The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave Law, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War (review)

The fight to liberate African Americans is not a twentieth-century phenomenon, as Robert Baker makes clear in this gripping story about Joshua Glover. The scene is Racine, Wisconsin; the year 1854—in a decade when abolitionist lawyer Salmon Portland Chase characterized slavery as "the great question of the day." Joshua Glover was among the more than four million African Americans enslaved in the South, and he joined an unknown number of men, women, and children who took flight to a free state or Canada. Glover chose the former and, circa 1851, took refuge near Racine, a port city in Wisconsin. He had been legally held against his will by Benammi Garland, a Missouri slave owner who tracked him to Racine and captured him there as a fugitive slave. Garland had prepared for resistance from the locals in free Wisconsin by enlisting federal marshals and a few toughs to carry out the Fugitive Slave Act, which authorized him to capture and remove anyone who legally owed service under state law. But the resistance in Wisconsin was probably greater than anything Garland had expected. Not only did Wisconsinites resist Garland and rescue Joshua Glover, they challenged the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act. This book chronicles their resistance and the constitutional arguments they developed in a futile effort to defeat the fugitive slave law.

An underlying theme of Baker's book is the conflict of laws that surrounded the capture of Joshua Glover. Missouri law had sanctioned slavery, and, as long as he was there or in a state with similar laws, Garland was within his legal rights to oppress anyone of African heritage if they had been designated as slaves. Federal law supported slavery, and, with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, it assisted in the capture and removal of fugitives, as well as limited the rights of the accused to prove their free status. A counterargument developed in antebellum America, as abolitionist lawyers, including Chase, challenged fugitive slave legislation, arguing that the Constitution had deprived Congress of any legal authority to pass laws to support slavery. Wisconsin abolitionists shared this point of view, and the majority on the state Supreme Court agreed. Thus when Garland captured Glover, intending to remove him, he faced abolitionists and state judges who were willing to challenge the nefarious law.

Baker anchors this story in the context of the nineteenth-century struggle over slavery. There were competing forces in the struggle for the hearts and minds of Americans. Minstrelsy, "America's first unabashedly popular theatre," is his best evidence to describe the cultural violence against African Americans (72). Minstrelsy might have been hilariously entertaining to white audiences who watched white performers in blackface mimic supposedly hapless and contented slaves, but it produced a false impression about black people in the white mind. Baker explains that these shows were highly complex, and sometimes depicted how black families were separated and sold away, but they mainly conveyed the notion that slavery was an appropriate status for blacks. Baker concludes that "audiences increasingly left minstrel shows not only thoroughly entertained but secure in their feelings of racial superiority," and Garland and his supporters skillfully described Glover in unfavorable ways, just as the minstrels had characterized black people (73). Of course, abolitionists pushed back, arguing that Glover was industrious and honest, seeming to say that he was entitled to freedom because he was different from the masses of African Americans.

That Wisconsin was a free state undoubtedly helped Glover's cause, and the state was also blessed with able advocates for freedom, including lawyer James H. Paine and printer Sherman M. Booth. So when the bells rang out in Racine on the morning of March 11, Wisconsinites knew that the emergency could have been triggered by a kidnapping, and they invoked the law to secure the freedom...