The Gallant Iowans

Iowa is a young State, but it is the home of heroes. With the present war she has begun a war history that yields in splendor and honor to that of no State in the Union, and no country on the globe. Her soil is the birthplace of a new chivalry, and she has become the mother of a new race of heroes. Her soldiers boast little and she has no industrious penny-a-liner to boast for them. Her soldiers are as modest as they are brave. They are not fierce braggarts. They are as gentle and tractable as children.

But when the storm of blood begins they are the guiding and governing heroes of the tempest. Where the harvest of death is to be reaped, they are the foremost of the reapers. Where a perilous assault is to be made, somehow or other there is always an Iowa regiment, or the wasted shadow of and Iowa regiment, to lead it. It was so at Wilson’s Creek; it was so at Belmont, it was so at Fort Donelson, it was so at Shiloh; it will ever be so throughout the war.

All our Western troops have been heroes, but the Iowa troops have been heroes among heroes. The “Iowa First,” “Iowa Second,” “Iowa Fourth” and “Iowa Seventh,” are bodies of men who would have given an additional luster even to Thermopylae, Marathon, Austerlitz or Wagram, and all Americans may be proud of Iowa. – St. Louis News

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, May 3, 1862, p. 2