Author: Iowa was 'Busy in the Cause' against slavery

First, Lowell Soike was the folk guy.

The native Minnesotan toured the American byways at the height of the 1960s folk boom with a banjo and guitar in a band called the Bondsmen.

But he set aside notions of music fame to devote his life to a careful study of local and regional history. He made his way to the University of Iowa in Iowa City to earn his doctorate.

Then a decade into his career with the State Historical Society, Soike became the barn guy.

His popular 1983 book Without Right Angles highlighted his efforts with the historic preservation office to save Iowa's round (or sometimes octagonal) barns of an earlier agriculture before behemoth tractors.

Now the retired historian, who turns 73 Friday, is the antislavery guy.

Soike has become best known for leading the charge to restore Iowa to its rightful historical prominence in the pre-Civil War struggle. It wasn't just "those doggone New Englanders out there," he said, who gave voice and vigor to the abolitionist movement.

Iowa as a free state leading up to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 played a crucial role on the western frontier for freedom seekers (escaped slaves) and their allies. It also figured in the national politics of the dispute that the 1820 Missouri Compromise (no new slaves states north or west of Missouri's southern border) would only temporarily defuse.

Thus Soike evolved from strumming tunes in the Bondsmen to researching and writing about the literal African-American bondsmen (and women) of our nation's shameful past.

He has spent much of the week discussing his new book, Busy in the Cause: Iowa, the Free-State Struggle in the West, and the Prelude to the Civil War. The title, published by University of Nebraska Press, more or less represents Soike's final chapter in his own research odyssey of the last dozen years.

"I don't tend to be a very good talker," he claimed over coffee at his Beaverdale home where he lives with his wife, Karen. "I'm a little bit shy in front of a large group."

State archaeologist Douglas Jones, a 19-year Historical Society veteran, has taken up the reins. Soike's project began with a grant to identify and preserve modern sites that could be documented as stations along the Underground Railroad through Iowa. But there were too few remnants.

"It was almost all archaeology instead of standing structures," Soike said.

So the research — which dominated his working days from 2008 until his 2010 retirement — became one primarily of archives and words.

Soike spun a single long manuscript that he soon realized would need to be sliced in half. The first volume was published last year: Necessary Courage: Iowa's Underground Railroad in the Struggle Against Slavery.

That book focused more on the freedom seekers and their allies within the state. The new book puts Iowa more in regional and national context to slave state Missouri and the furor over which law should apply to the Kansas and Nebraska territories.

As usual, history is useful because we find common cultural traits that remain relevant. Soike and Jones were on Iowa Public Radio earlier this week talking about their project. In a separate show so was journalist Colin Woodard, talking about the 11 "rival regional cultures" of America that still drive our modern politics and became the basis for his own 2012 book. Iowa primarily is a "Midlands" state, squeezed between "Yankeedom" to the north and "Greater Appalachia" to the south.

In other words, the migration of settlers from New England and Ohio and Illinois shaped the character of Iowa that plays out today in the political mix as a battleground state.

For example, Soike said, "Five times as many people from New England settled in Iowa than in Kansas."

With Soike's work done and the grant money spent, Jones nonetheless intends to continue "in true Underground Railroad fashion" with help from a volunteer network.

"We are still finding important pieces to the puzzle," including an abolitionist in Clinton County who had ties to Massachusetts and national antislavery groups, Jones said.

For more on Lowell Soike's new book, Busy in the Cause, go to nebraskapress.unl.edu.