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Population Growth 1840s - 1850s
Excerpt from To Go Free - A Treasury of Iowa Legal Heritage

In 1846 the population of Iowa was recorded as 97,588, in 1860 it was 674,913. The number of counties had grown from forty-four to ninety-nine.

Iowa was a beacon of hope for many in search of a new and better life. Iowa also was a beacon of faith for some individuals seeking to establish religious or utopian societies. These social experiments largely were short-lived, like the Swedenborgians' communistic colony in Iowa County in the early 1850s. A notable exception were the German Pietists who moved to Iowa from New York and southern Canada, and in 1855 formed the Amana communal society in Iowa County that would endure well into the twentieth century.

Iowa was not the promised land for the thousands of Mormons, who - after the murder in 1844 of their imprisoned prophet, Joseph Smith, near Nauvoo, Illinois - followed Brigham Young's footsteps to the Great Salt Lake of Utah. But the new state did offer temporary respite along the routes of the Mormons' westward trek in the late 1840s and the 1850s.

During this time there were many groups of new immigrants arriving in the state. One such group were the Irish who arrived in Dubuque in droves during the Irish Potato Famine of 1841. Dubuque soon became largely Catholic and when a group of Jewish immigrant arrived in the 1860s they were welcomed with little resistance. In the Davenport area, just down river, the German speaking of Schelswig-Holstein, a duchy torn between Denmark and Germany, thousands of Germans fled to Davenport, many of them going upriver to Dubuque. German immigration to Davenport began in 1836. After the failure of the 1848 German rebellion, a flood of German refugees known as the "forty-eighters" many from Schleswig-Holstein, fled to Davenport. Soon the Czech and the Polish people followed, coming upriver to Dubuque and moving westward into Jones, Delaware, and Linn counties, and then beyond. Iowa was now, truly a melting pot.

The 1846 war with Mexico raised anew questions about the status of territory acquired by the United States. In Henry Clay's Compromise of 1850, supported by Iowa's Democrat Senators Augustus Caesar Dodge and George W. Jones, Congress passed five measured designed to maintain the tenuous balance between slavery and non-slavery interests.

Iowa found itself at the heart of developing events. Many individuals crossed the state to cast their ballots - or to fight - in "Bleeding Kansas" and the Nebraska territory. Aided fervently by Iowa Quakers and other abolitionists, the underground railroad defied the fugitive slave law to transport slaves northward to freedom. Radical reformer John Brown used Iowa as a base to train recruits for his ill-fated raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia.