The price of the rescue: $2,856 in damages, and the $500 penalty the Supreme Court took away

1847–1851 · the Powell family's flight and the two Norris lawsuits

The case the money hangs on, at the county seat's strength: David Powell, his wife Lucy, and their sons Lewis, Samuel, George and James fled John Norris of Boone County, Kentucky, on the night of 9 October 1847, and settled in Cass County, Michigan. On 27 September 1849 the Kentucky party seized Lucy and three of the boys — Lewis, George and James — near Cassopolis; David and Samuel were not taken. Carried south, the wagon was stopped a mile or two south of South Bend on 28 September, and the captives came before Judge Elisha Egbert on habeas corpus. Egbert discharged them; a second writ produced a second discharge. The narrative stands in the federal reports themselves — Norris v. Newton, 18 Fed. Cas. 322 (No. 10,307), which incorporates the circuit court's account at 5 McLean 92 — and the case is South Bend's whole, pointed here because the lawsuits that followed are the price list for every act of help this branch describes.

The damages: what harboring cost, itemized and totaled — with the arithmetic conflict printed: Norris sued the rescuers for harboring and concealing the four. In Norris v. Newton et al., 5 McLean 92 (Circuit Court, District of Indiana, May Term 1850), a jury found for Norris against nine local citizens — named in the Tribune-derived account as Leander Newton, George Horton, Edwin Crocker, Solomon Palmer, David Jodon, William Wilmington, Lot Day, Amable LaPierre and Wright Maudlin — and assessed damages of $2,856. The itemization carried in the Crocker report's reprint prices the family member by member: Lucy $500, Lewis $800, George $750, James $700, plus the plaintiff's expenses of $165.80. Those items sum to $2,915.80, not $2,856, and the difference stands unreconciled in this entry, because both figures come out of the record's own carriers. Judge McLean's charge, printed with the report, shows the jury working between witnesses who valued the loss at $2,450 and at $2,700. A Boone County library account rounds the whole affair to "$2,500"; it is the weakest of the three figures and is printed at that strength. What is not in doubt is the scale: a jury priced four people's freedom at roughly a prosperous farm, and nine named neighbors were made to pay it.

The penalty suit's course, to the top of the system: Damages were only half Norris's remedy. He also sued Edwin B. Crocker and Judge Egbert himself for the $500 penalty that §4 of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 (1 Stat. 302) laid on anyone who obstructed a recapture or harbored a fugitive. The case went to the Supreme Court of the United States as Norris v. Crocker, 54 U.S. (13 How.) 429, decided in 1851, Justice Catron writing. While the suit was pending, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 18 September 1850 (9 Stat. 462), whose §7 set its own penalties — a fine up to $1,000, up to six months' imprisonment, and civil damages of $1,000 for each fugitive lost. The Court held that the 1850 Act repealed the 1793 penalty by implication, and that the repeal barred Norris's still-pending action. He kept his $2,856 in damages; he never collected the $500 penalty. That is the penalty suit's whole course, and its lesson for this ground is precise: the law's price for helping was real, itemized and collected in the damages action — and the one defendant class the record shows escaping was the judge who had twice discharged the captives, saved not by innocence but by a repeal.

Sources:

1. Norris v. Newton, 5 McLean 92 (C.C.D. Ind., May Term 1850), and its Federal Cases reprint, 18 Fed. Cas. 322 (No. 10,307) — the flight and recapture narrative, the two habeas discharges before Judge Egbert, the verdict of $2,856, and Judge McLean's charge with the witnesses' valuations of $2,450 and $2,700.
2. Norris v. Crocker, 54 U.S. (13 How.) 429 (1851) — the $500 penalty under §4 of the Act of 1793 (1 Stat. 302); the Act of 18 September 1850 (9 Stat. 462), §7; repeal by implication barring the pending action.
3. The itemization (Lucy $500; Lewis $800; George $750; James $700; expenses $165.80) as reprinted with the Crocker report by the Sacramento Historical Society — summing to $2,915.80 against the verdict's $2,856, the conflict preserved.
4. The nine defendants' names as carried in the Tribune-derived account of the case; the Boone County (Ky.) library account's rounded "$2,500," printed at its weaker strength.