Conditions at Fort Des Moines for Colored Officers

Introduction

African Americans had some success in the struggle against slavery, especially as white opposition to the peculiar institution grew in the late antebellum period, other efforts were less successful. On the eve, of the Civil War little had changed and equal citizenship was still little more than a dream. The war fundamentally transformed this situation, helping Iowa move in a direction dramatically different from other Midwestern states (Antrobus, 121-135). The war brought thousands of slaves into Iowa, most of who came from Missouri and settled in southeastern Iowa, although others went to Des Moines, the smaller towns of the eastern interior, and to sparsely populate rural areas around the state. The balance of power among black Iowans now shifted from the old Mississippi River towns to the southeast, Des Moines and Davenport. Whether they were members of large enclaves like Keokuk or the single black resident of an isolated farming township, these migrants used kinship networks, labor, and community institutions to acclimate to their new environment and assert their right to equal citizenship. They defined this much as earlier black settlers had, but the war had increased their ability to do so (Chase, 297-310).

Discussion

Many of the events deal primarily with the black elite, thus creating a certain emphasis on that group in the chapter. First, the death of Alexander Clark signaled a transfer of power to the younger generation that had grown up free and educated in Iowa with no memory of slavery, migration or war. Second, the continued growth of Des Moines “black community made possible the creation of the Iowa Bystander newspaper, and this entirely new institution enabled black Iowans to tell their own story for the first time after six decades of contending with an often indifferent or hostile white press (LeFew-Blake, 56-71). This was even more important given the state's increasing racial hostility, as seen in civil rights setbacks in Sioux City, Davenport and elsewhere. Some members of the black elite retreated from a rights-based discourse and became even more concerned with clientage. Leadership of black institutions became not only a means to uplift the less fortunate but also to announce to whites that they were more “respectable” than other African Americans; this shows that even the national movement to turn inward involved key links to whites, if not overt civil rights activism. The third sea change was the 1900 creation of the Buxton mining camp, which for thirty years was home to thousands of African Americans. They lived and thrived in a place where they were a demographic, political, economic and cultural majority, and when the mines played out they took their experience of living in the state's only true black metropolis to other parts of Iowa, helping to shape its twentieth century racial dynamics in the process. As the single most important event in the beginning of a new era, it naturally brings an end to the previous one and thus the dissertation as, well (Salisbury & ...