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. We cannot go into the details of the Booth case, a _cause célèbre_ in ante-Civil War political history. But the Democratic papers, after the DeBar lynching, ostentatiously bemoaned the fact that due to recent events “neither national nor state laws” could hereafter be enforced in Wisconsin. The beginning of the trouble was the setting at naught of the national law for the rendition of slaves, in which the arch Republican Booth was ringleader. The Mayberry lynching and the DeBar lynching followed in natural sequence. These editors did not choose to analyze the difference between the Glover case and the others--the fact that the one was a rescue performed at their own risk by philanthropic men, the others brutal killings committed by men crazed with the lust of blood vengeance. In other words, the Democratic press, including those papers printed in the German language, attempted the impossible feat of arranging in the same straight line the “higher law” and the lower law. Of course, the Republican press retorted handsomely, and probably with considerable political effect, that if the apologists for mob law in Kansas were “in favor of the execution of the fugitive slave act in Wisconsin” they would like their avowal to that effect.[71] It is well known that during the 1855 campaign, as in the previous year, a good many Germans were converted from their old-time Democratic allegiance.[72] But both parties were too intent on their immediate political objects to risk pressing for an investigation of the West Bend tragedy, which might have alienated a large section of the German vote in three German counties.