The abolitionist presence · nine men, three election tickets, and a hostile town

1844 – 1859

The political record, from the county history's own canvass: Organized antislavery in St. Joseph County is documented first as votes. In 1844 James G. Birney, the Liberty candidate for president — Chapman's narrative calls his party, loosely, Free-Soil — polled 33 votes in this county, and Chapman pauses on the figure: it showed, even at that early day, a few who were not afraid of social ostracism on account of their opinions on slavery. In 1845 the abolitionists put a full state ticket in the field (a Mr. Stevens for governor); in 1846, Chapman records, Whigs, Democrats and Abolitionists all had full state and county tickets in the field here. In 1848 a newspaper called the Free Democrat was started in South Bend to advocate Martin Van Buren's election, and Van Buren, the Free Soil candidate, polled 332 votes in the county against Zachary Taylor's 817 and Lewis Cass's 667. The antislavery vote, that is, grew tenfold across the decade and remained a minority of roughly one vote in six — organized, ticketed, and beaten, on the county's own returns.

The little band of nine: At the movement's center Chapman places a smaller company. His biography of Solomon W. Palmer — lumber dealer, defendant in Norris v. Newton, afterward the county's Republican sheriff — says that after removing to South Bend Palmer "became a strong Abolitionist. He was one of the little band of nine men in South Bend, who, in those early days, braved public odium and reproach for conscience' sake, and maintained that human bondage was accursed of God, and a blot on the fair fame of the Republic." The biography adds the price of the avowal: "the old and middle-aged men that are now living well remember that the avowal of being an Abolitionist was to invite general ostracism even in the North." Nine is the biography's number, printed as the biography's; it is a striking coincidence, and no more than that on this record, that the circle Norris's lawsuit named — nine defendants before Maudlin's dismissal — is of the same size. What the nine did, on the documented record, is specific rather than general: they lawyered, bailed, paid and stood suit for the Powell family, and on the tradition's account they kept the movement's purse — the barbers' open palm of the claims entry — filled.

The climate they worked in: The town's temperature is documented from both sides. South Bend's own Whig newspaper, Colfax's St. Joseph Valley Register, treated the 1849 case — in the words a later Notre Dame Magazine account quotes from it — as an issue of "life and death" that "caused so much excitement in our usually quiet town." The reminiscence tradition preserves the other temperature in particulars: a schoolteacher, Mr. Thompkins, obliged to give up his school and leave the village for having indiscreetly admitted he was an abolitionist; the Presbyterian pastor, the Rev. Mr. Gordon, who never omitted from his prayers "May we remember those in bondage as bound with them," and the prominent lady of his congregation who wished aloud that he would stop; Almond Bugbee, defending men arrested under the fugitive law in conversation, answered by Liston — Norris's own counsel — with "You are a traitor, a traitor to your country"; and the village lawyers' debating society in the old seminary, debating colonization against abolition, where a Mr. Reed pointed at Bugbee in the audience and said he would rather be a horse thief than an abolitionist — and, after Bugbee's reply at the next meeting, desired it no longer. The mass fact of the decade stands at the center of the Powell record itself: when the case was heard, the courthouse filled, the town turned out, and Chapman's closing judgment is that the citizens of South Bend, "generally, without distinction of party," felt the strongest sympathy for the captives. The case literature that carries that judgment was written by the winning side's friends, and it is printed as their claim; the two habeas discharges, the refused riot indictment, and the election returns are the corroboration the record offers.

What was not here: No antislavery society — no founding, officers, minutes or meeting of an organized abolitionist society in South Bend — appears in any record reached for this section: not in Chapman, not in Howard, not in Thornbrough, not in the reminiscence tradition that names so much else. The documented organizational forms of the cause here are the party tickets of 1844–1848, the defense of 1849 and its purse, and, after 1854, absorption into the Republican Party that Palmer served as sheriff. Visiting lecturers of national name are likewise absent from the antebellum record reached: no Douglass or Garrison platform in this city is documented in these years, and none is claimed. The abolitionist presence in antebellum South Bend was real, named, and consequential once — in a courtroom — and it was small enough for its own county history to count it on two hands.

Sources:

1. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), political history chapter — the 1844, 1845, 1846 and 1848 returns and tickets and the Free Democrat; pp. 476–477, the Palmer biography — the "little band of nine men" and the ostracism sentence, quoted as Chapman prints them.
2. Sean O'Brien, in Notre Dame Magazine — the St. Joseph Valley Register quoted on the 1849 case ("life and death"; "our usually quiet town"), carried here as a quotation at second hand.
3. Windle (1939), from Dakin (1899) — Thompkins, the Rev. Mr. Gordon, the Bugbee–Liston exchange and the seminary debate, at reminiscence strength.
4. Chapman (1880), p. 624 — the closing judgment on the citizens' sympathy, printed above as the case literature's claim with its corroborations named.