The local militia were called out to suppress the disorder, but they were without power. It soon became noised about that Glover was to be secretly removed to Missouri. This made the mob furious. Just at this time the Racine contingent arrived, adding oil to the flames. The reënforced crowd now marched to the jail, attacked the weak structure with axes, beams, and crowbars, rescued the fugitive just at sunset, and hurried him off. An underground railroad agency took the poor fellow in charge, and soon placed him aboard a sailing vessel bound for Canada, where he finally arrived in safety.
Throughout Wisconsin the rescue was approved by the newspapers and public gatherings. Sympathetic meetings were also held in other States, at which resolutions applauding the action of Booth and his friends, and declaring the slave catching law unconstitutional, were passed with much enthusiasm. There was also held at Milwaukee, in April, a notable State convention, with delegates from all of the settled parts of the commonwealth; this convention declared the law unconstitutional, and formed a State league for furnishing aid and sympathy to the Glover rescuers.
In 1857, as a result of the Glover affair, the Wisconsin legislature passed an act making it a duty of district attorneys in each county "to use all lawful means to protect, defend, and procure to be discharged ... every person arrested or claimed as a fugitive slave," and throwing around the poor fellow every possible safeguard. Such was Wisconsin's final protest against the iniquity of the Fugitive Slave Law.
Naturally, Booth had been looked upon by the United States marshal as the chief abettor of the riot. He was promptly arrested for violating a federal law by aiding in the escape of a slave; but the State supreme court promptly discharged him on a writ of habeas corpus. Thereupon he was brought before the federal court, but again the State court interfered in his favor, because of a technical irregularity.
On the first of these occasions, the State court issued a very remarkable decision upon State rights, that attracted national attention at a time when this question was violently agitating the public mind. It declared, after a clear, logical statement of the case, that the Fugitive Slave Law was "unconstitutional and void" because it conferred judicial power upon mere court commissioners, and deprived the accused negro of the right of trial by jury. One of the justices of the court, in an individual opinion, went still further: he held that Congress had no power to legislate upon this subject; that "the States will never quietly submit to be disrobed of their sovereignty" by "national functionaries"; that the police power rested in the State itself, which would not "succumb, paralyzed and aghast, before the process of an officer unknown to the constitution, and irresponsible to its sanctions"; and that so long as he remained a judge, Wisconsin would meet such attempts with "stern remonstrance and resistance."
The federal court reversed this action, and again arrested Booth in 1860, but he was soon pardoned by the President, and met with no further trouble on account of the Glover affair.
As for the people of Racine, they made life rather uncomfortable for the men who had assisted the Milwaukee deputy marshals in arresting Glover. The city became a fiercer hotbed of abolition than ever before, and several times thereafter aided slaves to escape from bondage. Fortunately for their own good, as well as for the cause of law and order, they found no further occasion to take the law into their own hands, in the defense of human liberty.
