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Indiana free-banking act, June 25, 1852 · the sweep run against South Bend, Mishawaka, Harris, and Clay
Indiana's free-banking era opened with "An Act to Authorize the Business of Banking," approved June 25, 1852, with a further act of June 16, 1855. The sweep for this row ran whole, and its searches are shown. Searched: the Indiana free-banking-era bank lists and the standard literature of the 1852 act; Hawes' Indiana State Gazetteer and Business Directory for 1858–59, including its "Banks and Bankers" listings; and Howard's and Chapman's county bank sequences, which between them carry South Bend's banks in unbroken order. Returned: no free bank seated in South Bend, none in Mishawaka, and none in Harris or Clay townships, at any point in the free-banking years. The one gazetteer bank list the sweep surfaced in detail — Branch Bank of the State of Indiana, Southern Bank of Indiana, Prairie City Bank, McKeen and Tousey, Watson and Shannon — is a Terre Haute list, and it is printed here as a Terre Haute list, not borrowed for this county. Howard's sequence is itself the strongest negative evidence: the State Bank branch runs to 1858, the Bank of the State of Indiana runs 1858–1864, the national banks begin 1863 — with no free bank between any of them.
The negative has a legal explanation, and it is in the record. The State Bank of Indiana's 1834 charter carried a statutory monopoly — the state promised to allow no other bank to be established, and the bank's modern popular history (The Rag Picker, 1978, on the 1834 charter) states it flatly: "During its existence no other bank could operate within the state." No free bank could lawfully sit in South Bend before the charter ran out, and the 1855 charter for the successor bank (art-75-2) filled the local gap before free banking could take hold here. The result stands as a tested negative: in the free-banking years, this county's banking was the state banks', and this ground's was nobody's. If the negative is ever to be re-tested at full strength, its settling sources are named: the Indiana State Library's free-banking-era bank lists, and Weber's census of state banks 1789–1861 (2006/2011), which names every bank of the era with locations and beginning and end dates from balance sheets, banknote reporters, and secondary sources.
The private-banker side of the row does have names, and they are printed. Horatio Chapin — cashier of the State Bank's South Bend branch from 1838 to 1862 — managed the private banking firm of Chapin, Wheeler & Co. in Chicago from 1862 to 1865, the one private-banking house in the record run by this county's own bank cashier (art-75-1). The men who organised the First National Bank in 1863 (art-75-4) are the other named private-money figures of the transition. But no private banker is recorded as operating on Harris or Clay ground in the free-banking years, or in any year of the century: the townships were farmland, and the settlement's money trade ran, in the banked fragment's phrase, as the post office's "banking-by-mail-order business." The free-banking years, on this ground, are a negative with the search shown — and the names the era does yield are South Bend and Chicago names, printed at that size.