The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1850 · Norris v. Newton et al. · the press layer
The banked fragment names Solomon W. Palmer alone; the federal suit had nine defendants. When Norris sued in the United States Circuit Court for the District of Indiana, the defendants he named were: Edwin B. Crocker, Leander B. Newton, George W. Horton, Solomon W. Palmer, David Jodon, William Wilmington, Lot Day (Jr.), Amable M. Lapiere (also printed LaPierre), and Wright Maudlin. The roll prints from two carriers (the Taylor reconstruction and a 2003 South Bend Tribune-derived catalogue record) and the spelling of the eighth name varies between them; the variance is printed, not harmonised. Palmer, the one name the banked fragment carried, stands in the roll in his place — fourth of nine.
The abolitionist-press half of the audit's row is answered at the strength the county record reaches. South Bend's press was young and party-bound: the South Bend Free Press appeared in January 1836 under Schuyler Colfax, and the St. Joseph Valley Register was first issued 12 September 1845 by John D. and Joseph H. Defrees in the Whig interest, the paper that in time became the News and Times (Anderson & Cooley, 1901, press chapter, read first-hand). No abolitionist newspaper published in St. Joseph County in the Powell years was located in any carrier searched — the county had no abolitionist paper to quote. What the county produced instead was the pamphlet: Crocker's own printed report of the proceedings, kept in print by the Register's office (the 1873 Beal reprint), which is the abolitionist press artefact of this case. The modern scholarship confirms the climate the pamphlet worked in: a strong abolitionist presence in South Bend materially affected the outcome before Egbert (Harvey, Hanover Historical Review, 2017, "The South Bend Fugitive Slave Case"). The residue is stated plainly: if a county abolitionist paper run exists, it was not reached; the settler stands as the Windle pamphlet together with the county press record printed here.
Principal sources: Taylor (2020), as above; Norris v. Newton et al., 18 F. Cas. 322; Anderson & Cooley, South Bend and the Men Who Have Made It (1901), press chapter (Archive.org copy, first-hand); Harvey (2017).