GREATER DES MOINES BOTANICAL GARDEN

THURSDAYS

June 15

The June Bugs

June 22

Jay Allen

June 29

Brad & Kate

July 6

Adé & The Soul Brothers

July 13

NOLA Jazz Band

July 20

The Sheet

July 27

Max Wellman

August 3

Son Peruchos

August 10

Surf Zombies

August 17

Damon Dotson

August 24

Tom’s Top 8

August 31

Cory Waller & The Wicked Things

September 7

Birdchild

September 14

Parranderos Latin Combo

September 21

Gina Gedler

September 28

The Feel Right other items from the early history of the city.

Henderson

Lewelling House

401 South Main St, Salem

Open Sundays, May-September and weekdays by appointment

319-258-2000

The small town of Salem in southeastern Iowa was the first Quaker settlement in Iowa. Established in 1835, in what would become Henry County a year later, its residents were opposed to slavery as a matter of faith held by members of the Society of Friends. But just how far they should take that opposition divided the community. It wasn’t a question that could be ignored, since the Missouri border was just 25 miles away.

The town’s congregation split into two factions in 1843: the Salem Monthly Meeting and Abolition Friends Monthly Meeting. Henderson Lewelling, who had arrived in Salem six years earlier, was one of the organizers of the abolitionist group.

Lewelling’s two-story stone house served as a meeting place for the town’s most committed abolitionists. It is possible that he sheltered escapees from Missouri there as well. But the most important moment in Salem’s anti-slavery history came a year after Lewelling and his family left Iowa for Oregon in 1847.

Justice of the Peace Nelson Gibbs purchased the house from Lewelling, and both lived and held court there. On June 2, 1848, nine enslaved people—men, women and children—escaped from Ruel Daggs farm in Clark County, Missouri. Three days later, bounty hunters from Missouri caught up with them near Salem. Local residents blocked the bounty hunters from taking away the fugitives, insisting everyone go before the justice of the peace for a hearing.

Gibbs demanded the bounty hunters produce proof that the people they captured were owned by Ruel Daggs and they were working on Dagg’s behalf. The bounty hunters had nothing to back up their words. Gibbs declared their captives were free to go. The bounty hunters seized four of the fugitives, forced their way through the locals and hurried back to Missouri.

Daggs announced a reward of $500 for anyone who captured the missing five fugitives. On June 7, a mob of armed men from Missouri stormed Salem. They occupied the town and began forcing their way into homes, searching for the missing five. A local man slipped past the mob, and rode at top speed to the county seat of Mount Pleasant to alert the sheriff. The sheriff assembled a group of armed volunteers, and headed to Salem. As soon as the sheriff and his men confronted the Missourians, the mob fled back across the border. The five remaining freedom seekers were never recaptured.

Furious, Ruel Daggs sued 19 Salem residents for damages under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, demanding $10,000 in compensation for his “lost property.” The case went to trial in federal court in Burlington in June 1850. The law was on Daggs’ side, and he won. The attorneys for the defendants filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, not because they thought they’d win, but just to give the defendants time to transfer their property to other family members. It worked. Daggs was never able to collect any of the money the court awarded him.

Ruel Daggs v. Elihu Frazier et al was the last case brought under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. The Daggs case would be cited in congressional debates, as Southern states pushed through the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a more expansive version of the older law. That use of the federal government to force free states to honor wishes of enslavers further deepened the schism in the country over slavery, and became a milestone on the path to the Civil War.