I mentioned Muscatine's Alexander G. Clark in passing yesterday while writing about Frederick Baker, Lucas County's only black Civil War fatality. So I got to wondering if Mr. Clark, among Iowa's civil rights pioneers, ever had appeared in Chariton and discovered that he had --- during early October, 1872, shortly before the presidential election of that year.
It was a political speech --- Clark was campaigning for Ulysses S. Grant, the Republican incumbent, who would be opposed in the general election by Horace Greeley, nominated by both Republican dissidents who fashioned themselves the Liberal Republican Party and by Democrats. In the end, Grant won handily and Greeley punctuated the contest by dropping dead after the popular vote had been counted but before the Electoral College cast its votes.
But that was in the future when Clark was invited to Chariton to stump for Grant and to urge loyalty to the Republican party --- the party at that time in American history most likely to support civil rights for black Americans.
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Clark, born free in Pennsylvania during 1826, arrived in Muscatine during 1842 where he worked as a barber, became a real estate entrepreneur and, later, a lawyer --- and an effective advocate for the civil rights of black people.
He lobbied for creation of and then recruited for Iowa's only black infantry regiment --- the 1st Iowa (later reorganized as 60th U.S. Colored Troops). When his daughter was denied admission to an all-white Muscatine school during 1867, he sued --- a suit that led to the landmark 1868 Iowa Supreme Court decision that made the state among the first to integrate its public school system. He also lobbied and campaigned for the amendment, given final approval by Iowa voters in 1868, that removed the word "white" from various provisions of the state's 1857 constitution that had disenfranchised black men.
Much of what he accomplished had been facilitated by his contacts in and affiliation with the Republican party, so it was entirely natural for him to take to the campaign trail on Grant's behalf during 1872. Here's the report of his visit to Chariton as published in The Patriot of Oct. 9:
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"Alexander Clark, the well-known colored speaker, addressed a large and appreciative audience at the Court House last Wednesday evening. The meeting was called to order by Major Walker, and W.S. Campbell elected chairman. Mr. Clark, on being introduced, delivered an argumentative, searching and convincing speech.
"The black men of this country recognize in the Republican party their friends. Since the Baltimore Convention, the Democratic party has made a wonderful profession of friendship, but for what --- simply votes. The handful of blacks who met at Louisville recently in the interest of the Democratic candidates were lackeys, bought for the occasion. In the old slave times there were negro overseers, and they were the meanest kind of taskmasters. The colored Liberals of today occupy the same relation to their race now that these overseers did then, in point of numbers, character and influence.
"The Democrats have not in a night turned to love what they have always hated. Mr. Clark concluded with an earnest appeal to his colored friends to continue with the Republican party."
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Most who live in Iowa now are aware that the 2020 campaign season has commenced, but politics are nothing to new in the state --- including some fairly odd twists and turns.
The Patriot, in the same issue that reported upon the Clark visit, noted that Henry Clay Dean was due in town the following Saturday to campaign for Horace Greeley. Dean, one of most noted Copperheads of the Civil War era and rebel apologist thereafter, was headquartered at his home, Rebel's Cove, along the Chariton River just over the state line in Missouri, southeast of Centerville.
The Patriot, solidly Republican in its editorial outlook, noted in its advance story that Greeley --- now backed by Dean --- had once said of him, "I do not know where the cause of national villany could find a better advocate than yourself."
Then, as now, politics make for strange bedfellows.
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