The Disabilities at Settlement Size, and the Repeal Course Whole

1851 – 1893 · upheld 1856, invalidated 1866, removed 1881

A settlement man could buy land, pay tax, and be fined under Article XIII; he could not vote on any of it. The 1851 Constitution confined suffrage to white males and said so outright (Art. II, §5: "No Negro or Mulatto shall have the right of suffrage"). Militia service stood barred; the testimony bar stands at state-summary strength; no militia record, testimony case, or suit touching a Huggart, Bass, Boone, or Manuel person was found in any carrier, and none is invented to fill a heading. The school bar meets this township's one documented exception: Karst's footnote (via Thornbrough) gives the pre-war rule at its true grain — Black attendance was permitted but not required, a few white schools allowed it, most did not, and the 1869 Assembly first made official provision for Black children's education — which is exactly why the settlement's children at the largely white Olive Branch school, and Andrew Huggart's years as superintendent of its union Sunday school, print as facts to be remarked (the schools file owns that record). The repeal course: Barkshire v. State, 7 Ind. 389 (1856) — the article upheld, an Ohio County marriage prosecuted under it; Smith v. Moody (1866) — the article held invalid; the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments followed federally while Indiana's text still read "white"; and in 1881 Article XIII was formally removed and the companion amendment struck "white" from Article II and §5 whole. The community this regime governed is counted where the record allows: at its maximum about 1880, 28 counted in six households — Samuel (the nephew), Wesley, Efferson Manuel, Andrew, Noah Boone, Hardy Manual [spellings as Karst prints them] — dug first-hand from Karst's census citations; the 1850 household stands at household strength in the black-history file; a published 1850/1860 township aggregate was not reached and is a named gap (settler: the manuscript schedules at Karst's own citations). The settlement outlived the whole regime: bought under the bond law in 1834, bought under the article through the 1860s, sold in 1893 under none of it.