The abolitionist presence, at counted size

1844 – 1863

Counted at the ballot box: the county's organized antislavery presence was small, persistent, and measurable. In 1844 the Liberty Party's James G. Birney drew 33 votes in St. Joseph County. In 1845 the abolitionists fielded a full state ticket; in 1846 Whigs, Democrats and Abolitionists all ran full state and county tickets here. In 1848 the Free-Soil candidate Martin Van Buren drew 332 county votes against Zachary Taylor's 817 and Lewis Cass's 667 — roughly one vote in six cast in this county went to the candidate of no extension of slavery. Solomon W. Palmer's biography, in Chapman's county history, remembers the core at its true size: "a little band of nine men in South Bend, who braved public odium and reproach for conscience' sake." Nine men, 33 votes, then 332: that is the presence at the size its own record gives it, and it is printed at that size.

The Mishawaka fact in it is a printing press: the Free-Soil campaign of 1848 was argued in this county in part from a newspaper printed in Mishawaka — the Free Democrat of 1848, a Free-Soil campaign paper that lived and died with that campaign. The paper itself — its editors, its run, its end — stands whole in this history's newspapers file; what belongs to this branch is the presence the paper evidences: in 1848 Mishawaka was not merely a place abolitionist votes were cast but a place antislavery print was made. (The South Bend record, following Chapman, places a Free Democrat's start across the river; on this build's own newspaper record the 1848 paper was printed in Mishawaka, and the presence is stated at pointer-to-press size, no more.)

the Irish-born Rev. Joseph Adderly of St. Paul's Episcopal Church, whom his abolitionist congregation pressed in 1863 to preach against slavery as the Methodist and Presbyterian preachers in town were doing. The sentence stands at its banked strength in this history's communities file — a congregation abolitionist enough, in the war's third year, to press its own rector toward the subject — and it is carried here verbatim, neither enlarged nor explained away.

Sources

1. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), political chapters and the Palmer biography (pp. 476–477) — Birney's 33 votes (1844); the full tickets of 1845 and 1846; Van Buren 332, Taylor 817, Cass 667 (1848); the "little band of nine men."
2. Newspapers file of this record — the Free Democrat of 1848, printed in Mishawaka, owned there; pointer only here.
3. Communities file of this record — the Rev. Joseph Adderly sentence, carried at banked strength verbatim.