Читать книгу History of the Constitutions of Iowa - Shambaugh Benjamin Franklin - Страница 4

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.