The people of Wisconsin, however, were unwilling to recognize this fact. Having enacted a personal liberty law in 1857, they made Byron Paine, a young lawyer, who had taken a prominent part in the defence of Booth, their candidate in 1859 for associate justice of the Supreme Court, and elected him on a combined anti-slavery and state rights issue. Thus the state maintained its ground until the eve of the Civil War. Then it relinquished it to assist in coercing South Carolina and other Southern states from their secession, the right of which these states defended by the same doctrine of state sovereignty.[951]
The Glover rescue occurred while the Kansas-Nebraska Act was pending in Congress. The attempted rescue of Burns came just after this piece of legislation, already passed by the Senate, had been voted by the House. This measure, which set aside the Missouri Compromise prohibiting slavery from all the Louisiana territory lying north of 36° 30' north latitude, except that included within the State of Missouri, deeply stirred public feeling in the free states: thus the violence of the demonstrations in the Booth and Burns cases was in some measure a protest against Douglas legislation. Burns was arrested in Boston on May 24, 1854, under a warrant granted by the United States commissioner. He felt his case to be hopeless, and so told Richard H. Dana, Jr., and Theodore Parker; but they urged him to make a defence, and prevailed on the commissioner to postpone the hearing. Boston was soon ablaze with indignation kindled in part by the inflammatory handbills scattered broadcast by members of the Vigilance Committee. These handbills contained invectives against the "kidnapper," and expressed a sentiment prevalent in New England, as in other parts of the North, when they declared "the compromises trampled upon by the slave power when in the path of slavery are to be crammed down the throat of the North."
In response to messages from the Vigilance Committee Thomas Wentworth Higginson, A. Bronson Alcott and others hurried to Boston to consult with the leaders there on what was best to be done. A mass-meeting had been called for Friday evening, the 26th, to be held in Faneuil Hall, and it was now planned to make an attack, at the height of this meeting, on the court-house, where Burns was in durance, and "send the whole meeting pell-mell to Court Square, ready to fall in behind the leaders and bring out the slave." The city was in a state of wild excitement when the time for action came, and it was natural that in the confusion existing some of the arrangements should miscarry. The crowd that filled Faneuil Hall was so dense as to cut off all communication with the speakers on the platform, and prevented concerted action. When, under the impassioned oratory of Phillips, Parker and others, the audience had given evidences of its readiness to undertake the rescue, the announcement that an attack upon the court-house was about to begin was made from the rear of the hall, and it was proposed that the meeting should adjourn to Court Square. Phillips had not received notice of the project, and the other speakers had not fully comprehended it. The alarm was thought to be a scheme to break up the meeting and was not followed by the decisive action necessary to success.
Arriving at the court-house the crowd found a small party under the lead of Higginson, Stowell and a negro battering in a door with a stick of timber. Entrance was gained by a few only,—who found themselves in the hands of the police,—while the concourse outside was daunted at the outset by the mysterious killing of one of the marshal's deputies. The arrest of several of Higginson's companions followed, and a renewal of the assault, if there was any danger of such a thing, was prevented by the approach of two companies of artillery and two more of marines ordered out by the mayor to preserve the peace. Troops were retained at the court-house during the examination of Burns, and it is reported by an eye-witness that the seat of justice "had the air of a beleaguered fortress." On the 2d of June Commissioner Loring remanded the fugitive to slavery.
The presence in Boston of a multitude of visitors attracted thither by the annual meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, the state convention of the Free Soil party, and the spring meetings of the religious bodies, as well as by the arrest of the negro, led the authorities to take all precautions to forestall any fresh attempt at rescue when the fugitive should be sent out of the city. Accordingly, over a thousand soldiers with loaded muskets, and furnished with a cannon loaded with grape-shot, were detailed to assist the city police and a large number of deputy marshals to carry out the law. In the procession that accompanied Burns to the United States revenue cutter, by which he was to be carried back to Virginia, there were four platoons of marines and a battalion of artillery, besides the marshal's civil posse of one hundred and twenty-five men. Fifty thousand people lined the streets along which this procession passed, and greeted it with hisses and groans, while over their heads were displayed many emblems of mourning and shame. It is little wonder that the Enquirer of Richmond, Virginia, commenting with satisfaction on the rendition of Burns, was led to add, "but a few more such victories and the South is undone."[952] Such was the state of public opinion in Massachusetts that the Board of Overseers of Harvard College declined to confirm the election of Commissioner Loring as a member of the Harvard faculty; and the people petitioned, until their request was granted, for his removal from the office of judge of probate.
Similar hostility to the Fugitive Slave Law existed in Illinois. John Reynolds, who had been governor of the state, wrote about 1855 that when President Jackson issued his proclamation in December, 1832, condemning nullification in South Carolina, the legislature of Illinois hailed it with gratification and pledged the state to sustain the executive in his purpose to enforce the federal laws at all hazards. Jackson's proclamation, he said, had a strong tendency to suppress the spirit of nullification throughout the Union. The law of 1850 had been framed in pursuance of the Constitution, and was hailed as the foundation of sectional peace and happiness, but "within a few years, a section of the State of Illinois, the city of Chicago, is not disposed to execute this act of Congress. The opposition in Illinois to this law is not extensive, but confined to a single city, so far as I know. Yet in that disaffected district the act is a dead letter...."[953] The number of centres in Illinois in which the act was disapproved and violated was far beyond the knowledge of ex-Governor Reynolds.
In Ohio incidents arising out of the operations of the Underground Railroad became the occasions for serious contests between the state and federal authorities. On May 15, 1857, the United States deputy marshal for southern Ohio, with nine assistants, entered the house of Udney Hyde, near Mechanicsburg, Champaign County, in pursuit of a fugitive slave. The approach of the posse had been observed by the negro, who took refuge in Hyde's garret. Some firing was done by both the negro and the marshal, with the result that the officer and his party were glad to take their positions outside of the house. Here they were soon found by a crowd of citizens from the neighboring town, whose sympathies were so unmistakably with the fugitive that the pursuers decided to leave without delay. Returning twelve days later, they were told that the fugitive, Addison White, had gone to Canada. Thereupon they arrested several persons in the neighborhood on the charge of aiding a slave to escape, and set off with these persons ostensibly for Urbana, where the examination was to be held.
Instead of going to Urbana, the party took a southern course through Clark and Green counties. The sheriff of Clark County, who organized a company to give chase, overtook the marshal and his men, and received at their hands a severe beating. Bands of angry citizens now scoured the country, and, at length, after a skirmish locally known as "the battle of Lumbarton," captured the marshal's posse. On the charge of assault with intent to kill, the prisoners were placed in jail at Springfield. This action occasioned a serious clash between the United States District Court for the southern district of Ohio and the state courts; and the federal tribunal asserted its jurisdiction by releasing the marshal's posse, although in the decision rendered it was admitted that there "was a question whether the marshal had not exceeded authority in the use of unnecessary force."
So critical had the situation now become that Governor Chase determined to have a personal conference with President Buchanan and the Secretary of State, General Cass. The Governor therefore sent an officer of his staff to Washington to arrange for the meeting, and to say to the Secretary of State that Mr. Chase "was as earnest in support of the authority of the federal government, legitimately exercised, as he was in support of the authority of the state; but that he should feel compelled to protect the state officials in the exercise of their duties, and the state courts in the exercise of their legitimate functions, if it took every man in the state to do it." In order to adjust the existing differences before they culminated in open hostility between the two governments, it was proposed on the part of Mr. Chase that the United States district attorney at Cincinnati be instructed to drop all suits against citizens of the state, with the understanding that a similar course be followed by the state with regard to the marshal and his deputies. At the formal meeting this was the plan adopted. Thus the affair was amicably settled, although it did not fail to leave a deep impression on the public mind, and to evoke comments from the press indicative of the restiveness of the abolitionists under the jurisdiction of United States courts in fugitive slave cases.[954]