Exclusion and decline · what Article XIII did here

1851 – 1870

The count falling: On 4 August 1851 Indiana's voters wrote exclusion into the state constitution — Article XIII, barring Black settlement outright — and Allen County approved it 1,803 to 261, as Griswold prints the return; the vote itself, the registration machinery that followed it, and Clerk Sinclear's 1855 notice to the county's Black residents are told in the Underground Railroad section. What belongs to this record is the local consequence, and it is written in the censuses. Between the census of 1850 and the census of 1860, Allen County's Black population fell by 35 percent (the Indiana Historical Society's figure); the History Center's account of the same decade says the city's Black population, once over a hundred, had fallen by a third while the white population doubled. By the census of 1870 the county counted fewer than fifty Black residents. The congregation tells the same story in its own record: the A.M.E. trustees, unable to build under the black laws, sold their Jefferson Street lot in 1853, and the community's church had no house of worship until after the Civil War. Article XIII was voided by the Indiana Supreme Court in Smith v. Moody (1866) and its words were not struck from the constitution until 1881; the community it had shrunk spent the rest of the century rebuilding from a base of a few dozen people.

Sources:

1. Indiana Historical Society, "Early Black Settlements by County" (Allen County) — the 35 percent decline, 1850–1860, and fewer than 50 Black residents in the county by the 1870 census.
2. Tom Castaldi, "Turner Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church," History Center Notes & Queries (from Fort Wayne Magazine, February 2008) — the city's Black population down a third by 1860 while the white population doubled; the 1853 lot sale.
3. B. J. Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Indiana, Vol. I (1917) — Allen County's Article XIII return, 1,803 to 261; Smith v. Moody, 26 Ind. 299 (1866), and the 1881 repeal, via the UGRR section's sources.