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Like a Boy Scout leader with camera around his neck, Kenneth L. Lyftogt takes readers deep into the jungles of a long-ago land, filled with thorny branches, quicksand, and storm clouds turning dark, very dark, very fast.  The storm, of course, was slavery.

The clouds had been building for many years, as Lyftogt describes in his new book, Iowa and the Civil War Vol. 1:   Free Child of the Missouri Compromise, 1850-1862.

He introduces us to Iowa’s deeply anti-slavery Governor James Grimes.  He prevented state officials from enforcing the national Fugitive Slave Law.  In June 1855, Grimes confessed to his wife that if he weren’t governor, “I should be a lawbreaker.”

Anti-slavery winds blew stronger across the state, counteracted by heated gusts by Democrats, inflamed over slavery tearing apart the state and national Democratic Party.  The opposing fronts met during the 1858 gubernatorial race.

Republican Samuel J. Kirkwood debated Democrat (and former U.S. Senator) Augustus C. Dodge.  An eyewitness described a moment in the debate:

Kirkwood drew a picture of a slave mother with a babe in her arms fleeing from bondage with her eye on the North Star.  In close pursuit was her cruel master with his bloodhounds hard after her, just as she crossed the Iowa line from Missouri.

Kirkwood clenched his fists and moved toward Dodge, demanding whether Dodge would turn over the fleeing mother and child to a slave catcher.  Kirkwood “shouted at the top of his voice, ‘Answer my question.’  Dodge replied, ‘I would obey the [Fugitive Slave] law.’ Kirkwood retorted, ‘So help me, God, I would suffer my right arm be torn from its socket before I would do such a monstrous thing.”

The eyewitness commented, “The crowd broke into a frenzy that resembled the sweep of a cyclone.”

The book then addresses Lincoln’s election as president and the firing upon Fort Sumter. Lyftogt spends most of the book on the formation of Iowa military units and their first year of fighting.

He sets his camera on the widest lens to observe:

The war was an extension of politics from its very beginning, especially in the commissioning of officers.  This was democracy in action.

Switching lenses, he snaps a shot of prominent Iowans, including the Chief Justice, grasping for political plums:

The volatile mixture of politics and war was most obvious in the ruthless, never-ending scramble for military rank.  Every aspiring officer had to be a politician in one capacity or another.  Iowa’s regiments were filled with officers with political experience.

Lyftogt doesn’t flinch at warts on praiseworthy Iowans.  For example, describing Col. Grenville Dodge of the 4th Iowa Infantry, Lyftogt writes:

Dodge was one of those rare and remarkable individuals who actually was a good as he thought he was.  But he was also a man determined to impress his superiors and his hometown audience.  His shameless self-promotion, with its distortions and outright lies, is an embarrassing blot on an otherwise exemplary record.

Summary and recommendation

This book is nicely illustrated, and it features good quotes in comfortable storytelling style.  It covers Iowa and the Great Compromises through the Battle of Shiloh, with a brief discussion of Island No. Ten, March 3-14, 1862.  The book ends rather abruptly, anticipating volume two.

I highly recommend Free Child of the Missouri Compromise.

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