The Underground Railroad and Antebellum South Bend

Underground Railroad & Antebellum South Bend · the record, at the strength of its evidence

South Bend stood thirty miles south of Michigan and a world away from Kentucky, and for one weekend in the autumn of 1849 the whole machinery of American slavery was dragged into its courthouse: a family seized at gunpoint in the night, two writs of habeas corpus, a courtroom seizure, a federal jury pricing four human beings at $2,856, and a line of lawsuits that ended, two years later, in the Supreme Court of the United States. That case — the Powell case — is the best-documented fugitive-slave episode in Indiana, and it is documented because the losing side's lawyer wrote it down and an anti-slavery office in New York printed it. Around it stands a thinner record, and this section prints each part of it at the strength of what carries it. What counts as documented here is narrow on purpose: the court record and the case literature printed from it at the time; the federal census volumes; the county histories of 1880 and 1907; and the dated press. What stands on memory is labeled with its carrier — chiefly an 1899 newspaper gathering of the participants' own reminiscences, and the 1939 compilation that preserved it — and printed as tradition, never as fact. The Underground Railroad's organized lines, on the earliest expert survey, did not run through this city at all; what ran through it was a road, a river, a courthouse, and a small company of people whose names survive because a Kentucky slaveholder sued them. Their story, and the story of the Black community that lived here under laws written to exclude it, follows at exactly the size the surviving record supports.