The Powell case · a family seized, freed, and sued for

1847 – 1850

The city's brightest antebellum hour, and its price: David Powell and Lucy Powell fled John Norris, who claimed to own them, in northern Kentucky on the night of 9 October 1847, with their four children — Lewis, Samuel, George and James — and settled at Cassopolis, Michigan. On 27 September 1849 Norris's party seized Lucy and the children at home — George, sixteen, and James, fourteen, are the sons the detailed account names — at gunpoint, and carried them south toward Kentucky through South Bend. A Michigan neighbor, Wright Maudlin, pursued, and South Bend attorney Edwin B. Crocker drew a writ of habeas corpus. Judge Elisha Egbert heard the case in the St. Joseph County courthouse and ruled Norris's capture illegal: it had been made without the due process the federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 itself required.

The family was freed — and then, in the courthouse itself, Norris's men seized them again at gunpoint before order was restored and the family was escorted back to Michigan. Norris answered with law of his own: suits in the United States Circuit Court at Indianapolis against the rescuers, the lawyers and the sheriff. Heard on 20 May 1850 before Justice John McLean, riding circuit — the same McLean who seven years later was one of two dissenters from the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision — a jury awarded Norris $2,856 for the family's "value," on a $2,500 claim, and Norris then brought a dozen further suits against fifteen people, each claiming the $500 penalty the federal Act of 1793 allowed a claimant against any person who harbored or concealed his fugitives — suits that recovered nothing, as this history’s Underground Railroad record tells whole.

The Powells remained free; the men who freed them paid for the freeing. Crocker published his own account, Review of the South Bend Fugitive Slave Case, in 1873, and the case is the reason South Bend's part in the fugitive-slave record is documented at all. The cases did reach the U.S. Supreme Court: the penalty action came up as Norris v. Crocker, 54 U.S. 429 (1851), and the Court’s ruling there ended the suits — a modern visitor summary that says so is right in substance, if loose in its pairing; the full legal record stands in this history’s Underground Railroad record.

Sources:

1. Edwin B. Crocker, Review of the South Bend Fugitive Slave Case (South Bend, 1873), via Michiana Memory — the seizure of 27 September 1849, Judge Egbert's habeas ruling, the courthouse re-seizure, and the Indianapolis proceedings, as summarized in the African American Landmark Tour's courthouse chapter (George Garner).
2. Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana before 1900, pp. 63–68 — the circuit-court suits, Justice McLean presiding, the $2,856 award of May 1850 and the further suits.
3. City of South Bend, Final Report of the Reparatory Justice Commission (2026), Part I — the case in the Commission's telling, including its note that the family remained free; the Commission's "three of her children" seized differs from the landmark tour's naming of George and James.