The price of the rescue: Norris v. Newton and Norris v. Crocker, from the published reports

1847–1851 · THE PENALTY SUITS WHOLE

The case the Talley article points to has a price, and the price has a published record: the freedom-seekers were David Powell, his wife Lucy, and their sons Lewis, Samuel, George and James, who absconded from John Norris of Boone County, Kentucky, on a Sunday night in October 1847 and settled near Cassopolis, Michigan. On the night of 27 September 1849 Norris's party seized Lucy, Lewis, George and James at Cassopolis — David and Samuel were away — tied Lewis's arms, and drove south through South Bend early on 28 September. South of the village a party that grew, in Judge McLean's charge, to "one hundred and forty, or upward, some of them being armed" stopped them; Sheriff Edwin B. Crocker served habeas corpus; at South Bend a first writ was abandoned and a second, naming all four, was heard. The state judge discharged the four on the ground that the master could arrest only to bring fugitives before a judicial officer; Norris re-arrested them in the courtroom under an Indiana warrant; they were jailed for safekeeping over the weekend; on Monday the state circuit court's grand jury found no bills against Norris's party, a third habeas issued, Norris declined to appear further, and the four were discharged and "conveyed off" surrounded by a crowd the witnesses estimated at 150 to 400 Black people, many from Cass County. That is the seizure-and-rescue course, from the federal report itself — printed here at pointer-plus size because the suits cannot be understood without it; the whole case remains South Bend's build's.

The damages suit — Norris v. Newton et al., 18 Fed. Cas. 322 (5 McLean 92), May Term 1850: Norris sued Leander Newton and others in the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Indiana to recover damages for harboring and concealing the four, under the Act of 1793. Justice John McLean's charge, reported by McLean himself, held the law against the rescuers at every point that mattered: under Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 16 Pet. 539, the master could seize his fugitives without process if without breach of the peace; the state judge's habeas jurisdiction was "special and limited" and ended once Norris's return showed custody under federal authority; the discharge was therefore void and "can give no protection to those who acted under it"; Crocker was protected only so far as he acted as counsel, and liable beyond it "the same as any other individual"; and every person in the crowd "who aided, by words or actions, the movement which resulted in the escape of the fugitives, is responsible." On damages the charge prints the evidence exactly: "The damages, in the present case, are estimated by two witnesses, one of whom states them at $2,450, and the other at $2,700." The report's last line is the verdict, and it is the amount this build prints: "The jury returned a verdict for the plaintiff, for $2,850 in damages." A companion action of debt between the same parties for the $500 statutory penalty for harboring is noted in the case literature as pending alongside the damages action. The defendants named in Crocker's own later Review and in the Tribune's 2003 retelling are nine: Edwin B. Crocker, Leander B. Newton, George W. Horton, Solomon W. Palmer, David Jodon, William Wilmington, Lot Day Jr., Amable M. LaPierre and Wright Maudlin.

The penalty suit — Norris v. Crocker and Egbert, 54 U.S. (13 How.) 429 (1851): Norris separately sued Edwin B. Crocker and Elisha Egbert in debt for the $500 penalty under section 4 of the Act of 12 February 1793 (1 Stat. 302), for obstructing, rescuing, harboring or concealing a fugitive. While the action was pending, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 18 September 1850 (9 Stat. 462), which covered the same offences with a new regime — fines to $1,000, imprisonment to six months, and civil damages of $1,000 for each fugitive lost. The circuit judges divided and certified the question to the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Catron's opinion held, in the syllabus's words: the 1793 Act's fourth section "is repealed, so far as relates to the penalty, by the Act of Congress approved September 18, 1850," and "where an action for the recovery of the penalty prescribed in the act of 1793 was pending at the time of the repeal, such repeal is a bar to the action." The $500 penalty was therefore never collected in this case: the harsher 1850 law extinguished the old penalty action even as it raised the price of resistance going forward. The two suits together are the rescue's full price tag — $2,850 in damages actually awarded on the published record, and a $500 penalty killed by repeal.

The conflict, printed whole: secondary summaries do not agree with the report or each other. The Allen County INGenWeb slavery page, citing historian Claire Harvey, gives the award as $2,856. The South Bend Tribune's 2003 account says the nine "had to pay Norris nearly $3,000 in damages." A Boone County library account gives "an unprecedented $2,500." None of those figures is the published report's figure. The published report — 5 McLean 92, the judge's own reporting — prints estimates of $2,450 and $2,700 and a verdict of $2,850, and $2,850 is what this section carries as the record amount; the three summary figures stand beside it as the conflict they are, unreconciled. Whether the $2,850 was ever paid, and by whom among the nine, is not stated in any source reached in this run and is carried in the closures file as an open point, not a gap in the verdict itself.

Sources:

1. Norris v. Newton et al., Case No. 10,307, 18 Fed. Cas. 322 (5 McLean 92), Circuit Court, D. Indiana, May Term 1850 — read whole in the Federal Cases transcription (law.resource.org): the charge's narrative (seizure 27 Sept., the 140-person stop, the successive writs, the Monday discharge), the Prigg holdings, the $2,450 / $2,700 estimates, and the closing verdict line, $2,850.
2. Norris v. Crocker and Egbert, 54 U.S. (13 How.) 429 (1851) — syllabus and certificate of division: the $500 penalty under the 1793 Act §4, the 1850 Act's repeal by implication, and the bar to the pending action; Justice Catron.
3. Crocker, Review of the South Bend Fugitive Slave Case, Tried in 1849, '50 and '51 (1873 reprint), as excerpted in the Sacramento Historical Society's Golden Note 67:1 (2020) — the suit commenced 21 Dec. 1849 against the nine named defendants.
4. CONFLICT SOURCES, printed as conflict: Allen County INGenWeb, "Slavery in Indiana" ($2,856, citing Claire Harvey); South Bend Tribune (2003), via the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Library catalogue record ("nearly $3,000"); Boone County Public Library, "Freedom, Capture and the Law of the Land" ($2,500).