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1816 – 1851 · registration, a $500 bond, and hiring-out
Indiana prohibited slavery in 1816; it did not confer civil equality. The first constitution's frame barred Black suffrage, Black militia service, Black testimony against a white person in court, and — by an 1843 statute — Black attendance at the public schools (Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana, 1957, the scholarly settler for the whole course). The act of 1831 (Revised Laws of Indiana, 1831, pp. 375–76, via Thornbrough) required a Black or mulatto person coming into Indiana to settle to register with the clerk of the circuit court and to post bond of $500, with sureties, as a guarantee of good behaviour and against becoming a public charge; if the bond was not given, the overseers of the poor could remove the person from the state or hire him or her out for six months; and it was unlawful to employ a newcomer who had not given bond. The record's own scale is the honest one: $500 was five times the $100 Samuel Huggart paid for his eighty acres — the bond was a wall, not a fee.
The sequence for this township prints exactly. Samuel Huggart, a free Black man born in Ohio (his county of origin stands conflicted in the register, C25, whole), applied at the La Porte land office on 11 September 1834 — Cash Certificate 2986, eighty acres at $1.25 the acre — and received his patent 20 March 1837: he entered and bought under the 1831 regime, seventeen years before Article XIII existed. Whether he ever posted the bond or registered, no carrier says; the state's own marker review states the contrary record does not exist — "there is no indication that St. Joseph County had such a register or that the Huggarts ever signed a register or paid a fee." No record of enforcement against him survives either. He appears in no census until 1850, and then inside his son Andrew's household; Andrew's own arrival stands at three dates in three carriers (conflict C26, whole). The settlement's second generation bought, married, and worked under the article that follows; the heirs' sale of 23 September 1893 closed the landholding twelve years after that article was struck from the constitution.