When Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, he delivered astonishing news: enslaved people in the furthest reaches of the former Confederacy were now free. With the Civil War at an end, the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President Abraham Lincoln two years earlier, was finally in effect in every corner of the tentatively reunified nation.
People who had known bondage and degradation their whole lives were suddenly free. This day of overdue justice, of exhilarating good news, this answer to the prayers of millions of Americans, would later become known as “Juneteenth.”
Countless individuals and events paved the way for this moment. The decade preceding the Civil War – what historian Doris Kearns Goodwin refers to as the “Turbulent Fifties” – alone produced several flashpoints that led the nation closer to Southern secession, civil war and – ultimately – emancipation.
These included the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Bleeding Kansas, the caning of Sen. Charles Sumner, the infamous Dred Scott Supreme Court ruling, and John Brown’s failed raid at Harper’s Ferry.
But a series of largely forgotten events that unfolded in Wisconsin over 10 days in March 1854 also played a pivotal role. It began when Joshua Glover, a slave on a St. Louis farm, determined two years earlier that he would be free.
In the spring of 1852, he crossed the river into Illinois and journeyed some 400 miles to Racine, Wisconsin, where he was welcomed by the abolitionist community. He found work and a place to live. For the first time in his life, he was free.
Or so it seemed. In the eyes of Benammi Garland, his former owner, Glover was still his “property.” Federal law supported this view. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 established that escaped slaves could be reclaimed by their former owners without due process – even in free states.
Garland secured an arrest warrant and assembled a posse. They traveled to nearby Racine, surprised Glover in his home, assaulted him and carted him off to Milwaukee. There, he was thrown into a cell, forced to contemplate a renewed lifetime of bondage.
News of the abduction spread quickly. In Racine, residents rallied in the town square and sent word to abolitionist newspaper editor Sherman Booth in Milwaukee. In the spirit of Paul Revere, Booth rode through the city streets calling residents to turn out at the courthouse because “a man’s liberty is at stake!”
Some 5,000 people showed up.
For a few hours they delivered speeches, passed resolutions and demanded that Glover be released. When it became clear that the orderly approach wasn’t working, some in the crowd changed tactics.
Using a wooden beam from a nearby construction site, they battered down the courthouse door, overwhelmed the guards and liberated Glover. The crowd erupted in celebration.
He was hidden along the Underground Railroad for a few weeks while Garland and officials searched in vain. Glover was eventually smuggled onto a ship in the Racine harbor and taken through the Great Lakes to Canada. He settled near Toronto, where he lived the rest of his life in freedom.
But the story doesn’t end there. Just nine days after Glover’s rescue, another group of abolitionists gathered at a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin. Incensed by Glover’s arrest and the looming Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would allow slavery to expand into new territories, they called for the formation of a new antislavery political party.
They emerged from the schoolhouse calling themselves “Republicans.”
The fledgling party quickly gained strength across the North. Within a few years, the Republican presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, would win the White House. Southern secession and civil war quickly followed.
On January 1, 1863, in the midst of this deadly conflagration, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. As Union forces advanced, emancipation became a reality for more and more slaves.
While Joshua Glover’s ordeal was not alone in hastening the nation to war, his rescue did strain the rapidly fraying bonds between North and South. The addition of a new party, opposed to what Southerners saw as the backbone of their economy, confirmed that Northerners opposed their way of life.
The war that followed was brutal and tragic. But it served a purpose. On June 19, 1865, our nation’s founding principles of liberty and human dignity were finally extended to 4 million Americans who had long been excluded.
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