This is the spot, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where 5,000 people rallied spontaneously to free a man named Joshua Glover.

Glover was an escaped slave, whom US Marshals had arrested near Racine, Wisconsin and transported to the court house and prison that stood on this spot. As news of this spread, some 5,000 people showed up. They broke into the prison, freed Glover, and put him on a boat to Canada, where he’d be free.

It’s worth remembering that slavery in America was supported by the whole of the US government, and that the people who broke Joshua Glover out of jail were all law-breakers.

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Before going back to the mundane, please consider the people of Milwaukee and others like them; they were willing to break laws and risk imprisonment to do the right thing and free enslaved people. What do you suppose they thought about when contemplating such things?