Anti-Slavery and the Underground Railroad in Fairfield, Iowa

The fruit of over ten years of deep research, this book reveals that by 1856, Fairfield was on the direct line as a prominent hub of Iowa’s Underground Railroad. New evidence suggests that right from Fairfield’s founding in 1839, some heroic Fairfielders were risking everything to illegally help Blacks flee captivity from the slave state of Missouri only 30 miles south. The book documents the tumultuous years before the Civil War to show how this farming community gradually evolved from a hands-off attitude toward Southern slavery, and awoke to its moral need to value human rights over profits. Original research into genealogies, censuses, deeds, maps, old newspapers, and biographies uncovers the long-hidden ties between the anti-slavery people and places of Fairfield, Jefferson County, and southeast Iowa, and places them in the context of the nations’s quarter-century of growth in anti-slavery sentiment.