How a Fugitive Slave’s Jailbreak Fueled the Rise of the Republican Party

And we continue with our American Stories. Up next to story about an event in American history with profound implications and a story that’s been forgotten over time. You’re to tell the story of the rescue of Joshua Glover, a fugitive slave. Is Doctor Robert Baker and Michael Jarr, who’s the creator of the documentary Liberty at Stake: The Joshua Glover Story. Here’s Michael to start us off at the moment that would change Joshua Glover’s life forever.

On the night of March tenth, eighteen fifty-four, he was playing cards with a couple of friends in his home. What he didn’t know: his former slave owner never stopped looking, and the slave catchers…

…knock on the door. Glover is societious. He has heard that there are slave catchers abroad.

There had been some people snooping around.

The day before. So he says, “Don’t answer the door,” but his friend unlatched it, and the posse swept in. I came across the story of Joshua Glover in the Milwaukee County Historical Archives. I was working on industrial tort law.

I believe I first came across his story maybe ten years ago. There is a plaque in downtown Milwaukee, just on the corner of a park, and the plaque commemorates what took place in that square in eighteen fifty-four, and there’s just enough there to kind of whet your appetite.

The short story of it was that he was jailed in Milwaukee as a fugitive slave and…

…brought to the courthouse, which had been in that square back at that time.

And his reputed slave owner, a man by the name of Benamy Garland, had the Fugitive Slave Law of eighteen fifty to extradite him from Wisconsin to Missouri. And rather than allow this to happen…

A crowd of five thousand people…

…broke Joshua Glover out of jail and then arranged for him to flee to Canada, where he would live the rest of those days in freedom.

But in the events of March of eighteen fifty-four were a catalyst for much bigger events: the formation of the Republican Party, which led to, obviously, the election of Abraham Lincoln, which contributed to the Southern States seceding and Civil War and eventually emancipation. So I realized, “Oh my gosh, there’s a domino effect here,” and it wasn’t the sole event, obviously, but one of many that were taking place, and we’re really ripping the fabric of the nation apart. The eighteen fifties were a very turbulent time in America. The Kansas-Nebraska Act passed. People could vote to decide whether they wanted to be a free state or a slave state.

And this struck everybody as another capitulation to slaveholders.

You can’t vote to enslave your neighbor.

All across, especially the Midwestern states, these Nebraska societies pop up. They’re almost like single-issue political clubs. The other horrific event during that same period with Kansas is what happens in the Senate. Preston Brooks takes a cane to Charles Sumner—I mean, nearly kills them on the floor of the United States Senate—which, by the way, followed a long train, long history of violence in the halls of Congress. There were outright brawls in the House of Representatives.

Prior to that, as part of the bigger package of bills adopted in eighteen fifty, part of that was the Fugitive Slave Act, which put stronger teeth into the ability of slave owners to reclaim their slaves.

You have to understand, the Fugitive Slave Act had been in force in the United States since seventeen ninety-three. This is something that comes up very, very early in American history as a fundamental problem. “What are we going to do now that we have free states and slave states who share common borders?” And the Constitution, of course, has an Article Four, a fugitive slave clause. It’s one of the most poorly written parts of the Constitution, and people start exploiting the weaknesses.

A lot of states were putting up roadblocks that made it much more difficult for slave owners to reclaim their escaped slaves, that would give rights to anyone who was accused of being a fugitive slave.

You see more and more efforts by the enslaved to escape bondage, and you see more and more willingness of people in northern cities to assist. And so there’s a growing outcry amongst the states of the South that the Constitution is not being respected, and they demand a congressional settlement on this. And so Congress in eighteen fifty passes a new Fugitive Slave, and the new Fugitive Slave Act has several features in it that make it fairly remarkable, and it’s really a novelty in American law. The first is that it appoints new federal officers to oversee fugitive slave renditions. The second prong is that they empower the federal marshals to assist in returning fugitive slaves by giving them tremendous authority. One of the authorities that they give them is the power of posse comitatus. It’s the ability to say, “During a crisis, I’m calling on all of you citizens to help me enforce the law.” So now, with the power of posse comitatus, a federal marshal who is seizing a fugitive slave can essentially conscript anybody around him, any citizen, to assist him in returning this fugitive slave to a slaveholder. And that is what really rankles people in the North. Felt turned them into slave catchers. You remember, in the North, not everybody was abolitionists, and there were plenty of anti-slavery people who were fine with slavery so long as it stayed in the South, but they had deep problems with allowing the slave states to extend their slavery principles into free territories and into the free states. Now they’re going to become a part of this entire regime.

“How can we be a free state if we are engaged in returning people to bondage?”

It suspends habeas corpus. It specifically denies fugitives a trial by jury. It doubles the civil and criminal penalties that are associated with helping fugitives escape. It was enormously risky. You could be sentenced to prison; you could suffer a fine that was crippling, catastrophic.

Back in that time, we’re…

…talking about something that would amount to your livelihood. The civil prosecutions that the Fugitive Slave Act allowed, but sometimes go upwards of ten thousand. If you were a printer, for instance, that was all of your equipment. If you were a labor it would be essentially enough to put you into debt prison for the rest of your life. And they make federal marshals actually liable for the value of the claimed fugitives should a rescue take place.

So they really tried to put a lot more strength in the ability of slave owners to come up to the North, track down their fugitive slaves, arrest them, have no due process, and then return them back to a lifetime of bondage. So in the Southern perspective, that was a great development, but for people in the North, like people in Wisconsin, that was horrific.

And this fed complaints in the northern states that the Fugitive Slave Law was not just a novelty but patently unconstitutional, and it was.

Really difficult at the time, politically. The Democrats were kind of seen as the “slave party.” The Whigs were becoming more and more ineffectual, and then there were a couple of other parties, and they had abolitionist leanings, but they were not strong parties.

And this is all in advance of the midterm elections that are going to occur in November of eighteen fifty-four at a pivotal point in American history. So, Joshua Glover’s arrest is really kind of a fulcrum point. It focuses national attention again on just how much the slaveholders have succeeded in bending the Republic to their will.

And you’ve been listening to Doctor Robert Baker and Michael Jarr. Jarr’s the creator of the documentary Liberty at Stake: The Joshua Glover Story. They can be viewed at www.lastmilm.com. Go to their website and help them tell the inspiring story of Joshua Glover to a national audience. And what we learned here is, well, from a quote, “How can we be a free state if we are returning people back to bond?” And that’s about as close as it gets to the full summary of the problems between North and South, specifically as it relates to the Fugitive Slave Act. When we come back, more of this story, the story of Joshua Glover here on our American Stories. And we continue with our American Stories and with the story of the rescue of fugitive slave Joshua Glover. Let’s get back into the story. Here again is Michael.

Jarr: January first, New Year’s Day, eighteen fifty. Joshua Glover was part of a slave auction on the courthouse steps in Saint Louis. What a terrible way to start the New Year! A man named Venemy Garland purchased him, and Venemy Garland had a farm just outside of Saint Louis. Joshua Glover worked as a slave there for two years before he decided that he was going to pursue his own freedom and began to make his way four hundred miles—just a little under four hundred miles—to the abolitionist stronghold of Racine, Wisconsin. There was plenty of work to be found. It was a burgeoning port city.

It was actually in competition with Milwaukee.

And for two years, he actually was able to really live out his dream of freedom. He must have been a fairly accomplished woodcarver. He would bring his products into the city and gipoo and selam, and apparently was fairly successful at that. So, an entrepreneurial and hardworking guy.

And that means that he had come to the attention of enough people that when his description is published by by Garland, it eventually gets back to these networks of pro-slavery people. So, in addition to betting abolitionist networks in the North, there were also networks of pro-slavery people. They watched for advertisements and helped to track down fugitives. Some of these people were committed unionists; they believed that this was their constitutional duty, and others were probably more cynical and just realizing there was a business opportunity there and would put themselves into the employ of slaveholders.

On the night of March tenth, eighteen fifty-four, he was playing cards with a couple of friends in his home, but…

A man inside the cabin who has been paid off—turncoat—unlatches the door, and in rush the Marshal and his arresting party. He is eventually manacled, put into a wagon, and they then prepare to take him to jail. But instead of going to Racine, they turn north and head to Milwaukee. And then what they do is, they’ve actually brought two wagons, and they send one of the wagons back to Racine. It’s fairly obvious at this point that they are expecting to be met in Racine, and in fact this happens: abolitionists have already been alerted by the time the wagon arrives in Racine. And this is in the dead of night.

One of the friends who had been playing cards with Glover that evening actually escaped out a window, and he went and began to tell the abolitionist community that Joshua had been arrested.

And then they wire… they wire Sherman Booth.

Sherman Booth was an abolitionist newspaper editor in Milwaukee, and they tipped him off to say, “There’s a fugitive slave who’s been arrested here in Racine. He’s been taken to the jail. Can you confirm this?” So, Sherman Booth goes over to the jailhouse, and they really downplay it. They basically kind of use weasel words to basically say that, “Yet no one’s been abducted. There’s nothing going on here of any interest.” Sherman Booth began to kind of doubt that he had gotten good information. He ran into an attorney who had just filed a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Joshua Glover, so basically he had asked for him to be released. So, Sherman Booth goes back to his printing press begins to run off a number of handbills calling people out to oppose the efforts of the slave catchers to return Glover to slavery. Booth also gets on his horse and rides through the streets, Paul Revere…

…style, and he yells, “Come to the courthouse square! A man’s liberty is at stake! Freemen to the rescue!” This is what draws all of these people into the courthouse square, and…

A miserable cold March day, five thousand people dropped whatever they were doing and turned up at the courthouse on behalf of a man that most of them had never met, to demand that Joshua Glover be given due process and ultimately be released. The population of Milwaukee at the time was about twenty thousand people, so to think about that kind of a crowd, that kind of a turnout with truly remarkable.

Now, keep in mind, this was a city that had suffered an election riot. There were not infrequent riots in Milwaukee that occurred when you had gatherings just like this. This was a polyglot city. It had a lot of Irish immigrants and had a lot of German immigrants, and to put all of these people into the same space naturally invokes some anxiety from everybody. And then what happens is, once they all gather in the courthouse square, the crowd elects a president, and the president then appoints a committee, and the committee is made up of people from every ward. And then they sit down and start drafting resolutions that they presented the crowd, and the crowd then discusses the resolutions and then votes on them.

In other words, this was not your typical mob scene. This was not your typical riot with pitchforks and torches.

They actually behaved very much the way any out-of-doors democratic assembly would. And they make a constitutional argument that as a resident of the state of Wisconsin, nobody can remove him from Wisconsin except by trial by jury. And they say that he has a right by the Constitution to the rite Febuse Corpus, and they set themselves on those planks. They are going to make sure that his constitutional rights are respected. They then take these resolutions to the jailer and to the federal judge who is overseeing the case, and at the same time, they are working legal angles, and they did this for several hours. This takes hours, and then we’re talking about something that isn’t a momentary thing. Literally, people describe being at the meeting all day, going home for dinner, and then coming back after dinner was over.

But they realized that whoever was not going to be released.

It’s only when the federal judge says that they will not honor the writ of habeas corpus that the crowd springs into action.

And they grabbed a wooden beam, and they said, “This will make for a fine key,” and they used that key to batter down the courthouse door.

They are directed by the jailer as to where Glover is because they start off in the wrong direction, and he doesn’t want them to destroy his jail. They break only the lock on his door, which allows them to take him out, and they do no other damage to the jail.

At that point, the crowd goes wild, like it was the return of a war hero or something like that. People were cheering and clapping and shaking Glover’s hand and wiped him to the South Side of Milwaukee.

Ultimately, he would be taken to a ferry and ferried to Canada. That is how the rescue happens.

People in the…

South were outraged immediately. The legal ramifications for the abolitionists are clear.

Sherman Booth was arrested. They were jailed. They were also sued by Joshua Glover’s former owner, Benamy Garland, successfully sued because he claimed that they had been involved in stealing his property. Sherman Booth lost his newspaper business, his printing presses, and so on, in order to pay off what was owed. And in the…

Case of Sherman Booth, it didn’t actually take part in the rescue. He had left the meeting at that point, but he was the…

…most vocal organizer. And there had been similar rescues in other cities, but the Joshua Glover event was really sort of a catalyst for bigger developments in the coming days. Nine days after his rescue, a group of abolitionists met in a little white schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, and said, “We need a new anti-slavery political party in this country.” They came out of that schoolhouse calling themselves Republicans.

I think the story of Joshua Glover is important for—I mean, any number of reasons—but to me, the most important thing is that it is a lesson in civic activity.

Five thousand people, black and white, come together on behalf of one man, determined to make sure that the American ideals that they believe in—the founding ideals of the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness—were going to be extended to Joshua Glover. It’s hard for us to kind of imagine on any given day just dropping what you’re doing to go out and spend some time in the cold, acting on behalf of somebody else who maybe is facing injustice. But then to go that next step and actually break the law, knowing that you could be arrested, you could be fined, you could face off sorts and penalties as a result of your actions, and still being willing to do that is just an inspiring act.

Every person involved was forced to repeatedly articulate what it was they were doing and why. They had to articulate their vision for what the Constitution was, and they ha…