Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 75, number 2, winter, 1991-1992

              W1Ii(X3) 131,3
Isaac P. Walker, from an oil portrait by William J. Head, in the Society's collections
ion and for that reason Wisconsin should at least respect it.-'
In early 1854 a Missourian, Bennami Garland, came to Wisconsin to reclaim his slave, Joshua Glover. Glover had escaped from Missouri two years earlier and had set¬ tled in Racine. Garland obtained a writ for Glover's arrest under the 1850 Act, and on March 11 he had Glover arrested.
Glover was taken to the Racine County jail to await a hearing before Judge Andrew G. Miller, the only federal judge in Wiscon¬ sin. It was uncertain what Judge Miller would do, but most observers feared he would be unsympathetic to Glover's plight.
Miller was originally from Penn.sylvania; he owed much of his success in the legal pro¬ fession to the fact that he was a close friend of his fellow Pennsylvanian James Buch¬ anan, who was then a leader of the national Democratic party and was one of the north¬ ern Democrats most sympathetic to the South. Miller had been appointed to the federal bench by President James Polk, a Tennessee Democrat. Miller had a reputa¬ tion as a remote, isolated man who would not be swayed in the slightest by public sentiment.'"
A few hours after Glover was arrested, the Milwaukee abolitionist community
" Ibid., 208. In 1850 both of Wisconsin's senators, Henry Dodge and Isaac Walker, were Democrats. Wisconsin had one Democratic congressman (James D. Doty), one Whig congressman (Orsamus Cole), and one Free Soil congress¬ man (Charles Durkee).
'" Parker M. Reed, The Bench and Bar of Wisconsin: History and Biography (Milwaukee, 1882), 49-50. See also Edward G. Ryan's remarks upon Miller after his death, reported at
,37 Wis. 25 (1875).
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