The city of Dubuque lies on the west bank of the Mississippi River, about two-thirds of the way from Saint Louis to the south and Minneapolis and Saint Paul to the north. The main portion of the city in the mid-nineteenth century was situated on an alluvial plain approximately four miles long and one mile wide. Behind the plain rise, to quote one early visitor, “wild and beautiful bluffs” nearly 200 feet high. As late as the 1880s, the bluffs were almost exclusively occupied by “the homes of wealth, intelligence and liberality.” Beyond the bluffs lay the lead mines that...

Hopes that the war might reestablish harmony in Dubuque went unfulfilled. At theHerald,Dennis A. Mahony adopted a hard-line position against the war from its beginning. Meanwhile, theTimessupported the war and regularly called for suppression of it rival, preferably by the government but by a mob if necessary; in 1861 a company of soldiers training the city was deployed to block one such mob action. With Peace Democrats dominant in the city, by 1862 Dubuque had earned a national reputation as “a Secession hole.” The next year, following the draft riots in New York City in July...

While being held as a prisoner of war after the Battle of Shiloh in 1862, Second Lieutenant Luther W. Jackson from Dubuque recorded his impressions of the war in his diary. From Jackson’s perspective, the South had a natural beauty, “but give me old Iowa thank God she is Free.” Even “the moon [in the South] . . . don’t seem so bright as my old Iowa moon.” In another entry, he expressed his patriotic desire to see the war through to the end. Although Jackson missed his wife, he did “not wish to leave the service until this war...

Whether as artisans or unskilled workers, or as the sons of the city’s low-nonmanual and artisan families, the soldiers from Dubuque had been accustomed to a certain independence as men and as workers before the war. That independence had generated growing concern among some people in the city. As described earlier, social observers worried that many of the city’s sons were growing up in apparent “unrestrained independence” during the late 1850s and early 1860s. Workers’ independence further troubled those who thought assertions of independence masked an absence of order and discipline in workers’ lives. TheTimes,for example, used an...

Near the beginning of the war, theDubuque Timesoffered some advice to men about to embark on military service: “We would earnestly say to all of our noble hearted volunteers . . . [you] may come home maimed for life in body and limb, but do not return with crippled character, and poisoned faculties.” In other words, although it recognized the dangers the soldiers would face, the paper expressed most concern about the men’s moral well-being. Nor was theTimesalone in this concern. “Great God!” theIowa Religious Newsletterquoted an army chaplain saying in July 1862. “I...

While expressing concerns about decaying civilian morals, some observers in Dubuque found at least one area to praise: the response of the city’s benevolent community, especially the women, to the relief needs of soldiers and their families. In its May 1864 editorial on “the effect of the war on the morals of the people,” for example, in addition to noting the positive impact “the wholesome restraints of military discipline” would have on the soldiers, theTimes“affirmed” more broadly that the war was “a national purifier, burning, as by fire, the most insidious and destructive vices and preparing the way...

A mericans often have held conflicting opinions about their returning soldiers. On the one hand, as theTimesput it in July 1865, the Union soldiers were “returning heroes,” fresh from a successful crusade to preserve freedom and democracy from evil tyrants seeking to destroy both. Having passed through the fires of war, moreover, some thought the veterans had emerged composed of sterner stuff, better able to run and win the race of life. In his farewell to his troops, for instance, General William Tecumseh Sherman expressed his confidence that “as in war you have beengood soldiers,so in...