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1849 · the course the pointer did not carry
The banked fragment ends at Judge Egbert's discharge; the case did not. The discharge itself stands as banked: Elisha Egbert, acting as commissioner, found no certificate of removal under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 authorising the Powells' seizure, and discharged them — Edwin B. Crocker and Albert G. Deavitt appearing for the family, J. A. Liston and Thomas S. Stanfield for the claimant John Norris of Kentucky. What followed, at the strength of the modern scholarly reconstruction read first-hand for this section (Taylor, 2020, itself built on Crocker's contemporary report of the proceedings), is a second seizure and a second discharge. Norris's men re-seized the captives in the courtroom itself. Norris held a fresh writ out of the clerk of the Circuit Court; the sheriff refused to act on the seizure; Liston mounted a table and called on the Kentuckians present to shoot any who interfered. The Powells were lodged in jail over the weekend. Norris and his party were themselves arrested — as rioters, and for assault and battery. Crocker interviewed the family in prison. The crowd the record describes ran to between 150 and 400 people: Black supporters come in from Michigan and Indiana, Quaker sympathisers from Cass County, South Bend villagers — some of them armed. Norris did not appear when the matter came on; he gave up the pursuit and returned to Kentucky empty-handed. The Powells were discharged a second time and departed South Bend with their friends and neighbours.
The build prints this course at reconstruction strength, labelled as such: the contemporary pamphlet report of the proceedings (Crocker's report, the "Windle pamphlet" of the audit's settler line) is the primary carrier, and this section reached it through the scholarly read, not at first hand. Where the pamphlet's own text is wanted, it stands in Michiana Memory as named above.
Principal sources: Kevin Taylor, "E.B. Crocker and the South Bend Fugitive Slave Case," Golden Note, Vol. 67 No. 1 (Sacramento County Historical Society, September 2020), read first-hand; the case report in Norris v. Newton et al., 18 F. Cas. 322 (No. 10,307).