Letter From Milwaukee

A Great Wave of excitement has just rolled over our city. The public heart has had the deep fountain of its humanity stirred to the bottom. Never since the founding of our city has there been such a deep and wide-spread expression of indignation as was caused by the arrest of Joshua Glover, a colored resident of Racine county. The circumstances connected with this exciting case are, briefly, the following:

On the night of the 10th inst., Glover was arrested near Racine, on a warrant of Judge Miller, of the United States Court, by Deputy Sheriff Cotton, both of this city. He was claimed by B.S. Garland, of St. Louis county, Mo. His shanty was entered about 8 o’clock in the evening, by Garland, in company with Deputy Marshal Carney, of Racine, and others. While sitting in his chair, a revolver was placed to his head by Garland, and the moment he raised his hand to push it away, Carney, with a heavy club, struck him on the head and instantly felled him to the floor. This club is now in the possession of the friends of freedom at Racine. It is a true and eloquent witness to the barbarity of those who made the arrest.

They immediately fettered and gagged their bleeding [illegible] him into a two-horse buggy [illegible] frosty night, and incarcerated him in our county jail on Saturday morning, the 11th [illegible]. During the forenoon the fact came out that our county officers and prisoners had been pressed into the service of the slave power. Through the bold and indefatigable efforts of Mr. Booth, of the Free Democrat, the facts connected with Glover’s arrest and imprisonment spread through the city like wildfire. The great and true heart of humanity began to beat quick and strong. Our citizens, as in the days of the Revolution, were seen marching in quick-step to the music of our liberty-going bells. Merchants and mechanics, lawyers and doctors, assembled in a vast multitude about the jail, and in front of the court-house. That “storm from the people,” which Henry Ward Beecher says must come, seemed to have suddenly burst upon us, and was “rolling like thunder in the mountains.” An immense meeting was then organized in the court-house square, and the following preamble and resolution were adopted by acclamation:

“Whereas, a writ of habeas corpus has been issued by Judge Jenkins to Sheriff Page and Deputy Marshal Cotton, commanding them, in the name of the State, to bring the prisoner before him, and show cause why the prisoner should not be released, which writ has not yet been obeyed, therefore,

“Resolved, As citizens of Milwaukee, that every person has an indefeasible right to a fair and impartial trial by jury on all questions involving personal liberty.

“Resolved, That the writ of habeas corpus is the great defense of freedom, and that we demand for this prisoner, as well as for our own protection, that this sacred writ shall be obeyed.

“Resolved, That we pledge ourselves to stand by this prisoner, and do our utmost to secure him a fair and impartial trial by jury.”

Soon after the adjournment of the meeting, a delegation of nearly one hundred citizens arrived from Racine. As soon as they landed, they marched in a solid body to the jail. About this time a committee, who had been appointed to wait on Judge Miller, returned and made their report. This was in substance, that the Judge had instructed the United States Marshal and his Deputies to pay no regard to the writ of habeas corpus. This announcement, together with the determined spirit manifested by so many of the first citizens of Racine, greatly intensified the feeling of indignation. The result was, that without any preconcerted plan, or any anticipation of the kind by the great majority of those present, by one impulse, and one heavy surge, the outer jail-door was broken in, and then the inner, and in less than fifteen minutes from the time the first movement was made the hapless Glover was brought forth, amid the enthusiastic shouts of the multitude. He was literally handed into a two-horse buggy, and driven at full speed out of the city amid the cheers of the spectators.  

It was a bold movement- one that will be earnestly commended by many, and severely reprobated by others. In this city a large majority of our citizens rejoice in his rescue. While they would not justify mob violence in the proper sense of this term, and while they would have advised a more patient and persevering endeavor to have rescued the poor captive in some other way if possible, yet they are glad that, in obedience to the Mosaic statute, he was not delivered up to his assumed master. This is the feeling of those who would be the first to yield implicit obedience to all RIGHTEOUS LAWS, and the first to peril their lives in the enforcement of such laws. But there were aggravating features connected with this case which made a resistless appeal to every principle and impulse that is truly human in the heart of man.

    1. Poor Glover had been brutally treated by those who arrested him. Some of our best citizens had seen him in the jail, with his shirt literally stiffened with his own blood. Without any provocation, without attempting to injure his assailants, he had been smitten down by the hand of violence. This was no romantic tale of the bondsman’s wrong and sufferings. It was a heart-moving reality before their eyes. They saw the victim who had been beaten and gashed on our own free soil, for no other crime than yielding to that noblest impulse of humanity – a desire to be free.

Now, no man, in whose heart there is one spark of genuine humanity, could have gazed upon such a shameful spectacle without having his soul stirred to its deepest depth of sensibility.

    2. Every attempt to rescue Glover by any process known to the laws of our State had been overruled by the United States Judge. Through his advice the writ of habeas corpus, the freeman’s great bulwark of defense, had been disregarded. In short, all State authority was set at defiance. The jail which the people had erected with their own money, and for their own protection, must be pressed into the service of the slave power, while the freemen of Wisconsin were denied every legal process of their own enacting, by which they could determine the question whether a resident of their own State had been justly or unjustly imprisoned in this summary and inhuman manner. This was one of the features of the case which stirred men’s blood. If the North had been reduced to such a condition of degradation, they felt that their own and their children’s liberties were in peril.

    3. They did not dare to leave him in the jail for nearly forty-eight hours. They were suspicious of men who had shown such profound sympathy for the oppressor, and so little pity for bleeding manhood. They were justly apprehensive that the same adroitness which had evaded the writ of harbeas corpus – the body-guard of freedom -  would also elude the vigilance of its friends. And, fearing that the sentinels of humanity would be decoyed in some way, and the helpless victim clandestinely borne away, they were in haste for the rescue.

    4. The Nebraska iniquity had raised the public mind to that pitch of excitement which prepared them for this bold movement. The immense congregation of clear-minded men who assembled there were urged on under the conviction that the North had been betrayed; that the South had broken her plighted faith, and had been the first to trample upon the solemn compromise between the two sections of the confederacy. Those who had reluctantly acquiesced in the compromise of 1850 felt that the aggression of the South upon freedom had now passed all the bounds of endurance. And, under the impulse of the moment, the conviction was deep and strong that the faithlessness of the slave power had absolved Wisconsin from all further obligations.

Such were the sentiments which influenced the public mind, and moved it as mightily as the tempest rocks the mountain oaks. It was the resistless impulse of the moment, the impetuous out-pouring of all the humane sympathies of the soul, like the breaking forth of mighty waters. It was an hour when men felt that there was a HIGHER LAW which must be obeyed. And, true to an irrepressible instinct of humanity, the “Vox Populi” was executed in the liberation of the captive, amid loud and general exultation. “If this be treason,” in the language of Patrick Henry, let the authors of the Nebraska treachery thank themselves for it. History will decide whether the U.S. Judge or the citizens of Wisconsin acted most in accordance with that unalterable law of right which governed the noble spirits of ’76. If the liberation of Glover, in the circumstances, was a mere act of mob violence, how shall we classify the conduct of these men who struck the first [the rest of the article is illegible.]