In the previous year, 1854, occurred at Milwaukee the famous Glover rescue. Glover was a runaway slave who had been apprehended by his self-styled owner, brutally man-handled, and confined in the Milwaukee County jail for safekeeping. Sherman M. Booth, editor of the Daily Free Democrat, one of the founders of the Republican party, a vigorous free-soil and antislavery partisan, and the man in the state who was perhaps most feared and hated by the Democracy, had argued hotly for the protection of Glover’s rights against the man claiming him under the “unconstitutional” compromise law of 1850. Booth called a public meeting at the courthouse for the purpose, as he claimed, of concerting measures for helping Glover without the use of force. But the upshot was a rescue party which battered down the door of the jail, took Glover out, and by various shifts and transfers on the underground railway, carried him to Canada and freedom. Booth was then made to suffer for all that had been done; he was tried in the federal court, convicted, fined, and given a jail sentence.
We cannot go into the details of the Booth case, a cause célèbre in ante-Civil War political history. But the Democratic papers, after the DeBar lynching, ostentatiously bemoaned the fact that due to recent events “neither national nor state laws” could hereafter be enforced in Wisconsin. The beginning of the trouble was the setting at naught of the national law for the rendition of slaves, in which the arch Republican Booth was ringleader. The Mayberry lynching and the DeBar lynching followed in natural sequence. These editors did not choose to analyze the difference between the Glover case and the others—the fact that the one was a rescue performed at their own risk by philanthropic men, the others brutal killings committed by men crazed with the lust of blood vengeance. In other words, the Democratic press, including those papers printed in the German language, attempted the impossible feat of arranging in the same straight line the “higher law” and the lower law.
Of course, the Republican press retorted handsomely, and probably with considerable political effect, that if the apologists for mob law in Kansas were “in favor of the execution of the fugitive slave act in Wisconsin” they would like their avowal to that effect.[71] It is well known that during the 1855 campaign, as in the previous year, a good many Germans were converted from their old-time Democratic allegiance.[72] But both parties were too intent on their immediate political objects to risk pressing for an investigation of the West Bend tragedy, which might have alienated a large section of the German vote in three German counties.
It is not impossible that politics was responsible for the severity of the onslaught upon the militia companies, since the nativist propaganda for an exclusively American militia would be quick to seize upon such an opportunity, and it is not to be supposed that the politics of the case was all on one side. Yet, unless the governor was in possession of facts which were withheld from the public, the least that could be said against the companies is that they exhibited criminal inefficiency. From this distance, it looks as if politics affected the Republican attitude as well as the Democratic; as if crime was condoned in the interest of party success, since one party was intent on holding its former German adherents and the other was determined to take as many of them as possible into the opposition camp.
Whether or not the incident leaves the stain of blood on the path of Wisconsin politics, it marks the nearest approach to a race war between Germans and Americans which this general period affords. And by Americans we practically mean Yankees. For it was a truth which the German press sensed instinctively, that the Republican party—made up of “shreds and patches,” as was said,—embracing prohibitionists, abolitionists, free-soilers, nativists, and Whigs, was dominated by the “Puritan” element.[73] A glance at the history of its origin in Wisconsin will at least convince the reader of its Yankee paternity.[74]
However, the Republican party changed radically in character during the next few years, and as the German population came to be distributed between it and the Democratic party, a healthier social tone was the result. The political campaign of 1856, when Frémont was candidate for the presidency, was conducted with such enthusiasm by Wisconsin Republicans, as to make serious inroads on the Democratic German vote. A number of prominent German leaders took the stump for Frémont, speaking in the German language to German audiences with telling effect. Thereafter, in successive state campaigns and in the presidential canvass of 1860, the Germans of Wisconsin were electrified by the compelling oratory of their greatest campaigner, Carl Schurz, to whom the success of the Lincoln ticket, both in Wisconsin and other western states harboring many Germans, was largely due. Such participation was doing much to justify the prophecy of Dr. Huebschmann—that political equality would help to make the people of Wisconsin “one people.”
Photo by Edward C. Nelson
WM. STEPHEN HAMILTON, FOUNDER OF MUSCODA