Ableman v. Booth: Wisconsin Responds to the Fugitive Slave Law (2011)
Undergraduate: Anna Peterson
Faculty Advisor: John Semonche
Department: History
On the night of March 10, 1854, federal officers took Joshua Glover, an escaped slave, from his home in Racine, Wisconsin, and brought him to a jail in Milwaukee. The following day, a mob freed Glover from jail and sent him to Canada through the Underground Railroad. By the end of that day, state and federal courts had issued several warrants and writs, prompting a decade of tangled legal battles. The legal disputes, however, largely ignored Glover. Instead, the cases focused on the federal officials who had arrested Glover under the fugitive slave law of the Compromise of 1850 and on the leaders of the mob that freed him, especially Sherman Booth, the editor of an abolitionist Milwaukee newspaper.The series of events beginning with Glover’s capture and continuing through a decade of civil and criminal court cases, often described simply as the “Booth Incident,” had important and lasting effects on Wisconsin’s relationship with the federal government. From that March night in 1854 to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case seventeen years later, the power to protect citizens from intrusions on their rights by federal authorities shifted from the state courts to, exclusively, the federal judiciary.