Fugitive Slaves and the Unfinished American Revolution by Gordon S. Barker

Author:Gordon S. Barker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2013-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

JOSHUA GLOVER, THE FUGITIVE SLAVE. Supporting Joshua Glover, The Racine Advocate said, “The fugitive slave law cannot be enforced in Wisconsin.... The people will not suffer it” (Wisconsin Historical Society, WHi 6270).

Meanwhile Garland and his remaining associates set out for Milwaukee, some thirty miles away, with the manacled Glover lying semi-conscious in the back of the wagon. Garland expected a friendlier reception there. With Judge Miller, United States Commissioner Winfield Smith, and Arnold to orchestrate things, he felt sure there would be much less resistance in Milwaukee than in Racine. But getting there on dark, snow-covered trails was another story—especially for men not used to traveling in the wooded country around Racine. The slave catchers took a wrong fork and spent most of the night lost, reaching Milwaukee only around daybreak. Cotton later testified that he “lodged the fugitive, Glover, in jail on the morning of the 11th about 8 o’clock.” He probably did not know that when he left the jail to get some rest, the Milwaukee jailor, moved by “commendable feelings of humanity,” took the irons from Glover’s wrists and attended to the battered fugitive with “care and kindness.”5

News of Glover’s arrest quickly fanned antislavery fires in Racine and on Saturday citizens convened the “largest meeting” ever held in the town. Reports of the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law on Wisconsin free soil and revelation that Glover had been “cut in two places on the head” and his clothes were “soaking and stiff in his own blood” fueled emotions, particularly among those who knew him.6 Charles Clement, the editor of Racine’s weekly newspaper published an article with an attention-grabbing headline, “High-Handed Outrage. Attempt to Kidnap a Citizen of Racine by Slave-Catchers!” He adopted an antislavery stance similar to that of Samuel Joseph May and his compatriots after Marshal Allen seized Jerry in Syracuse. But the reaction of Wisconsinites also reflected their disdain for Stephen A. Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Bill “abolishing the Missouri Compromise.” That compromise, brokered by Henry Clay of Kentucky, had allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state at the same time that Maine joined as a free state so as to maintain the balance between free and slave states, but it also outlawed slavery north of Missouri’s southern boundary latitude 36° 30' with the exception of the State of Missouri. In the new legislation, Douglas effectively removed this limit on slavery’s expansion by advancing the principle of popular sovereignty whereby the people of a given territory would decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery. The threat that slavery might extend to areas that had previously been designated free soil fell like a heavy stone in Wisconsin.7

The arrest of Joshua Glover ensured that henceforth the townsfolk in Racine would fiercely resist the Fugitive Slave Law and also be among Douglas’s most vocal opponents. “[W]e as citizens are justified in declaring and do hereby declare the slave-catching law of 1850 disgraceful, and also repealed,” wrote Clement in the Advocate of Saturday, March 11, 1854.

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