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1847–1849
The best-documented courtroom proceeding on this ground before the Civil War was not a prosecution but a fight over whether the law would hold a family. In 1847 a Kentucky claimant's party under Norris, carrying the Powell family south as claimed property, was overtaken at South Bend by Wright Maudlin, a neighbor of the Powells, who found South Bend attorney Edwin B. Crocker to draft a writ of habeas corpus. Crocker and Maudlin brought the writ before Judge Elisha Egbert; with Maudlin maintaining the Powells were free and in immediate danger of illegal removal, Egbert instructed the sheriff's office to hold both the Powells and the Norris party until the writ could be formally reviewed. The criminal machinery of the county — its judge, its sheriff, its jail — was thus turned, for a proceeding, against the seizure itself.
The litigation then reversed direction. In December 1849 Norris sued the men he held responsible for the escape of his claimed property: the lawyers who had argued for the Powells, Wright Maudlin, the sheriff, and others. The case, and the family's own story, belong to Black History & Civil Rights in this history, where they are told in full; the entry stands here because the proceeding is part of this county's court record — the first case in it in which the enforcement apparatus itself was the contested ground.
Sources:
- Indiana University South Bend, African American Landmark Tour, "St. Joseph County Courthouses" — the habeas proceeding before Judge Egbert and Norris's December 1849 suit, citing Chapman (1880)
- Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), the fugitive-slave case chapter