Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/137

 of bringing Mr. Paine to my side, being sure that in him I would have the safest counselor and the truest friend. In this I succeeded only once, and then only imperfectly. He joined the army soon after the breaking out of the Civil War, rose to the rank of Brigadier-General, lost a leg while attacking at the head of his command, at Fort Hudson, served several times in the lower House of Congress, established a law office at Washington, declined, for economic reasons, the position of Assistant Secretary of the Interior, which was offered to him when I took charge of the Department, but accepted the Commissionership of Patents, and, after having left that office, resumed his law practice in Washington.

I have often regretted that I did not resist the temptation of public activity which constantly interfered with every attempt on my part to settle down to steady occupation as a lawyer. But I may say, by way of excuse, that whenever a public call was made upon me, my friend and associate, Mr. Paine, in the generosity of his heart, invariably encouraged me to respond to it. And as such calls came in rapid succession, the result followed that I was constantly employed in public matters, and never had time for any private pursuits that demanded consecutive application. I had hardly sat down upon my chair in the law office at Milwaukee, and was in great dejection of mind about the loss of a cow case in the court of a justice of the peace, when I was urgently demanded for service in a contest of peculiar significance.

Wisconsin had its “fugitive slave case,” which created intense commotion among the people. In March, 1854, a colored man, Joshua Glover, who for some time had been working in a sawmill near Racine, was, by virtue of a warrant issued by a United States District Judge, arrested as a fugitive slave from Missouri. The arrest was effected under peculiarly dramatic