Constitutions are not made; they grow. This thought has become a
commonplace in current political literature. And yet the growth of which
men speak with such assurance is directed, that is, determined by the
ideals of the people. Members of constituent assemblies and
constitutional conventions neither manufacture nor grow
Constitutions--they simply formulate current political morality. It is
in the social mind back of the convention, back of the government, and
back of the Law that the ideals of human right and justice are
conceived, born, and evolved. A Constitution is a social product.
It is the embodiment of popular ideals.
And so the real makers of the Constitutions of Iowa were not the men who
first in 1844, then in 1846, and then again in 1857 assembled in the Old
Stone Capitol on the banks of the Iowa River. The true "Fathers" were
the people who, in those early times from 1830 to 1860, took possession
of the fields and forests and founded a new Commonwealth. They were the
pioneers, the frontiersmen, the squatters--the pathfinders in our
political history. Aye, they were the real makers of our fundamental
law.
The first of the Iowa pioneers crossed the Mississippi in the early
thirties. They were preceded by the bold explorer and the intrepid
fur-trader, who in their day dared much, endured much, and through
the wildernesses lighted the way for a westward-moving civilization.
Scarcely had their camp-fires gone out when the pioneer appeared with ax
and ox and plow. He came to cultivate the soil and establish a home--he
came to stay.
The rapidity with which the pioneer population of Iowa increased after
the Black-Hawk war was phenomenal. It grew literally by leaps and
bounds. Men came in from all parts of the Union--from the North-west,
from the East, from the South, and from the South-east. They came from
Maine and Massachusetts, from New York and Pennsylvania, from Virginia
and the Carolinas, from Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee, and from the
newer States of Ohio and Indiana. It is said that whole
neighborhoods came over from Illinois.
In 1835 Lieutenant Albert Lea thought that the population had reached at
least sixteen thousand souls. But the census reports give a more modest
number--ten thousand five hundred. When the Territory of Iowa was
established in 1838 there were within its limits twenty-two thousand
eight hundred and fifty-nine people. Eight years later, when the
Commonwealth was admitted into the Union, this number had increased to
one hundred and two thousand three hundred and eighty-eight.
Thus in less than a score of years the pioneers had founded a new Empire
west of the Mississippi. And such an Empire! A land of inexhaustible
fertility! A hundred thousand pioneers with energy, courage, and
perseverance scarcely less exhaustible than the soil they cultivated!
In the location of a home the pioneer was usually discriminating. His
was not a chance "squatting" here or there on the prairie or among the
trees. The necessities--water and fuel--led him as a rule to settle near
a stream or river, and never far from timber. The pioneers settled in
groups. One, two, three, or more families constituted the original
nucleus of such groups. The groups were known as "communities" or
"neighborhoods." They were the original social and political units out
of the integration of which the Commonwealth was later formed.
But the vital facts touching the pioneers of Iowa are not of migration
and settlement. In political and constitutional evolution the
emphasis rests rather upon the facts of character. What the pioneers
were is vastly more important than where they came from, or when and
where and how they settled; for all law and government rests upon the
character of the people, Constitutions being simply the formulated
expressions of political Ethics. It is in this broad catholic sense that
the ideals of pioneer character became the determining factors in Iowa's
political evolution and the pioneers themselves the real makers of our
fundamental law.
Two opinions have been expressed respecting the early settlers of Iowa.
Calhoun stated on the floor of Congress that he had been informed that
"the Iowa country had been seized upon by a lawless body of armed men."
Clay had received information of the same nature. And about the
same time Senator Ewing (from Ohio) declared that he would not object to
giving each rascal who crossed the Mississippi one thousand dollars in
order to get rid of him.
Nor was the view expressed by these statesmen uncommon in that day. It
was entertained by a very considerable number of men throughout the East
and South, who looked upon the pioneers in general as renegades and
vagabonds forming a "lawless rabble" on the outskirts of civilization.
To them the first settlers were "lawless intruders" on the public
domain, "land robbers," "fugitives from justice," and "idle and
profligate characters." Squatters, they held, were those "who had gone
beyond the settlement and were wholly reckless of the laws either
of God or man." Nay more, they were "non-consumers of the country,
performing no duties either civil or military." In short, gentlemen who
had never even visited the Iowa frontier talked glibly about frontier
lawlessness, anarchy, and crime.
Such wholesale defamation when applied to the early settlers of Iowa
ought not to be dismissed with a shrug. The men who made these harsh
charges were doubtless honest and sincere. But were they mistaken? All
testimony based upon direct personal observation is overwhelmingly
against the opinions they expressed.
Lieutenant Albert Lea who had spent several years in the Iowa District
writes in 1836 that "the character of this population is such as is
rarely to be found in our newly acquired territories. With very few
exceptions there is not a more orderly, industrious, active, painstaking
population, west of the Alleghanies, than is this of the Iowa District.
Those who have used the name 'squatters' with the idea of idleness and
recklessness, would be quite surprised to see the systematic manner in
which everything is here conducted . . . . It is a matter of surprise that
about the Mining Region there should be so little of the recklessness
that is usual in that sort of life."
In 1838 Peter H. Engle, writing from Dubuque, says: "The people are all
squatters; but he who supposes that settlers . . . . who are now
building upon, fencing and cultivating the lands of the government are
lawless depredators, devoid of the sense of moral honesty, or that they
are not in every sense as estimable citizens, with as much
intelligence, regard for law and social order, for public justice and
private rights . . . . as the farmers and yeomen of New York and
Pennsylvania, . . . . has been led astray by vague and unfounded
notions, or by positively false information."
The statements of Lea and Engle fairly represent the views of those who
from actual personal contact were familiar with the life and character
of the pioneers.
We may then rest assured that the squatters of Iowa were as a class
neither idle, nor ignorant, nor vicious. They were representative
pioneers of their day, than whom, Benton declared, "there was not a
better population on the face of the earth." They were of the best blood
and ranked as the best sons of the whole country. They were young,
strong, and energetic men--hardy, courageous, and adventurous. Caring
little for the dangers of the frontier, they extended civilization and
reclaimed for the industry of the world vast prairies and forests and
deserts. They made roads, built bridges and mills, cleared the forests,
broke the prairies, erected houses and barns, and defended the settled
country against hostile Indians. They were distinguished especially for
their general intelligence, their hospitality, their independence and
bold enterprise. They had schools and schoolhouses, erected churches,
and observed the sabbath.
A law abiding people, the pioneers made laws and obeyed them. They were
loyal American citizens and strongly attached to the National
government.
The pioneers were religious, but not ecclesiastical. They lived in the
open and looked upon the relations of man to nature with an open mind.
To be sure their thoughts were more on "getting along" in this world
than upon the "immortal crown" of the Puritan. And yet in the silent
forest, in the broad prairie, in the deep blue sky, in the sentinels
of the night, in the sunshine and in the storm, in the rosy dawn, in
the golden sunset, and in the daily trials and battles of frontier
life, they too must have seen and felt the Infinite.
Nor is it a matter of surprise that the pioneers of Iowa possessed the
elements of character above attributed to them. In the first place, only
strong and independent souls ventured to the frontier. A weaker class
could not have hoped to endure the toils, the labors, the pains,
and withal the loneliness of pioneer life; for the hardest and at the
same time the most significant battles of the 19th century were fought
with axes and plows in the winning of the West. The frontier called for
men with large capacity for adaptation--men with flexible and dynamic
natures. Especially did it require men who could break with the past,
forget traditions, and easily discard inherited political and social
ideas. The key to the character of the pioneer is the law of the
adaptation of life to environment. The pioneers of Iowa were what they
were largely because the conditions of frontier life made them such.
They were sincere because their environment called for an honest
attitude. Having left the comforts of their old homes, traveled
hundreds and thousands of miles, entered the wilderness, and endured the
privations of the frontier, they were serious-minded. They came for a
purpose and, therefore, were always _about_, doing something. Even to this
day, their ideals of thrift and "push" and frugality pervade the
Commonwealth.
And so the strong external factors of the West brought into American
civilization elements distinctively American--liberal ideas and
democratic ideals. The broad rich prairies of Iowa and Illinois seem to
have broadened men's views and fertilized their ideas. Said Stephen A.
Douglas: "I found my mind liberalized and my opinions enlarged when I
got out on these broad prairies, with only the heavens to bound my
vision, instead of having them circumscribed by the narrow ridges
that surrounded the valley [in Vermont] where I was born."
Speaking to an Iowa audience, Governor Kirkwood once said: "We are
rearing the typical Americans, the Western Yankee if you choose to call
him so, the man of grit, the man of nerve, the man of broad and liberal
views, the man of tolerance of opinion, the man of energy, the man who
will some day dominate this empire of ours." How prophetic!
Nowhere did the West exert a more marked influence than in the domain of
Politics. It freed men from traditions. It gave them a new and a more
progressive view of political life. Henceforth they turned with
impatience from historical arguments and legal theories to a
philosophy of expediency. Government, they concluded, was after all a
relative affair.
"Claim Rights" were more important to the pioneer of Iowa than "States
Rights." The Nation was endeared to him; and he freely gave his first
allegiance to the government that sold him land for $1.25 an acre. He
was always _for the Union_, so that in after years men said of the
Commonwealth he founded: "Her affections, like the rivers of her
borders, flow to an inseparable Union."
But above all the frontier was a great leveler. The conditions of life
there were such as to make men plain, common, unpretentious--genuine.
The frontier fostered the sympathetic attitude. It made men really
democratic and in matters political led to the three-fold ideal of
Equality which constitutes the essence of American Democracy in the
19th century, namely:
Equality before the Law,
Equality in the Law,
Equality in making the Law.
The pioneer of the West may not have originated these ideals. The first,
Equality before the Law, is claimed emphatically as the contribution of
the Puritan. But the vitalizing of these ideals--this came from the
frontier, as the great contribution of the pioneer.