The ten years preceding the firing upon Fort Sumter were crucial ones for the young American republic. The final antebellum decade opened on a note of promise and hope as the spirit of reconciliation culminated in the compromise of 1850. But in both north and South the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act roused passionate feelings about the vexatious issue of slavery, and other developments stained relations between the sections to the breaking point: Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision, the bloodshed in Kansas, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry the birth of the Republican party, and the election of Lincoln to the presidency. This is an account of the politics of a trans-Mississippi, northern frontier state-Iowa, the first free state admitted to the Union from the former Louisiana Territory. Iowans reacted to all the pressures of national politics in their own special fashion and also faced questions of local importance. The latter concerns, including such issues as prohibition, railroads, immigration, homesteads and land grants combined with weightier national issues to produce a special brand of politics that was vital,, aggressive, and self-assured. This account of Iowa on the eve of the Civil War provides a fresh opportunity to examine the dynamic forces which ultimately shaped the destiny not only of the Haw-Eye State but of the United States as a whole.