| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

H. Robert Baker. The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War. (Law, Society, and Politics in the Midwest.) Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2006. Pp. xiv, 251. $38.95.
H. Robert Baker's study of the legal and constitutional issues surrounding the case of fugitive slave Joshua Glover is a fascinating and riveting account of a complex set of questions that deeply divided Americans in the 1850s. In the course of his study Baker shows himself to be well versed in nineteenth-century constitutional questions and an able writer. He also reveals that an interpretation of events raised by the capture in Wisconsin of a Missouri slave can be as controversial in the twenty-first century as it was in the nineteenth.	1
Glover, the slave of Benammi Garland, had lived near Racine, Wisconsin, for two years when captured on March 10, 1854. Within hours demonstrators, led by abolitionist editor Sherman Booth, freed Glover from a Milwaukee jail and sent him on his way to safety and obscurity in Canada, even as the city prepared to host a stage version of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). So began a six-year legal battle to punish Glover's rescuers, initiated with Booth's conviction for violation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The struggle also involved the constitutional rights of the people of Wisconsin and the larger issue of federal versus state authority. The suit against Booth led the Wisconsin Supreme Court to declare the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional and the U.S. Supreme Court under Roger Taney to strike down the state ruling five years later. A bizarre series of events saw Booth serve several months of his sentence before rescuers freed him. Booth was then recaptured in October 1860, before outgoing President James Buchanan issued an eleventh-hour pardon in March 1861 as the country teetered on the brink of civil war.	. . .

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