The price of the rescue: the penalty suits, boundary-printed

1847 – 1855

The case, in the founding file's own naming: the freedom case of David and Lucy Powell, South Bend, 1847–1850 — expressly no relation to the Mishawaka Powells of the founding file — stands whole in South Bend's record, and the founding file already carries it as a named gap against the Civil Rights Heritage Center collection and the newspaper runs. What belongs to this addendum is only its price, printed at the size the record gives it. The family — David, Lucy and their children Lewis, Samuel, George and James — fled John Norris of Boone County, Kentucky, on the night of 9 October 1847 and settled in Cass County, Michigan. At midnight on 27 September 1849 Norris and eight men seized them in South Bend. Habeas before Probate Judge Elisha Egbert discharged them for want of the certificate the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 required; Norris's men seized the family again in the courtroom itself — Liston, standing on a table, calling "Gentlemen, protect your property!"; and on Monday, 1 October 1849, after Prigg was read to the court, they were discharged a second time and finally, with seventy to two hundred of their Black neighbors from Cass County in town over that weekend to see it done. The family stayed free. The men who had stood around the courtroom paid.

The damages: on 21 December 1849 Norris sued nine men in the United States Circuit Court for the District of Indiana — Leander B. Newton, George W. Horton, Edwin B. Crocker, Solomon W. Palmer, David Jodon, William Willmington, Sheriff Lot Day Jr., Amable M. Lapiere and Wright Maudlin, the last dismissed as a Michigan resident. The declaration valued the family at $2,500 (the 1899 record's pamphlet quotation gives $2,000; the conflict is printed, not picked). Justice McLean's charge and the habeas syllabus stand reported at 18 Federal Cases 322. The jury itemized its verdict by the family's members — Lucy $500, Lewis $800, George $750, James $700 — with $165.80 in expenses, for a total of $2,856 (Thornbrough prints $2,850, and the 1899 record once prints $3,856; neither is followed, and both are noted). Whether the judgment was collected, the accounts do not reconcile: Chapman has the United States marshal selling the defendants' real estate on 29 March 1855, and Palmer's biography remembers the case costing him nearly every dollar he had; the 1899 record has the execution returned "no property found," in a chronology that cannot stand — judgment "entered June 1852," execution "issued June 1851" — and has $1,632.66 in costs awarded against Almond Bugbee, a supporter who was not even a defendant. Both accounts are printed; the record reached does not choose between them.

The penalty suits, and their death in the Supreme Court: the damages were only the first course. Twelve further suits followed against fifteen defendants, claiming the $500 penalty the 1793 Act gave a claimant against any person who harbored or hindered — with talk of some twenty-five more, and $15,000 to $20,000 in exposure. The test case was brought against Crocker and against Judge Egbert himself, the very judge whose discharge the rescuers had defended. In May term 1851 the circuit court held that the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act had repealed the 1793 penalty by implication, and certified the division of opinion upward. In Norris v. Crocker, 54 U.S. (13 Howard) 429, the Supreme Court — Catron, J. — held that section 4 of the 1793 Act's penalty was repealed by the Act of 1850, barring the pending action. The penalty suits died; the $2,856 damages judgment stood. That is the whole price of the rescue: one verdict paid or levied, a dozen penalty actions extinguished by the statute that superseded the one they were brought under, and a legal question from a South Bend courtroom answered in the reports of the Supreme Court.

Mishawaka's side, plainly: no penalty suit, no seizure and no rescue case on Mishawaka ground appears in any record reached — not in the county histories, not in the reported case and its literature, not in the reminiscence record. The searches are the ones named in the traffic and station articles of this addendum, and the settlers for anything beyond them are the same: the Civil Rights Heritage Center collection and the newspaper runs.

Sources

2. Norris v. Newton et al., U.S. Circuit Court, District of Indiana, filed 21 December 1849; habeas syllabus and McLean J.'s charge at 18 F. Cas. 322 (5 McLean 92) — the nine defendants, the itemized $2,856 verdict.
3. Norris v. Crocker, 54 U.S. (13 Howard) 429 — Catron, J.: the 1793 Act's §4 penalty repealed by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; the pending penalty action barred.
4. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County (1880) — the seizure, the two discharges, the marshal's sale of 29 March 1855; Palmer biography (the cost "nearly every dollar").
5. The 1899 record (Dakin, South Bend Daily Tribune, and the pamphlet it carries) — the $2,000 valuation quotation; the "no property found" execution return with its impossible dates; the $1,632.66 costs against Bugbee; the once-printed $3,856 — conflicts printed whole.
6. Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana Before 1900 — the $2,850 variant, noted and not followed.