On February 16, 1859, John Brown, traveling with twelve men, women, and children escaping slavery from Missouri along with his own men, stopped near here at the farm of Jonathan M. Murray, a fifty-five year old abolitionist from Maine who lived just over a mile east of the eventual town of Redfield on the road to Adel. Brown's party rested overnight at Murray's place before resuming their three month trek toward Chicago and Detroit, where on March 12th the group crossed by ferry to freedom in Windsor, Canada. Ten months later Brown was dead, captured and hung after his failed attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on October 16th, 1859; that action by the former Kansas fighter and his band, including four Iowans, ignited national controversy between North and South and became a catalyst leading to the Civil War. Brown's actions were part of the Kansas troubles that arose after 1854 over whether the territories would become slave or free states, making western Iowa an important staging area for free-state forces and for those aiding fugitives escaping enslavement. Among the leading figures in antislavery and Underground Railroad activity were people of Congregational, Quaker, Presbyterian, and Wesley Methodist faiths. The northward flight of people escaping enslavement in western Missouri often brought them to the rural Iowa hamlet of Civil Bend, just upriver from Nebraska City, from which they were directed to Tabor and then eastward across Iowa toward Chicago, Detroit, and Canada. Direct participation in Underground Railroad work was dangerous and illegal, and many Iowans who wanted to avoid or ignore the slavery issue while keeping Black settlement out of the state were willing to help slave hunters retrieve runaways. The outward flow of fugitives from Missouri and the border slave states intensified hostility toward the North, while the larger Kansas conflict over slavery enraged North and South, killed the Whig Party, created the Republican Party, split the Democratic Party, and helped bring about Lincoln's election in 1860.
