Sherman Booth

Sherman Booth (September 25, 1812 – August 10, 1904) was an abolitionist, editor and politician in Wisconsin, and was instrumental in forming the Liberty Party, the Free Soil Party and the Republican Party. He became known nationally after helping instigate a jailbreak for a runaway slave in violation of the Fugitive Slave Act.

Born in Davenport, New York, he was raised in an area of western New York known for various religious and reform movements. His father was against slavery. He attended (and later taught) at nearby Jefferson Academy. By 1837 he was a traveling speaker and organizer for the New York Temperance Society. He earned a reputation as a persuasive and booming orator. In 1838 he began attending Yale University and proved an exceptional student. He repeatedly declined financial aid, choosing instead to support himself with his continued teaching.

In 1839 he was hired with other Yale students to teach English to the imprisoned Africans who had taken over the slave ship Amistad. He continued to teach the Africans after they were successfully freed by the U.S. Supreme Court. His involvement in the case led him to join the wider abolition movement.

In 1840 Booth helped organize the Liberty Party, an abolitionist party born from the evangelical American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. He sought to expand the abolition fight from the churches to the statehouses, and became the party's main organizer for Connecticut. After he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale in 1841, he joined the staff of the abolitionist paper the Christian Freeman, becoming its associate editor.

Just days before Wisconsin became a state in 1848, Booth and his editor Ichabod Codding arrived in Wisconsin to establish another abolitionist paper, the American Freeman. Booth quickly became its sole proprietor, moving it from Waukesha to Milwaukee and renaming it the Wisconsin Freeman. As chief secretary to the Liberty Party's convention that year in Buffalo, New York, he helped shape the new Free Soil Party and expand its platform beyond abolition to build a larger coalition. In this spirit he renamed his paper the Wisconsin Free Democrat. In 1850 Booth denounced the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, and with other Wisconsin Free Soilers pressured the state legislature to provide a writ of habeas corpus and trial for accused fugitive slaves.

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