My Great Great Grandfather and Grandmother were part of the Underground Railroad                        movement in Iowa up to the US Civil War. Here is a newspaper article from 1872 describing a                                            couple UGRR instances during those trying times:

Nathan and Elizabeth (Winder) Newlon

And the Underground Railroad[*]

 

Transcribed and Reformatted From the Original News Article

by

©2015 Chris Newlon Green

 

Iowa State Register[†]                                        December 15, 1872

 

Winterset Branch

      Something like a year ago the Winterset people celebrated the opening of the Rock Island Branch Road, but years before there was a road running through their town. Night expresses only were used, but they never ran off the track. At Winterset Mr. Nathan Newlon was the presiding genius. His crib has held frequent loads that were never gathered in a field of Yellow Dent nor Flint corn. But he was not alone in the business. The number of stockholders in the Underground Railroad at Winterset were legion. In the country there were Uncle Billy Ruby and David Martin, while Mr. J.J. Hutchings, Judge Pitzer, and a score of others in the village always responded when called on to pay for a darkey’s ticket on this famous line.

 

      Four miles east of St. Charles Mr. Wm. Beard kept a station. There was only one other Abolition family near him; the other neighbors all being pro-slavery Democrats of the strictest sect, and the sharpest lookout was necessary when a train was approaching or departing to prevent running into a Locofoco.[‡] Further on, near Indianola, Uncle Grimshaw, a staunch old Quaker with a heart as capacious as the big loft where he used to hide his sable guests, was station agent. The time table was arranged for trains to reach his house about daylight. Here the passengers laid over for the night express, which would roll out about ten o’clock, halting at the Quaker settlement between Knoxville and Indianola. The next stage was a long one – to Newton or to Taylor Peirce’s, and from there the time table has not been furnished us.

 

      One time a party of five slaves came through the northern part of Madison County on foot, and without a guide. They fell in the hands of some pro-slavery residents of the county, and were captured. That night they were placed in a covered wagon, to which four strong horses were attached, and started under guard to Missouri. But meantime some of the Madison County Abolitionists had heard of the circumstance and started in pursuit. About daylight they overhauled the wagon, rode in front of it, and seizing the horses, ordered a halt. The driver got out his shotgun and threatened to shoot. For fear that he might do so foolish a thing, one of the hard-hearted Abolitionists punch him behind the ear, and he retired from the discussion. By the time he again began to take an interest in this world’s affairs, the blacks and their liberators had disappeared, nor was there any further track of them visibly.

 

      The last train that passed through on the route came from Ray County, Missouri, starting just after the war commenced. They came through Page County, stopped over a day at Quincy and the next day halted at Mr. Samuel Ainsworth’s at Nevin. That night they started for the Winterset station. The mud was knee deep, but in the gray of morning Hon. B.F. Roberts came riding up to Mr. Newlon’s door with the announcement that Ainsworth with six fugitives, was close behind. There was a lively rattle of pots and pans in the farmer’s house, a clearing away of rubbish in the loft, and by the time the train arrived Mother Newlon had a smoking hot breakfast on the table and the quarters for the passengers were all prepared. That night they rested, and at nightfall Mr. Newlon started with them for Indianola.

 

      After daylight the next morning, by a circuitous route, they reached Uncle Grimshaw”s and from there they were sent to Newton. That was the last train, and a few weeks later the blacks began to pass through Iowa without a guide, and none molested them. The rails on the track were taken up, and the conductors handed in the records of their doings. They have been scrutinized by the nation, and pronounced correct; nor is it likely that, when the final accounts of men are entered on the ledger of immortality, there will be any balance on this score against those whose humane sympathy, Christian sentiments and brave hearts, made them active workers on the Underground Railroad.

 

---

[*] Nathan, 1812-1878; Elizabeth, 1806-1891

[†] In 1855 the Iowa Citizen began publishing and was renamed the Iowa State Register in 1860. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Des_Moines_Register

[‡] The Locofocos were a faction of the Democratic Party that existed from 1835 until the mid-1840s. The faction was originally named the Equal Rights Party, and was created in New York City as a protest against that city’s regular Democratic organization (“Tammany Hall”). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locofocos

 

While on the subject of John Brown, it's interesting to note that his widow, Mary, is buried in the Madronia Cemetery on Oak St. in Saratoga, CA. A couple years ago while visiting friends up there, I took this photo.

I'm going to continue the subject of Abolitionists for the next couple Posts.

 

From the Wall Street Journal On-line  1 May 2021:

Five Best: Novels on Slavery and the Civil War

Selected by Dorothy Wickenden, the author, most recently, of ‘The Agitators.’

 

                        Thomas Hovenden’s ‘The Last Moments of John Brown’ (ca. 1884).

                                           PHOTO: VCG WILSON/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES

 

By Dorothy Wickenden, April 30, 2021

The Good Lord Bird

By James McBride (2013)

1. James McBride’s John Brown is a Bible-thumping, “low-down son of a bitch,” a murderous zealot who looks “mad as a wood hammer” and whose infamous militia consists of a dozen of the “bummiest, saddest-looking individuals you ever saw.” These are the early observations of the narrator, Henry Shackleford, an enslaved boy whom Brown mistakes for a girl and sweeps up in the wars of Bleeding Kansas. Henry “weren’t for no fighting,” but he accompanies Brown across the U.S. and into Canada as Brown flees the authorities and attempts to raise money and men. In this antic tale of the misadventures of the man who made the Civil War inevitable, Henry creates a portrait of Brown that grows fonder as the end approaches: “Pure to the truth, which will drive any man off his rocker. But at least he knowed he was crazy.” Henry witnesses Brown’s atrocities but also his tenderness and his puzzling commitment to fight “on behalf of the colored.” Noting Brown’s beatific smile before he is hanged, Henry says: “It was like looking at the face of God.”

Henry and Clara

By Thomas Mallon (1994)

2. “Henry and Clara” established Thomas Mallon as a master of historical fiction. Clara Rathbone—vain, clever and socially ambitious—reflects, near the climax of this blood-drenched novel, that she always sensed “there was a secret sewn into the violence of that night.” She is referring to April 14, 1865, when she and her fiancé, Maj. Henry Rathbone, last-minute guests of the Lincolns in their box at Ford’s Theatre, witness the assassination of the president. That much is true. But Mr. Mallon seamlessly blends fact and fiction in this sharply angled historic tableau. Clara’s “blind love” for her Byronic stepbrother can only end tragically, and through Clara Mr. Mallon also conveys just how unprepared the North is for the cataclysm of the war. In the spring of 1861, when Clara learns that her father, U.S. Senator Ira Harris, will allow her semi-incestuous marriage as soon as the Union declares victory, she exclaims, “I’m so happy! Maybe this war is a blessing—God forgive me for saying it.” Mr. Mallon, a stylish, witty writer, almost imperceptibly transforms his love story into a heart-stopping psychological thriller.

The Underground Railroad

By Colson Whitehead (2016)

 3. “The lesson was unclear,” Cora tells herself. No longer enslaved on the Georgia cotton plantation where she was raised, she finds that “misfortune had merely bided time: There was no escape.” Relentlessly pursued by the Javert-like slave-catcher Ridgeway, she becomes accustomed to the sound of the lock on his wagon: “It hitched for a moment before falling into place.” Ridgeway opines about “the American imperative”: “To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. If not subjugate, exterminate.” In Colson Whitehead’s dazzlingly inventive narrative, the Underground Railroad is an actual rail line that takes Cora through four hellish states—from an ostensible “new era” in South Carolina, where sterilization and scientific experiments are performed on free blacks, to temporary respite on a black farm in free-state Indiana. Like Cora, the reader cannot escape the hideous legacies of slavery, but Mr. Whitehead holds out some hope for a redemptive future through his heroine: discerning, fierce, indomitable.

The Killer Angels

By Michael Shaara (1974)

4. Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a 34-year-old professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College, thinks of Aristotle after he leads his bayonet charge on Little Round Top: In the presence of real tragedy, he concludes, “you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended.” Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Killer Angels” doesn’t so much re-create the three-day Battle of Gettysburg as inhabit it. Drawing on primary documents, Shaara climbs inside the minds of the warring officers and invites the reader to experience the sights, sounds and smells of the killing fields. White-haired Gen. Robert E. Lee’s bad heart leaves him with “a sense of enormous unnatural fragility, like hollow glass.” The Yankees hold the superior position in the hills outside town, but Lee disastrously refuses to consider the defensive maneuver urged on him by his second-in-command, James Longstreet. After the defeat, he concedes, “It is all my fault, it is all my fault.” As dusk falls, Chamberlain sits alone on the rocky hill, his mind “blasted and clean,” watching men moving below him with yellow lights, “from black lump to black lump while papers fluttered and blew and fragments of cloth and cartridge and canteen tumbled and floated against the gray and steaming ground. . . . It rained all that night. The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July.”

Washington Black

By Esi Edugyan (2018)

5. This wondrous adventure story, punctuated by scenes of gruesome violence, begins in 1830. Young George Washington Black, a field hand on a Barbados sugar plantation who is about to lose his life for a murder he did not commit, is whisked away in a hot-air balloon. Its inventor, Christopher, the abolitionist brother of the malign owner of the plantation, is an eccentric naturalist and explorer who has been tutoring “Wash.” In Virginia, Wash refuses to join two fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad, preferring to accompany Christopher to the Arctic, on an apparently crazed search for Christopher’s father. Wash later makes his way to Halifax Harbor, where he becomes an expert in marine life. In Esi Edugyan’s crystalline prose, Wash observes the bloom of jellyfish in a nighttime sea: “fragile as a woman’s stocking, their bodies all afire.” But he is not all sensitivity and introspection. Attacked one night by a mercenary, Wash stabs him in the eye with an ivory-handled kitchen knife, then takes flight on his own quest, to find Christopher, the man with whom “freedom seemed a thing I might live in, like a coat”—only to discover that what he actually seeks is to shed the fear of “accepting my own power.”

 

 By Mark Edmundson

April 15, 2021 11:30 am ET

As printed in the Wall Street Journal

Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy 

When Walt Whitman began conceiving his great volume of poetry, “Leaves of Grass,” in the 1850s, American democracy was in serious danger over the issue of slavery. As we celebrate National Poetry Month this month, the problems facing our democracy are different, but Whitman still has a great deal to teach us about democratic life, because he saw that we are perpetually in danger of succumbing to two antidemocratic forces. The first is hatred between Americans, which Whitman saw erupt into civil war in 1861.

The second danger lies in the hunger for kings. The European literature and culture that preceded Whitman and surrounded him when he wrote “Leaves of Grass” was largely what he called “feudal”: It revolved around the elect, the special, the few. Whitman understood human fascination with kings and aristocrats, and he sometimes tried to debunk it. But mostly he asked his readers to shift their interest away from feudalism to the beauties of democracy and the challenge of sustaining and expanding it.

This challenge is what inspired him to find his central poetic image for democracy, the grass: “A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands.” Whitman says that he can’t and won’t offer a literal answer to the question. Instead he spins into an astonishing array of “guesses.” The grass “is the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven”; it’s “the handkerchief of the Lord…Bearing the owner’s name somewhere in the corners, that we may see and remark and say Whose?”

To Whitman, “the grass is itself a child…the produced babe of the vegetation.” “Tenderly will I use you, curling grass,” he writes. “It may be that you are from old people and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps / And here you are the mothers’ laps.” He offers one metaphor for the grass after another, and one feels that he could go on forever.

But mainly Whitman’s grass signifies American equality: “I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,/And it means,/Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,/Growing among black folks as among white,/Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff,/I give them the same, I receive them the same.” Whatever our race and origin, whatever our station in life, we’re all blades of grass. But by joining together we become part of a resplendent field of green, stretching gloriously on every side.

Whitman found a magnificent metaphor for democratic America and its people. Like snowflakes, no two grass blades are alike. Each one has its own being, a certain kind of chlorophyll-based individuality. Yet step back and you’ll see that the blades are all more like each other than not. Americans, too, are at least as much alike as we are different, and probably more so. America is where we can be ourselves and yet share deep kinship with our neighbors.

And who are our neighbors? Kanuck, Congressman, Tuckahoe, Cuff—Canadian, legislator, Virginia planter, Black man, all of the teeming blades of grass that we see around us. When you stand back far enough, you can’t see any of the individual blades, but look closer and there they are—vibrant and unique, no two alike. We say “e pluribus unum,” from many one. But who could have envisioned what that would look like and how it would feel before Whitman came along?

The grass is Whitman’s answer to the problem that bedeviled his contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson: how to resolve the tension between the individual and the group. Emerson is sometimes hopeful that the two can cohere. When you speak your deep and true thoughts, no matter how controversial, he believed that in time the mass of men and women will come around to you. Each will say, ‘this is my music, this is myself,” Emerson says in “The American Scholar.” But mostly he is skeptical, believing that society is almost inevitably the enemy of genius and individuality.

Whitman’s image of the grass suggests that the one and the many can merge, and that discovery allows him to imagine a world without significant hierarchy. Can any one blade of grass be all that much more important than any other? When you make the grass the national flag, as it were, you get to love and appreciate all the people who surround you. You become part of a community of equals. You can feel at home.

In “Leaves of Grass,” soon after he offers his master metaphor Whitman rises up to view American democracy from overhead. The poem’s famous catalogues of people doing what they do every day are quite simple: “On the piazza walk five friendly matrons with twined arms;/ The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold,/The Missourian crosses the plains, toting his wares and his cattle,/The fare-collector goes through the train—he gives notice by the jingling of loose change.”

This is your family, these are your sisters and brothers, Whitman effectively says. In general, we walk the streets with a sense of isolation. But if we can move away from our addictions to hierarchy and exclusive individuality, and embrace Whitman’s trope of the grass, our experience of day-to-day life can be different. We can look at those we pass and say not “That is another” but “That too is me. That too I am.” Or so Whitman hopes.

Of course, the benefits that Whitman promises do not come for free, or simply by reading his poem. We’ve got to meet his vision halfway, by being amiable, friendly, humane and nonhierarchical. This repudiation of hierarchy is not so easy; it’s not clear that even Whitman himself pulls it off. Isn’t he trying to be a great poet, the first truly American bard? But his effort matters. He knew that democracy is always vulnerable, that the best hope for human happiness could disappear from the earth. But Whitman would not let that happen without a fight.

—Mr. Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. This essay is adapted from his new book “Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy,” published this week by Harvard University Press.

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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 Chris' Literary Works

  

From Blue to a Gold Star

Go to: http://blurb.com/bookstore

With a young family and bright career future ahead of him, First Lieutenant Clarence R. Green meets his destiny in a trench somewhere in France during the First World War.

From 100 years ago, local newspaper articles, his letters home and family photos tell Clarence's story.

A story of heroism and self-sacrifice.

A story of a small Iowa town's courage amid the anguish wrought by war.

Read the First-Person accounts that changed a family and a community.

Letters Home: Viet Nam 1964

Go to: http://blurb.com/bookstore

Letters Home: Vietnam 1964 is framed around an Army Corpsman’s letters home from the nascent Vietnam War. Little has been written about the U.S. Army Medics doing MEDCAP work in Vietnam. This story of medical teams in the Delta region is told through photos, vignettes, and recollections. 

LETTERS HOME’s story unfolds some months before the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. A Medical Specialist, part of an Army Medical Civic Action Program team (MEDCAP), delivered medical services to scores of villages and hamlets south of Saigon, in the Delta. The author, Medical Corpsman and French Interpreter, narrates what the war, at the beginning of America’s involvement, was like for him.

“With stethoscopes hanging around our necks and with jars of pills and ointments in our portable drug store, we diagnosed, treated and dispensed medicines to rural folks, families, children, even VC.

"To villagers, we were the Bac Si Mỹ, the American Doctors.”

"A Civil War Narrative:

Journals, Letters and Verse of William Clark Newlon"

 Presented in PDF with photos, maps and footnoted annotation 

Go to:

greensblueandgray.com

William Clark Newlon chronicles his Civil War experience in two journals written between April 1861 and August 1863. Infantry soldier Will Newlon describes his move west from Iowa through Missouri, and then down to Tennessee. Between these events, Will pens the tedium and daily suffering of being a Civil War soldier, the drilling and parades, the cooking and camp making, the cold and the rain, the battles and the loneliness.

 PHOTOS, PHOTOS, PHOTOS

Here's a link to my Flickr photo collections. You'll see three albums there:  my 2003 trip to Tennessee, an area of the Western Theatre of the War Between the States (US Civil War), photos of my year (1964) as a soldier in Vietnam down in the delta, south of Saigon, and wonderful photos of my dog, Rontu (1989-2005). I still miss that Lab. 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/greensblueandgray/albums

 

Already six months now into the COVID19 shelter in place. 

I've had plenty of time to read and write during this time. I finished the narrative of my GGrandfather's journals, then I wrote a small book about my Grandfather and the 168th Inf. during the First World War. 

I then dusted off an old, unfinished project: my year in Vietnam, way back in 1964. I'm almost finished with that book after some 50 years of thinking about writing it and writing it. All three are here listed below.

I'm learning how to market and get the word out about these three works. I've started with promoting and offering two of them through blurb.com. The PDF is large so I'd need to send it to you via Dropbox. Except for Blurb Bookstore, I do all my own fulfillment.

Please visit greensblueandgray.com for more info.

Thanks,

Chris

 Works of Chris Newlon Green: 

"A Civil War Narrative: Journals, Letters and Verse of William Clark Newlon" 

    Go to: http://greensblueandgray.com 

Letters Home: Viet Nam 1964 

    Go to: http://blurb.com/bookstore 

From Blue to a Gold Star 

    Go to: http://blurb.com/bookstore