{"id":11693,"date":"2024-07-17T18:18:31","date_gmt":"2024-07-17T18:18:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=11693"},"modified":"2024-07-17T18:59:06","modified_gmt":"2024-07-17T18:59:06","slug":"documentary-premiere-at-rnc-touts-glovers-lasting-blow-for-liberty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=11693","title":{"rendered":"Documentary premiere at RNC touts Glover\u2019s lasting blow for liberty"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared at https:\/\/www.badgerinstitute.org\/documentary-premiere-at-rnc-touts-glovers-lasting-blow-for-liberty\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Local filmmaker links Wisconsin incident to origin of Republican Party<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\n

A heroic moment in Wisconsin\u2019s history deserves a lot more attention, says Michael Jahr. So he\u2019s making a movie about it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u201cThere are some stories that are so amazing, you say, \u2018How could I have never heard that before?\u2019\u201d said Jahr, who \u2014 full disclosure \u2014 was my colleague at the Badger Institute until last year. Now he\u2019s writer and director on a team making a documentary about the Joshua Glover episode, the time when a lot of Wisconsinites defied federal law to save a man from being dragged back into slavery.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Like all good memorials, this recounting has some lessons for us.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Glover\u2019s story isn\u2019t wholly unknown. Jahr said he\u2019d read the plaque<\/a> in downtown Milwaukee and ran across a gripping account<\/a> at an estate sale. Murals<\/a> at an I-43 underpass on downtown\u2019s edge commemorate it. On Monday, Jahr and colleagues premiered<\/a> the first version of their work on a particularly high-profile stage, the Republican National Convention.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s quite a tale. Glover was living in Racine in 1854, two years after he escaped slavery in Missouri, when a bounty-hunting posse found him and dragged him off to Milwaukee\u2019s jail, intending to return him to bondage. Their warrant was based on the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, a federal law that bound officials and even citizens in every state, including those like Wisconsin that never were cursed with slavery, to refrain from helping fugitives and to cooperate with recapturing them.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

In abolition-minded Wisconsin, \u201cthat was anathema,\u201d said Jahr. \u201cThat was horrific.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Racine abolitionists outraged by the bounty hunters\u2019 abduction of a free man set off for Milwaukee by boat the next morning, bringing a sheriff to arrest the posse, and telegraphing like-minded Milwaukeeans, among them Sherman Booth, editor of an abolitionist newspaper. Booth rode through the streets shouting that a man\u2019s liberty was at stake, drawing a crowd estimated at 5,000 to the jail.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When it became clear the crowd\u2019s demands, that Glover receive due process and not be jailed over the sabbath, would not be met, men used a beam from a nearby construction site to batter their way into the jail, freeing Glover. \u201cHe was cheered, almost like a celebrity,\u201d said Jahr, and was whisked away in a waiting wagon, first to Prairieville (now Waukesha), then after some weeks of being hidden from the still-prowling bounty hunters, on a boat to Canada and safety.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Wisconsin, the matter wasn\u2019t over. \u201cThere was great risk,\u201d said Jahr, \u201cnot just for the underground railroad moving him along, but for the rescuers.\u201d The Missourian claiming Glover as property sued Booth, who eventually was financially ruined. The rescuers\u2019 criminal cases for violating the hated law volleyed back and forth between state and federal courts for years \u2014 Booth spent time behind bars \u2014 with the Wisconsin Supreme Court eventually discarding the federal Fugitive Slave Act in Wisconsin.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis enraged the South,\u201d said Jahr. \u201cAll these events in Wisconsin served to drive a wedge between North and South.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jahr and his colleagues are looking to offer an expanded version of the documentary, titled \u201cLiberty at Stake,\u201d by next spring to broadcasters or educators. They wanted the 12-minute convention-length version \u2014 you can see it at Vimeo<\/a> \u2014 ready by the time 50,000 visitors came to town \u201cbecause it\u2019s a Milwaukee story, a Wisconsin story,\u201d as Jahr said. As Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson says in the documentary, it\u2019s one with universal appeal.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt goes to the heart of how passionate people were about freedom and what America was,\u201d said Jahr.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a key lesson: That the Civil War was fought on the understanding that for some states to deprive some Americans of their natural endowment of liberty was an injury to all. It could not remain a matter of if-you-don\u2019t-like-slavery-don\u2019t-own-a-slave \u2014 not just because the status of western territories was in question but because a federal law had conscripted Wisconsinites into what they saw as evil. The logic of slavery consumed every American\u2019s liberty.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The second lesson: In a republic, the law has limits, and it\u2019s up to citizens to hold government to account for violating them \u2014 by battering down a jail door or by Wisconsin Supreme Court justices daring to nullify a federal law.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

A third lesson comes from what happened only nine days after Glover was freed: Booth and other abolitionists, politically homeless from the failure of smaller parties to challenge the dominant Democratic Party, \u201crecognized, against the odds, that a new party was needed,\u201d said Jahr. They met in a schoolhouse in Ripon to form one, dubbing it the Republican Party, and six years later, its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won the White House.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Divided on other issues, \u201cthe one thing that unified them was their absolute commitment to the founding ideals of liberty for all,\u201d said Jahr. In other words, Glover\u2019s rescue couldn\u2019t be a one-off.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Wisconsin elections, \u201cvery quickly, they displaced the pro-slavery party,\u201d said Jahr. \u201cIt really is a model for how a grassroots movement can influence politics and culture at large.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

To be sure, that influence led to a civil war. But it\u2019s not too much to say that Wisconsin\u2019s blow against slavery helped save America\u2019s soul. It\u2019s a moment worth remembering.<\/p>\n

Patrick McIlheran is the Director of Policy at the Badger Institute. Permission to reprint is granted as long as the author and Badger Institute are properly cited<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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