Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/104

 of the coroner's jury, it must be recorded that no earnest effort was made to punish them. Nor was any step of an official character taken (so far as I have been able to find) to determine the guilt or innocence of the militia companies and their officers. In fact, the Democratic press of the state, evidently fearful of sacrificing some German Democratic votes, which that year were all needed, deliberately tried to darken council by confounding this case in principle not only with the Mayberry case, which it resembled, but also with another of an entirely different nature, to which we must give passing attention.

In the previous year, 1854, occurred at Milwaukee the famous Glover rescue. Glover was a runaway slave who had been apprehended by his self-styled owner, brutally man-handled, and confined in the Milwaukee County jail for safekeeping. Sherman M. Booth, editor of the Daily Free Democrat, one of the founders of the Republican party, a vigorous free-soil and antislavery partisan, and the man in the state who was perhaps most feared and hated by the Democracy, had argued hotly for the protection of Glover's rights against the man claiming him under the "unconstitutional" compromise law of 1850. Booth called a public meeting at the courthouse for the purpose, as he claimed, of concerting measures for helping Glover without the use of force. But the upshot was a rescue party which battered down the door of the jail, took Glover out, and by various shifts and transfers on the underground railway, carried him to Canada and freedom. Booth was then made to suffer for all that had been done; he was tried in the federal court, convicted, fined, and given a jail sentence.