The law over their heads, whole: the Black Laws, Article XIII, and the vote — with the county count named as a gap

ROW #652 · BRANCH ITEM 5 · AT THE RECORD'S STRENGTH

Before any fugitive reached this county, Indiana law had already decided what a Black Hoosier was allowed to be, and the whole frame prints: The constitutions of 1816 and 1851 alike barred Black men from voting and from the militia; Black testimony was barred in cases involving whites; Black children were barred from the public schools. Over that frame the legislature built the Black Law of 1831: every Black person entering Indiana had to register with the county authorities and post a 500-dollar bond — a white witness required, a physical description taken — as a guarantee of good behaviour and against becoming a public charge, or face expulsion. Five hundred dollars in 1831 was a settler's stake, not a fee; the bond was the exclusion, priced.

In 1851 the exclusion became constitutional. Article XIII of the new constitution provided, in its first section's words, that “No negro or mulatto shall come into, or settle in the State, after the adoption of this Constitution.” Its machinery: contracts made with a Black person coming in contrary to the article were void; a person who employed such a person, or encouraged them to remain, could be fined — up to 500 dollars in the Historical Bureau's account; and the fines were dedicated to colonization — paying to remove Black Hoosiers to Liberia. A companion registration law required Black residents already in Indiana to register themselves and their families with the clerks of the circuit courts; the books that requirement created are the Negro Registers, of which Coy D. Robbins collected what survives statewide (Indiana Negro Registers, 1852–1865, 1994). Article XIII was submitted to the voters separately from the rest of the constitution, and it outpolled the constitution itself: the figures print in two tellings that are not merged — 113,828 for exclusion out of 135,701 cast (the Indiana State Journal figures, 30 August 1851, about 84 percent, via the Allen County record), and the exhibit-table telling, 109,976 for the article against 109,319 for the constitution, with 21,066 / 26,755 against in the table's pairing. Either way the direction is not in doubt: exclusion won, statewide, by roughly five to one, and won more votes than the constitution it rode in on. The Indiana Supreme Court voided Article XIII in 1866 (Smith v. Moody, on the Thirteenth Amendment's ground, in the accounts reached); it was not formally removed from the text until 1881.

The county count: NAMED GAP (GAP-UGRR-1). The register asks for the exclusion vote “with its local count” — St. Joseph County's own return on the separate article. No county return reached for this section states it: the statewide totals and the convention record print, and Steuben County's contrary vote is famous precisely because a county figure survives for it, but no St. Joseph County figure is carried in any source reached here. Settler, named in-article as the brief requires: the St. Joseph County poll books and the county clerk's certified return for the election of the first Monday in June 1851 (the submission date fixed in the convention's own ordinance), with the Indiana State Archives' election returns and the St. Joseph County Public Library's Michiana collection as the holding places to test. Until that return is pulled, this section prints the state vote whole and the county vote as missing — it does not borrow a neighbour's number.

The register that does not survive, printed as a loss. The same discipline governs the county's Negro Register. Registers survive for a number of Indiana counties and were collected by Robbins; no St. Joseph County register is carried in any source reached for this section, and none is quoted here. Whether the county's book was kept and lost, or kept so thinly it left nothing to lose, the record reached does not say. Settler (GAP-UGRR-2): Robbins's county-by-county collection itself, checked under St. Joseph County, and the Indiana State Archives' register holdings — the two places a surviving county book would have to be. Printed at this strength, the loss is a finding about the archive, not a claim about the people: Penn's census frame (next article) is what the surviving record actually holds.

Sources:

1. Indiana Historical Bureau, “Being Black in Indiana” and the 1851 Constitution record — the disabilities, the bond, Article XIII's text, fines and colonization fund, and the registration law.
2. Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana Before 1900 (Indiana Historical Bureau, 1957) — the 1831 law, the colonization movement and its state support, the disabilities whole.
3. U.S. Forest Service / Indiana Historical Society accounts of the state laws and registers (1831 bond and register requirements, white witness, physical description).
4. Allen County (INGenWeb) timeline, carrying the Indiana State Journal, 30 August 1851 figures; Indiana Historical Society exhibit table for the second telling; the convention's submission ordinance (first Monday in June 1851), Indiana Historical Bureau.