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.[1] 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.[2] 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.
