American antislavery had never lacked for distinguished legal theorists and tacticians, but H. Robert Baker persuasively suggests that to the better known names of William Jay, Robert Rantoul, Jr., Lysander Spooner, and Salmon P. Chase should be added the name of Byron Paine, attorney for Booth. Paine argued that the Fugitive Slave Law, in denying the writ of habeas corpus and the right of trial by jury, abridged the common law liberties of the people, which it is the legitimate, indeed the most basic business of state governments (especially as then constituted) to defend. In a consistently interesting historical narrative Baker closely analyzes Abelman v. Booth as a dramatic instance of collision between state and federal jurisdictions, considering it in relation to Marbury v. Madison, which gave the U. S. Supreme Court final authority in Constitutional questions; Prigg v. Pennsylvania, by which, in 1842, Joseph Story had federalized slave recaption; and Lemuel Shaw's 1851 decision for the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in the matter of Thomas Sims, which, in returning that fugitive to Georgia, had sustained the constitutionality of the 1850 law. In the book's conclusion Baker distinguishes the antebellum position of Wisconsin from the superficially similar opposition of Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus to federal desegregation orders following Brown v. Board of Education. Both were state's rights positions, but only one was undertaken in behalf of such fundamental human rights as the Constitution was obliged by popular will to respect.

     The Rescue of Joshua Glover breaks new ground insofar as Abelman v. Booth has often been seen by historians as a reckless and extralegal challenge by Wisconsin to an odious but clearly constitutional enactment. One especially interesting aspect of Baker's analysis concerns the legality of popular protest, as the writer discriminates between objectionable mob action on the one hand and the recognition traditionally accorded on the other to rights of assembly and free political speech as these may become involved in the duty of citizens in a democracy to protect themselves from, say, kidnapping under the color of law. But the book breaks new ground also in ways that only emerge if the Glover case is placed in relation to concurrent but radically different cases arising elsewhere, especially that of Anthony Burns in Boston. The cultural historian will be delighted to see how much difference venue makes. In Wisconsin the law and order party were proslavery unionist Democrats who looked for policy to Franklin Pierce and Attorney General Caleb Cushing, whereas the antislavery activists (principally Booth and Paine) were graduates of the old Liberty Party, abetted, as the emergence of Carl Schurz might imply, by '48ers among the German population. In Massachusetts old line Webster Whigs squared off against "higher law" reformers including Transcendentalists and Garrisonians, both essentially apolitical. The Wisconsin reformers were effectual in delivering Glover and in resisting the Fugitive Slave Law; their counterparts in Massachusetts, on the contrary, experienced the shame and humiliation of seeing Burns remanded to Virginia. Forced to concede that the Slave Power had a legally free hand in their own state affairs and concluding that the Constitution was against them, they could then see no option but to embrace disunion politics. There is no hint in Baker's account that Romantic reform tinged the Wisconsin proceedings whatsoever; instead, legal pragmatism and a regard for the rights of the state's citizens became the basis for an elegant antislavery constitutionalism that could not have been more ideologically distant from Garrison's morally grounded repudiation of the Constitution as a proslavery document.