Colonization — the Offer, the Machinery, and the County's Answer

1829 – 1863 · $5,000, forty-seven emigrations, "total failure"

Article XIII's fines were written to pay for removal; the removal never came. The Indiana Colonization Society was organised at Indianapolis in 1829 as an auxiliary of the American Colonization Society. By act of 28 April 1852 the General Assembly created a State Board of Colonization: $5,000 appropriated, plus the article's fines and private donations, into a State Colonization Fund; $3,000 of it to buy land in Liberia, to be styled the Indiana Colony, in 100-acre lots; $50 to each emigrant in need of aid, families preferred. The outcome at the record's own size (the State Library's account): in the whole course of Indiana colonization, 83 free people of color emigrated from Indiana to Liberia, the state board itself facilitating only 47; by 1855 the board's agent admitted $65 a person was insufficient; Secretary William Wick's final report of 1863 concluded the movement a "total failure." The Black answer stands in the community's own words: the State Convention of the People of Color of Indiana, meeting at Indianapolis 1–4 August 1851 — the very month of the Article XIII vote — resolved "That we denounce the Colonization Scheme, and never will, as a body, emigrate to Liberia," and that if Indiana's laws became intolerable they would go "to Canada, Jamaica, or elsewhere, in preference to Liberia." For this county and township, the answer at documented size is a tested negative: no county colonization society, no township contribution, and no emigrant from this ground is named in any carrier reached (settlers: the county treasurer's fund receipts; the Board's annual reports' emigrant lists by county). The settlement's answer is visible only in conduct the deed record carries — the families stayed, and bought more land — printed as conduct, not as a resolution no carrier quotes.