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1850–1851 · the course around the judgment
There were two federal suits, and the second one ended the first one's law.Norris v. Newton et al., Case No. 10,307, 18 F. Cas. 322 (5 McLean 92), Circuit Court, District of Indiana, May Term 1850, Justice John McLean presiding and charging the jury on Prigg lines; verdict for Norris of $2,856. That figure stands in this build under conflict C147, a three-way conflict printed whole in the banked fragment, and this section does not touch it. The Taylor reconstruction itemises the verdict as the jury's valuations — Lucy, 40, at $500; Lewis, 20, at $800; George, 16, at $750; James, 14, at $700 — with $165.80 for Norris's South Bend expenses. New conflict NEW-I-1: those items sum to $2,915.80, which does not reconcile with the reported verdict of $2,856; both figures print, from their two carriers, and the build asserts no reconciliation.
Beside the damages suit ran the penalty suit: an action of debt against Edwin B. Crocker and Elisha Egbert only, for the $500 penalty given by §4 of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 against any who obstructed a claimant or harboured the fugitives after notice. That suit is the one that went up. Norris v. Crocker, 54 U.S. (13 How.) 429, December Term 1851, came to the Supreme Court on a certificate of division from the Circuit Court (whose term ran 19–30 May 1851), and the opinion of Justice Catron held that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had repealed the §4 penalty by implication, and that the repeal barred the penalty action then pending. The penalty course therefore ends in Washington, in Norris's defeat, on a repeal point — the legal ground under the whole South Bend affair shifted while the suits were still live. One secondary summary reached in this section misnames the opinion's author "Carter"; the report itself gives Catron, and the report governs.
Principal sources: Norris v. Crocker, 54 U.S. (13 How.) 429 (1851) (the report, first-hand); Norris v. Newton et al., 18 F. Cas. 322 (1850); Taylor (2020) for the verdict itemisation printed under NEW-I-1.