A POLITICAL HISTORY 1 2 3 7 53 OF WISCONSIN HERE IS NO ROMANCE LIKE THAT OF HISTORY. INDEED, IN A THERE LARGE SENSE, HISTORY IS ROMANCE; FOR LIFE ITSELF IS STRANGE POSSIBILITIES.- GEORGE RECORD PECK. BY A. M. THOMSON SECOND EDITION MILWAUKEE, WIS. C. N. CASPAR COMPANY 1902 PREFACE. The first draft of this "Political History of Wisconsin," by A. M. Thomson, was made for The Milwaukee Sentinel, and published in the Sunday edition of that newspaper from week to week until concluded, the initial installment appearing in the issue of January 2, 1898. A resident of Wisconsin for nearly fifty years, and during most of that time active and influential in journalism and politics, Mr. Thomson was widely regarded as the man above all others best fitted to write the history of politics in Wisconsin, and he undertook the task in response to numerous urgent requests. It proved to be the final work of his life. When the closing chapters saw the light of print, he was on his death-bed. But even in the extremity of mortal illness, his mind was busy with the history, and he wrote several letters to publishers with reference to bringing it out in book form. He carefully revised the earlier chapters for final publication, and gave explicit directions, which have been scrupulously carried out, regarding the revision of the remainder. It is the belief of those who have been concerned in the erection of this monument fashioned by his own brain and hand, that, in the artistic and substantial form in which it is here presented, his work appears as he would have wished to see it. The history which Mr. Thomson proposed to write begins with the Ordinance of 1787 and comes down to the election of Scofield and McKinley in 1896. It is not constructed on the lines of what is termed critical history, which is generally dry; neither is it a mere chronicle-a chronicle is also dry. Mr. Thomson's work is for the most part cast in the narrative form. The chief personages with whom it deals were intimately known to the author, and he draws them from life, illustrating their characteristics by happy anecdotes. His easy, graceful, lucid style invests with interest even the discussions of party principles which necessarily come within the scope of such a work. The early steps in the organization of political parties in Wisconsin are graphically sketched, and the heated campaign which resulted in the defeat of the first draft of a State constitution is fully described and explained, together with the fight over the boundary, in which the members of the constitutional conventions and territorial Legislatures saw fit to pit themselves against Congress and the Federal government. The years which followed the organization of the State government were full of exciting political occurrences. The Judge Hubbell impeachment trial; the escape and rescue of the slave Joshua Glover; the Bashford-Barstow litigation—very much like a revolution-in which the judiciary was called upon to decide who was Governor of Wisconsin; the conflict in the Booth case between the Supreme Court of Wisconsin and the Supreme Court of the United States; the corruption at the capital in 1856, when bribes were received from a railway corporation by the Governor and most of the members of both houses of the Legislature of Wisconsin, all these stirring incidents, episodes and events of Wisconsin's political history are brought before the reader in procession. Then the writer devotes himself to recounting the part which Wisconsin played in the great drama of the Civil war. There is on one side of the picture the patriotic response to the call for troops, and on the other the Ryan address and the draft riots in Washington and Ozaukee counties. Mr. Thomson was "the man who started the ball rolling" for Matt. H. Carpenter for United States Senator in 1869, and who headed the successful opposition to his reëlection in 1875. Both campaigns are vividly recalled, not in a one-sided way, but in a manner which shows Plutarch's impartial desire that "both the Greeks and the Romans shall be accorded fair treatment." Wisconsin was the first State in the Union whose Legislature successfully attempted to set a limit to the amount of fare that might be charged by railways. The Potter law and the Grange movement, of which it was the outcome, have full justice done them in Mr. Thomson's history. So have the two great struggles on the money question-that of 1875-1877, when the issue was "honest money vs. greenback infla |