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ITEMS 1–2 · COURT RECORD ONLY; THE CASE TEST AND THE PENALTY-SUIT TEST
The branch opens, as its discipline orders, with the documented case — writs, courtroom course, dispositions — and the county's fugitive-slave litigation is among the best documented in Indiana; but its ground is South Bend and Cass County, and no case of the class arises from Walkerton or Lincoln Township in any record searched. The documented complex, at boundary size: in 1847 Kentucky slaveholders raided into Cass County, Michigan, to retake freedom-seekers sheltered there — the Kentucky raid on Cass County — and the litigation it spawned reached this county directly as the South Bend Fugitive Slave case, in which Wright Modlin of Cass County, a station keeper who carried freedom-seekers up from the Ohio River, was a central figure. That is the record's documented seizure-and-suit course for this region: raiders, writs, and penalty exposure, seated in the Michigan line country and litigated with South Bend at its edge. Against that documented strength, the tests for this ground return empty: no seizure, rescue, harboring prosecution, or habeas proceeding seated in Lincoln Township or Walkerton stands in the county court record, the county histories read first-hand, or the documented-case literature reached; and no penalty suit — no Norris v. Newton-class action for the statutory price of a rescue, with or without a supreme-court course — arises from this ground in the Indiana Reports or the appellate record searched. The branch prints the negative at the strength of the positive record beside it: the county's machinery of recapture demonstrably ran, and demonstrably not here — or not in any proceeding the record kept. A rescue nobody sued over leaves no court file, and this branch builds on court files; the distinction is stated, and the negative is bounded by it.
Principal sources: the documented record of the 1847 Kentucky raid on Cass County and the South Bend Fugitive Slave case (Modlin), as carried in the Network to Freedom / Underground Railroad site literature; Chapman (1880) and Howard (1907), read first-hand; Indiana appellate record searched for county penalty suits, November 2026.