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1851 – 1852 · the exclusion article and its register
"No negro or mulatto shall come into or settle in the State, after the adoption of this Constitution." Article XIII of Indiana's 1851 Constitution (§1), carried whole: contracts with any person coming in violation of §1 are void, and whoever employs such a person or "in any way encourages" them to remain is fined ten to five hundred dollars (§2); all fines under the article are appropriated "to Colonization purposes" (§3); the General Assembly shall pass laws to carry it out (§4). Fearing the article might sink the whole instrument, the convention submitted it as a separate question. The statewide result (the Historical Society's exhibit packet): for the Constitution, 109,319 to 26,755; for Article XIII, 109,976 to 21,066 — the exclusion article drew more votes in favour than the constitution itself; the Bureau carries the same course as 84% for the article against 80% for the constitution, and names Steuben County as an exception. It is not this one.
The local count is a named gap, and it is this section's largest. No carrier — Bureau pages, the Historical Society's exhibits, the State Library's elections guide, Thornbrough at summary strength, the county histories — carries a St. Joseph County return for the Article XIII question, or a Union Township return. No number is printed because no carrier carries one. The settlers are named: Dorothy Riker (ed.), Indiana Election Returns, 1816–1851 (Indiana Historical Bureau, 1960), the volume the State Library's own guide names for the period; the Secretary of State's certified returns for August 1851; and the county clerk's poll books, if they survive. Until one is read, the county's vote prints as: taken, statewide 109,976 to 21,066; the county's own count not reached.
The act to enforce the article (approved 18 June 1852) required every Black resident of Indiana before 1 November 1851 to register with the circuit-court clerk. What survival looks like statewide is known: Coy D. Robbins's Indiana Negro Registers, 1852–1865 compiles the surviving registers of fifteen counties — Bartholomew, Floyd, Franklin, Gibson, Harrison, Hendricks, Jackson, Jennings, Jefferson, Knox, Martin, Ohio, Orange, Switzerland, Washington — more than 2,000 registrants, overwhelmingly southern Indiana. St. Joseph County is not among them, and the Bureau's marker review had already recorded that there is no indication the county had such a register. Whether the county kept one that was lost or never kept one, the record does not distinguish; what is certain is that none survives, and the settlement families' names do not appear in the one record class the 1852 act created for exactly them. It prints as a loss, its settler a paper search of the circuit-court clerk's record books (1852–1865) and the State Archives' county holdings.