Statehood and the Wisconsin Character, Eighteen Forty-Eight

Wisconsin became the thirtieth state of the Union on May twenty-ninth, eighteen forty-eight. The timing was neither accidental nor comfortable. The Mexican-American War had just ended, adding an enormous territory to the United States and immediately reopening the question that defined American politics of the era: would the new lands be slave or free?

Wisconsin entered as a free state, its constitution explicitly prohibiting slavery. But the new state was not simply anti-slavery in the abstract. Six years later, in eighteen fifty-four, the Wisconsin Supreme Court became the first state supreme court in the country to declare the federal Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional. The case involved a Milwaukee abolitionist named Sherman Booth, who had helped free Joshua Glover, an enslaved man who had escaped from Missouri and been captured by federal marshals in Racine. The Wisconsin court said the federal law requiring northern states to return escaped people to slavery was invalid under the Tenth Amendment. The United States Supreme Court reversed the decision, but Wisconsin had made a statement.

The state's character in those early decades was shaped by the nationalities of its settlers. Germans arrived in the largest numbers, fleeing the failed revolutions of eighteen forty-eight, the same year as Wisconsin statehood, and bringing with them strong opinions about labor rights, free education, and democratic governance. Norwegians settled the southwest. Poles came to the Fox Valley. Swiss farmers established New Glarus, which still looks, somewhat improbably, like a village in the Bernese Oberland. Each community brought its own food culture, its own church, its own language, and its own skepticism of concentrated power.

That skepticism would eventually become the Progressive tradition. But in eighteen forty-eight it was simply the character of new arrivals who had watched governments fail in their home countries and come here expecting something better from this one.