The law over their heads, whole

1831–1866

Whether or not a freedom-seeker ever slept in this township, the law that hunted them covered it. Indiana's Black Laws of 1831 required Black residents to register and post bond. The federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made seizure lawful anywhere in the state and penalised aid. Indiana's Constitution of 1851 added Article XIII, which prohibited Black people from coming into or settling in the state, voided contracts made with them, and was put to the voters as the exclusion question — carried statewide by a heavy majority in the 1851 referendum; the Liberty Township count in that vote was not pulled and stands as a named gap, its settler the county's 1851 election returns in the state archives. Article XIII stood until the Indiana Supreme Court struck it in 1866, after the Thirteenth Amendment had ended the system it served. The antebellum Black community of this township, counted and named, is the branch's last item, and it is answered by the Black history leg's census work: no named Black resident of Liberty Township in the antebellum decades was found in the sources reached, and the complete count waits on the 1850 and 1860 census manuscripts for the township — named here as the settling source, household by household, free schedules and slave schedules alike, there being no slavery in Indiana for a schedule to count.