The rescue of Joshua Glover: Lawyers, popular constitutionalism, and the Fugitive Slave Law in Wisconsin

The rescue of Joshua Glover on 11 March 1854 inaugurated a crisis in Wisconsin politics. The United States government was unable to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to recover Joshua Glover for Bennami Garland---his reputed owner---but it did successfully prosecute Sherman Booth and John Ryecraft for participating in the rescue. In January 1855, the Wisconsin Supreme Court interposed itself between the national government and its citizens and declared the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 unconstitutional. Historians have traditionally regarded the Wisconsin Supreme Court's action as an extraordinary event where the judges' politics rather than legal principles settled the case. Likewise, historians have considered the event secondary in importance to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in galvanizing opposition against slaveholders and leading to the ascendancy of the Republican party.; My dissertation examines new material on the Glover rescue and the trials of Sherman Booth. I analyze first-hand accounts, witness testimony, court records, appellate court decisions, correspondence, and newspaper commentary to discover how Milwaukeeans organized and conducted the rescue, and how Sherman Booth's lawyers defended their resistance to U.S. law. I examine these events within the social, economic, and cultural context of 1850s Milwaukee, a young city with an ethnically and religiously plural population.; Milwaukee's abolitionist community developed a strategy of resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that drew on the Jeffersonian tradition of popular constitutionalism. By framing their resistance in a primarily legal manner, Milwaukee's abolitionists sought to reach a wider audience often deeply divided on moral and religious convictions. By invoking the fundamental rights of Wisconsin's citizens and residents, Shennan Booth's lawyers opened a debate on the meaning of community membership and appropriate resistance to authority in a constitutional republic. These debates demonstrated how firmly entrenched the notion of popular constitutionalism was in antebellum American political culture and how it could legitimate popular political action.