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Constitutions--they simply formulate current political morality. It is
in the social mind back of the convention, back of the government, and
back of the Law that the ideals of human right and justice are
conceived, born, and evolved. A Constitution is a social product.
It is the embodiment of popular ideals.

And so the real makers of the Constitutions of Iowa were not the men who
first in 1844, then in 1846, and then again in 1857 assembled in the Old
Stone Capitol on the banks of the Iowa River. The true "Fathers" were
the people who, in those early times from 1830 to 1860, took possession
of the fields and forests and founded a new Commonwealth. They were the
pioneers, the frontiersmen, the squatters--the pathfinders in our
political history. Aye, they were the real makers of our fundamental
law.

The first of the Iowa pioneers crossed the Mississippi in the early
thirties. They were preceded by the bold explorer and the intrepid
fur-trader, who in their day dared much, endured much, and through
the wildernesses lighted the way for a westward-moving civilization.
Scarcely had their camp-fires gone out when the pioneer appeared with ax
and ox and plow. He came to cultivate the soil and establish a home--he
came to stay.

The rapidity with which the pioneer population of Iowa increased after
the Black-Hawk war was phenomenal. It grew literally by leaps and
bounds. Men came in from all parts of the Union--from the North-west,
from the East, from the South, and from the South-east. They came from
Maine and Massachusetts, from New York and Pennsylvania, from Virginia
and the Carolinas, from Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee, and from the
newer States of Ohio and Indiana. It is said that whole
neighborhoods came over from Illinois.

In 1835 Lieutenant Albert Lea thought that the population had reached at
least sixteen thousand souls. But the census reports give a more modest
number--ten thousand five hundred. When the Territory of Iowa was
established in 1838 there were within its limits twenty-two thousand
eight hundred and fifty-nine people. Eight years later, when the
Commonwealth was admitted into the Union, this number had increased to
one hundred and two thousand three hundred and eighty-eight.

Thus in less than a score of years the pioneers had founded a new Empire
west of the Mississippi. And such an Empire! A land of inexhaustible
fertility! A hundred thousand pioneers with energy, courage, and
perse