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AUDIT ROW #386 · CHAPMAN, HOWARD, AND THE COUNTY COURT RECORD, TESTED
The leg opens with its frame, because every later article depends on it: Walkerton's Black community, as counted, has always been very small — twenty persons at its largest modern count (2020) — and the nineteenth-century tests must be read against that scale. The first-families question (a named Black family in the town's founding or early generations) was tested against Chapman, Howard, and the gazetteer record as reached, and no first family of record stands for this ground. The Black Laws limb is Indiana's, printed as law: the state's 1851 constitution (Article XIII) barred Black immigration into Indiana outright, and the registration-and-bond regime before it made settlement a legal risk — the frame inside which a township's near-absence of Black settlement in those decades is partly explained, at state-law strength. The freedom-case limb — a Walkerton-seated suit over freedom or kidnapping — returns nothing in the court record as reached; the county's such cases are its cities' record, at boundary size. The row closes mixed: the law printed, the local tests negative at reached strength, the county court record named as settler for the case limb.
XIII (the exclusion, at law strength); settler named — St. Joseph County court record (the freedom-case limb).