The law over their heads · the Black Laws, Article XIII, and the register that does not survive

1816 – 1881

The framework the community lived under: Indiana's first constitution, in 1816, banned slavery outright, and the ban was never the whole of the law. The state's Black Laws barred Black men from the vote, the jury box, the militia and office; required a Black newcomer to prove his freedom; and in 1831 required every Black settler to register and give bond of $500 for good behavior and against becoming a public charge. The constitutional convention of 1850–51 went further and wrote exclusion into the fundamental law itself. Article XIII of the 1851 constitution — "No negro or mulatto shall come into or settle in the State, after the adoption of this Constitution" — voided contracts made with Black newcomers, fined whoever employed or encouraged them up to $500, and pledged the fines to a colonization fund for removing the Black residents already here. It was the only article submitted to the voters as a separate question, voted on 4 August 1851.

This county's part in making it: St. Joseph County's own delegate to the convention that framed Article XIII was Schuyler Colfax of South Bend — and on the Indiana Historical Bureau's reading of the convention record he "opposed by voice and vote the clause prohibiting free colored persons from coming into the State." The county's voters were not with their delegate. Only four Indiana counties rejected Article XIII at the polls — Elkhart, LaGrange, Randolph and Steuben — and St. Joseph was not among them; statewide the article carried by 113,828 votes to 21,873, a wider margin than the constitution itself. This county's own figures for that ballot have not been found in the sources reached for this section: the settling records are the Secretary of State's abstract of the 1851 returns and Dorothy Riker's Indiana Election Returns, 1816–1851 at the Indiana State Library, and until one of them is read, the county's margin stands as the named gap it is — the majority for exclusion is documented by the county's absence from the rejecting four; its size is not.

The machinery, and its local silence: The General Assembly's act of 18 June 1852 put the machinery in clerks' hands: every Black resident of Indiana before 1 November 1851 was to register with the county clerk, prove the residence by witnesses, and receive a certificate; the registers were to be the county's roll of its lawful Black inhabitants. For St. Joseph County, that roll does not survive to be read. Coy Robbins's statewide search, published as Indiana Negro Registers, 1852–1865 (1994), located fifteen extant registers in all of Indiana — and no St. Joseph County register is among them, nor is any such volume listed in the University of Notre Dame Archives' finding aid for this county's early records. Whether a register was ever opened here cannot be told from what survives; Thornbrough's statewide finding is that registers were begun in most counties and filled only in the smallest part — Clark County registered 74 of its 582 Black residents across eleven years, Marion County 25, Randolph County 12 — and that the requirement was largely ignored by the people it targeted.

The local application of the whole apparatus, in every record reached for this section, is a silence: no registration, no bond, no Article XIII prosecution of any person in St. Joseph County appears in the record. The exclusion law's force here was the force of a threat on the books — while the community it aimed at tripled, 29 to 88, in the decade of its enactment. The one piece of Indiana's fugitive machinery that did operate in this county operated for the other side: the state statute respecting fugitives from labor under which Norris held the Powells over their first weekend — a statute already void in principle under Prigg v. Pennsylvania, as the Monday hearing's reading of that case to Judge Egbert's court made plain.

The end of the article: Article XIII fell after the war it had failed to prevent: in Smith v. Moody (1866) the Indiana Supreme Court held it void under the Thirteenth Amendment, and in 1881 the legislature struck it from the constitution. The Black Laws' remaining bars fell in the same decades. What they had governed, in this county, was a community that outlasted them — and the record of their local working is mostly the record of how little of their machinery was ever set in motion here, balanced against the one autumn when a different machinery, the federal fugitive law of 1793, was set in motion in the county courthouse and run, at full power, to the Supreme Court.

Sources:

1. Constitution of Indiana (1851), Article XIII; Act of 18 June 1852 to enforce it — the article's text and the registration machinery, as carried in the Indiana Historical Society's collection guide to the Orange County register (SC 1726) and the Jefferson County register's published transcript (INGenWeb).
2. David G. Vanderstel, "The 1851 Indiana Constitution," Indiana Historical Bureau — the separate ballot and the statewide vote of 113,828 to 21,873; Hoosier State Chronicles (Indiana Historical Bureau / Indiana State Library), on Colfax's service as a delegate and his opposition "by voice and vote" to the exclusion clause.
3. Indiana Historical Society, SC 1726 collection guide — the four counties that rejected Article XIII (Elkhart, LaGrange, Randolph, Steuben), and Coy Robbins's location of fifteen extant registers statewide in Indiana Negro Registers, 1852–1865 (Heritage Books, 1994).
4. University of Notre Dame Archives, Saint Joseph County (Ind.) Records (SJO), finding aid — the county clerk's surviving early records as inventoried, among which no register of Negroes and mulattoes appears.
5. Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana before 1900, "Exclusion and Colonization," pp. 69–70 — the 1852 act's working, the registers' sparse use in the counties named, and the judgment that the article's significance was as an expression of prejudice and a deterrent, not a systematically enforced machinery.