Necessary Courage

During the 1850s and early 1860s, Iowa, the westernmost free state bordering a slave state, stood as a bulwark of antislavery sentiment while the decades-long struggle over slavery shifted westward. When opponents of slavery streamed west across the state to prevent slaveholders from dominating Kansas, Iowans fed, housed, and armed the antislavery settlers. In Necessary Courage, Lowell J. Soike details long-forgotten stories of determined runaways and the courageous Iowans who acted as conductors on this most dangerous of railroads—the underground railroad.