The antebellum Black community counted: twenty-nine people, none in these townships, and the offers made to them

1850–1860 · THE COUNT, COLONIZATION, AND THE ABOLITIONIST PRESENCE AT SIZE

The count, as banked and re-verified against the census volume: the Seventh Census (1850), Table II, returns Clay Township 659 people and Harris Township 437, and returns both townships entirely white. St. Joseph County's whole free colored population in 1850 was 29 people, seated — in the township table as the Population leg reads it first-hand — in Centre, Penn, Portage and Union townships and in South Bend. That is the community at its counted size: twenty-nine named-in-aggregate residents in a county of 10,954, none of them on this build's ground. The 1860 township counts for this county could not be reached in the published volumes in the Population leg's pass (its GAP-POP-2), and this run reached no manuscript-schedule transcription for the county's 1860 free colored residents either; the 1860 community therefore prints at state strength only — Indiana's free Black population grew across the decade despite Article XIII — and the county's 1860 names are a NAMED GAP, settler: the 1860 manuscript schedules for St. Joseph County (NARA M653, via the licensed indexes) read household by household.

Named residents — what the open record does and does not give: the row asks for named residents from this ground's side of the county. The county's named Black residents of the era in the open record are the participants in the 1849 case itself — the Powell family, Michigan residents seized in transit — and the unnamed-in-print crowd of 150 to 400 Black people who came into South Bend that weekend, "many of them from Cass county, in Michigan" (McLean's charge): a community large enough to fill a county seat's streets on a day's notice, seated mostly across the state line, and counted nowhere. Any naming of the county's 29 from the schedules themselves is manuscript work and is carried as the same NAMED GAP as the 1860 count, settler: the 1850 manuscript schedules (M432) for Centre, Penn, Portage and Union townships, which name every free inhabitant.

Colonization's offer, and the answer the record holds: the offer was institutional and funded. The Indiana Colonization Society (organized 1829, auxiliary of the American Colonization Society) under its agent from 1848, the Rev. James Mitchell, promoted emigration to Liberia; Article XIII §3 earmarked its own fines to pay for it; and in 1852 the General Assembly created a State Board of Colonization and appropriated funds to buy Liberian land and transport emigrants, at $65 per person by Mitchell's own 1855 circular — a sum he admitted was insufficient. The counted result, statewide, is the answer: by the standard account the State Library prints (Anthrop), 83 free people of color emigrated from Indiana to Liberia in the whole movement, and the state board facilitated only 47 of them. The Board's secretary, William Wick, concluded in the final 1863 report that the movement had been a "total failure." No emigrant from St. Joseph County is named in the open record reached — the published emigrant lists run to the Wabash Valley — and no St. Joseph County colonization society, auxiliary, or meeting is named in Chapman or Howard as banked. The county's answer, at the strength the record supports, is therefore double: its voters lived under an article whose fines were meant to fund removal (the county's own vote unrecovered, previous article), and its Black residents, all 29 of them in 1850, do not appear in the emigration record at all. They stayed. That refusal-by-absence is printed as record, not rhetoric: the settler that could name a county emigrant is the American Colonization Society's African Repository emigrant rolls and the State Board's reports (Indiana State Library), and the item is carried in the closures file as dug at state strength with the county application as a named gap inside it.

The abolitionist presence, at the counted size the record allows: on this ground the presence is kinship and conviction, already banked: the Bullas of Clay Township section 31, "uncompromising opponents of African slavery," kin to George W. Julian of Wayne County — the state's leading antislavery congressman — and the Chalfants, kin to Richmond's Quaker Underground Railroad families (1893 Memoirs). At county strength the presence becomes countable in the 1849 case's own cast: one attorney who took the fugitives' case and argued it twice (Crocker, with Albert G. Deavitt), one neighbor who rode after the kidnappers and fetched the writ (Wright Maudlin), one sheriff who served it — and then stood as a defendant for it — and nine men sued for the rescue, a defendant list that is itself the closest thing this county has to a counted abolitionist action: nine named men, one case, $2,850. No abolitionist newspaper published in St. Joseph County in the antebellum years is named in any source reached, and no antislavery society roll for the county was reached; both are carried as tested negatives at web-record strength in the closures file — the press and society record, if it exists, sits in the South Bend newspaper files of the 1840s–50s (St. Joseph County Public Library) and in Chapman's and Howard's society chapters read whole, which this run did not re-read and flags as the settler.

Sources:

1. Seventh Census (1850), Table II, as read first-hand in this build's Population leg — Clay 659, Harris 437, both entirely white; county free colored 29, in Centre, Penn, Portage, Union and South Bend; county aggregate 10,954.
2. Indiana State Library, "The Colonization Movement" (blog.library.in.gov) — Indiana Colonization Society 1829; Mitchell agent from 1848; State Board of Colonization 1852; $65 per person (1855 circular); 83 emigrants, 47 board-facilitated (Anthrop); Wick's 1863 "total failure."
3. Indiana Historical Bureau, The Indiana Historian, "Indiana Emigrants to Liberia" — the 1852 board and the published emigrant-list project (Wabash Valley strength).
4. Howard (1907), Clay Township section, and Pictorial and Biographical Memoirs (1893), Chalfant sketch —'s Talley article (Bulla–Julian; Chalfant–Richmond Quaker kin), pointed to, not re-dug.
5. Norris v. Newton, 18 Fed. Cas. 322 — the 150-to-400 estimate and the Cass County origin of the crowd; the nine-defendant list from Crocker's Review as above.