Ezra's Bookshelf

Finding Freedom

by Ruby West Jackson and Walter T. McDonald · 177 pages · ~3 hrs

HistoryRace & Identity

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Ruby West Jackson and Walter T. McDonald reconstruct the life of Joshua Glover, an enslaved man whose 1854 capture in Racine, Wisconsin, sparked a dramatic confrontation between federal authority and local abolitionists. Glover had escaped from Missouri and built a life in Wisconsin when slave catchers, armed with the Fugitive Slave Act, arrested him. What followed became a landmark moment in antislavery resistance: a crowd of thousands stormed the jail, freed Glover, and spirited him along the Underground Railroad to Canada. The book traces Glover's life before his escape - his labor in Missouri, the conditions that made flight necessary - and follows the network of Black and white abolitionists who organized his rescue and journey to freedom. The authors draw on court records, newspapers, and family histories to reconstruct events that left limited documentation. Sherman Booth, the abolitionist editor who led the rescue, became the center of a legal battle that reached the Supreme Court and intensified national tensions over slavery. The Glover case demonstrated that Northern communities would defy federal law to protect freedom seekers, contributing to the sectional crisis that led to civil war. This account honors both Glover's individual courage and the collective action that made his freedom possible, recovering a story that Wisconsin's official histories had long marginalized.

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