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1860 – 1861
On the eve: The antebellum record closes where the census of 1860 leaves it: a county of 18,455 people, eighty-eight of them Black, living under a constitution that forbade their coming and a community that had tripled anyway; a courthouse that had heard the fugitive question argued to discharge, twice, eleven years before; and a set of lawsuits whose last word, in the Supreme Court's reports, was that the old penalty law was dead. The war that settled the question the writs could not — the county's first company, its regiments, its dead, and the service of Black Hoosiers in it — is told in the Wars section, and the community's story resumes from 1870 in the Black History section. The legal order described here ended in the courts after the war: Article XIII void in 1866, struck from the constitution in 1881.
Sources:
- Eighth Census (1860), Indiana Tables No. 2 and No. 4, as cited above; Smith v. Moody (Indiana Supreme Court, 1866); the repeal of Article XIII, 1881.