The Slaves of Ruell Daggs

By G. Galin Berrier

The Anti-Slavery Friends of Salem, located southwest of Mount Pleasant in Henry County, figure prominently in one of the best-documented episodes of the Underground Railroad in Iowa, that involving the slaves of Missourian Ruell Daggs. Born in Delaware, Daggs came from Virginia to northeast Missouri in the late 1830's, settling with his family and sixteen slaves on a farm near Luray, west of Kahoka in Clark County. One son settled on a neighboring farm, and another in an adjoining county. Nearly seventy-five years of age in 1848, Daggs was neither the largest nor most influential slaveholder in the county. He had a reputation for treating his slaves in a humane fashion, but found it difficult to hold on to slaves with the free soil of Iowa so close at hand, so he decided to sell them south. At the beginning of April, 1848, one of Dagg's slaves, probably John Walker, had fled his master and taken refuge at Salem. Two months later, encouraged and aided by abolitionist Friends there, he slipped back into Missouri to rescue his wife and any other of Daggs' slaves who might care to chance an escape.

On Thursday evening, June 1, 1848, nine of Daggs' slaves set out for Iowa: Sam Fulcher, 40 to 45 years of age; Sam's wife, Dorcas; John Walker, 22 or 23 years old; John's wife, Mary; Julia, age 18; Martha, age 10; a small boy named William; and two other young children, one an infant, whose names are not known. Fulcher and Walker were valued at $900 to $1,000 each and their wives at $600 to $700 each; Julia's value was set at $250 to $300. They headed first to the isolated home of Richard Liggen (or Leggens), where they stayed Friday while a welcome downpour slowed their pursuers. That night Liggen drove them to the Des Moines River, swollen by the rains, which they crossed with some difficulty below Farmington and hid on the Iowa shore Saturday while the rain continued.

Meanwhile, Daggs' son William crossed over into Iowa with others, including a neighbor, James McClure. They were joined by a Lee County farmer and former Virginian, Samuel Slaughter, who wanted a share of the reward money being offered for the return of the fugitives. Leaving matters in their hands, Will Daggs turned back to Missouri, while McClure and Slaughter followed fresh wagon tracks in the rain-soaked ground to the vicinity of Salem. By the time they overtook the wagon, driven by three young white men who claimed to be returning from a fishing expedition, no fugitive slaves were to be seen. Saying they were in search of two stray horses, McClure and Slaughter went to Salem and put up for the night at a hotel. Returning Sunday morning to the area half a mile south of Salem near Little Red Cedar Creek where they had spotted the empty wagon the day before, McClure and Slaughter found Fulcher, Walker and the others hiding in the underbrush. As they prepared to return to Missouri with their captives, they were stopped and surrounded by a dozen men from Salem led by Elihu Frazier, Thomas Clarkson Frazier, and William Johnson. Perhaps realizing that McClure and Slaughter had no arrest warrants and did not know any of the fugitives personally, one of the leaders demanded that the party return to Salem for a hearing before the township justice of the peace, Nelson Gibbs. Another declared that he "would wade in Missouri blood" before he would allow the fugitives to be taken without a hearing.

As the party headed toward Salem, Slaughter lost control of the situation and most of his captives. Walker managed to get away, and Fulcher persuaded Slaughter to let the women and children stop to rest, so that by the time the party, now numbering between 50 and 100, reached the village, only Fulcher and Fulcher's young son were still in custody. Henry Dorland, the village school teacher, mounted a pile of lumber as they passed and exhorted the crowd to remain peaceable. Justice Gibbs' office in Henderson Lewelling's house being too small to accommodate the throng, the hearing was reconvened at the Anti-Slavery Friends Meeting House two blocks away. Aaron Street and Albert Button served as counsel for the fugitives, and when Slaughter and McClure were unable to produce arrest warrants, Gibbs declared in effect that he lacked jurisdiction and dismissed the proceedings. At this point, one Paul Way, described by one eyewitness as an old man, in pioneer's work clothes, "with long chin whiskers and a pointed topped lopped down felt hat" and riding an old sorrel mare while leading another horse, came by as if by pre-arrangement. Fulcher mounted the second horse and his child was handed up to him. Way is variously described as having shouted either "Stop the niggers, don't let them follow me," or "If anybody wants to foller me, let him foller." As Fulcher and his son made their escape with Way on horseback, Slaughter and McClure, vowing vengeance, returned to Missouri.

A few days later, Slaughter and McClure returned with a band of heavily-armed (one local legend claims they even had a field gun!) Missourians, estimated at anywhere from as few sixty to as many as three hundred men, vowing to search every "nigger-stealing house" in Salem. They set up road blocks at the exits from town and searched from house to house, beginning with that of Thomas Frazier. But Frazier had been warned, and the fugitives he was hiding had been concealed in the woods. When the search party arrived, they found only Frazier and his family quietly eating dinner. Other homes were searched, with similar results. According to one account, when a search party came to the house of Henry W. Way, where a ladder led up to the window of a loft, Way was supposed to have said:

You may go up if you wish, gentlemen. There are three negroes hidden away in that loft. But mind you, it is a risky business to make an attempt to carry out the search. The first man who touches a rung of that ladder is in danger of his life. I am armed, gentlemen, with enough of these little instruments [bullets in his drawn pistol] to make just thirteen holes in your flesh.

Apparently none of the searchers accepted Way's challenge.

Although the crowd of Missourians was unruly, a few of its members were able to restrain the rest, and their abuse of the citizens of Salem was mostly verbal. No homes seem to have been searched where permission was denied. Dr. Theodore Shriner refused to permit his house to be searched. Some in the mob had offered $500 each "for the heads of Joel Garretson and Eli Jessup, who had publicly advocated the emancipation of the slaves," but when Garretson's home was searched, he was unharmed. Jessup was concealed in a cave. Having come up empty-handed in their search, the Missourians then arrested John H. Pickering, Thomas Clarkson Frazier, Isaac C. Frazier, Erick Knudson, John Comer, and three or four others and held them overnight in a hotel. The next morning, Wednesday, the Henry County sheriff, Virginia-born and no friend of abolitionism, hurried to Salem from Mount Pleasant and effected a settlement. The Missourians agreed to release their prisoners, who in turn signed a recognizance to appear at the next term of federal district court to answer charges of robbing Slaughter and McClure of recaptured slaves. The Missourians then withdrew as far as Hillsboro, six miles distant, where they lingered for a time threatening to return to Salem, set fire to the town, and hang the leading abolitionists. Elihu Frazier rode the twenty miles to Denmark and returned with forty armed men, just in case these threats materialized, but the Missourians ultimately decided to return home instead.

There was a saying that it was "as easy to find a needle in a haymow as a Negro among Quakers," and in fact some of Ruell Daggs' slaves eluded capture. Sam Fulchner and his son are said to have been hidden east of Salem until Thursday night and then taken to Denmark by members of the returning rescue party. (Denmark, twenty miles southeast of Salem in Lee County, had been settled by Congregationalists and was also a center of anti-slavery activity.) John and Mary Walker and their baby also made good their escape, apparently going east by way of Yellow Springs, eventually to Chicago and ultimately to Canada. But Dorcas Fulcher, Julia, and two of the children were returned to Daggs, probably for the reward money. Clearly the claim of "not a single slave being retaken" once he or she had reached Salem is not true. In September 1848, suit was brought for damages under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, and the trial was held in Burlington in the summer of 1850. In the case of Daggs v. Frazier, et al., five Salem Quakers were found guilty of robbing Slaughter and McClure of recaptured slaves and fined $2,900, presumably the value assigned to the five fugitive slaves who escaped to freedom.

G. Galin Berrier, of Ankeny, Iowa, is a respected authority on the Underground Railroad in Iowa. He authored the chapter on the Underground Railroad in Outside In: African American History in Iowa 1838-2000, as well as lectures on the topic for Humanities Iowa and the Museum's Brown Bag Lecture Series. He is an adjunct professor of history for Des Moines Area Community College-Ankeny.

References:

O.A. Garretson, "Traveling on the Underground Railroad in Iowa." Iowa Journal of History and Politics, XXII (July 1924), 430-431; Robert R. Dykstra, Bright Radical Star: Black Freedom and White Supremacy on the Hawkeye Frontier (Cambridge, MA, 1993): 91.

George Frazee, "An Iowa Fugitive Slave Case-1850", Annals of Iowa, 3rd Series, VI (April 1903), 9-10; Garretson, 430-432, 437; Dykstra, 92-93.

Louis T. Jones, The Quakers of Iowa (Iowa City, 1914), 189-190; Garretson, 432; Dykstra, 91-92.

Dykstra, 93-95; Garretson, 432-434; Jacob van Ek, "Underground Railroad in Iowa," Palimpsest, II (May, 1921), 140-141; Jones, 190-191.

Jones, 191; Van Ek, 141-142; Dykstra, 196; The History of Henry County, Iowa (Chicago, 1879). 542-543.

Garretson, 434-436; History of Henry County, 543; Dykstra, 96-97.

Dykstra, 97; Jones, 188-189; Leola N. Bergman, The Negro in Iowa (Iowa City, 1969), 23-24; Frazee, 44-45.