“This Negro Elephant is Getting to be a Pretty Large Sized Animal”: White Hostility against Blacks in Indiana and the Historiography of Racist Violence in the Midwest

TL;DR

Campney argues that racist violence against Blacks in Indiana was common and central to white supremacy from the antebellum era through the early twentieth century, not an aberration or solely the product of white southern settlers. He shows surges around the Civil War and the 1879–1880 Exodus, with violence often politically motivated and geographically tied to Black settlement patterns.

Key findings

• Between 1845 and 1930, Indiana witnessed the lynching of 25 Blacks in 16 incidents, comparable to Illinois (22 in 21 incidents) and fewer than Kansas (52 in 37 incidents, 1861–1920). Indiana mobs lynched at least 15 Black men in 8 incidents between 1865 and 1880, but only 7 victims in 6 incidents between 1881 and 1902, challenging the conventional post-1880 “lynching era” chronology.
• Indiana’s Black population rose from 11,428 in 1860 to 24,560 in 1870. During the 1879–1880 Exodus, an estimated 2,000 Black North Carolinians migrated to Indiana, and the number of Indiana residents born in North Carolina rose from 1,354 in 1870 to 3,167 in 1880. Violence included the 1862 New Albany race riot, 1865 Evansville lynchings and expulsions, the 1878 Coal Creek and Mount Vernon attacks, and 1880 episodes in Shelbyville, Brazil, and Rockport.
• Violence was often overtly political during the Exodus: Democrats feared Black newcomers would vote Republican, and in Rockport in October 1880 rioters killed Uriah Webb while crying “One vote less” and cheering for Hancock. Economic motives also appeared when white miners attacked Black strikebreakers at Knightsville in 1873 and Coal Creek in 1878.
• Racist violence concentrated in southern Ohio River counties, but sundown exclusion also occurred in central and northern Indiana. In 19 of 92 counties, Blacks numbered 25 or fewer in 1860, 1870, and 1880; 16 of those counties were in northern Indiana. Black Indianans increasingly concentrated in cities: 12.2% lived in the three cities with more than 250 Blacks in 1860, 30.9% in seven such cities by 1870, and 36.6% in nine by 1880.

Methods

• Historical case study and historiographical synthesis of racist violence against Blacks in Indiana, examining white efforts at subordination, motivations for violence, geographical patterns, and implications for Indiana and Midwest historiography.
• Sources include contemporary newspapers, U.S. census data for 1860, 1870, and 1880, secondary historical scholarship, and a map of incidents and likely sundown communities.
• Analysis is qualitative and comparative, situating Indiana within scholarship on racist violence in Kansas, Illinois, and the wider Midwest; no formal quantitative model is used.

Limitations

• The paper states no formal limitations section. Evident limitations include heavy reliance on newspaper accounts, some explicitly partisan—for example, the Rockport Journal is described as “an ardently Republican newspaper”—and on anecdotal evidence for sundown towns.
• Census-based sundown inference uses an “arbitrary” threshold of 25 or fewer Black residents, and the paper notes that many small sundown towns were probably too small to be captured individually. Lynching counts are also presented as incomplete, with the author noting scholars “may yet find other episodes” after 1930.
• The Exodus migration figure is “estimated two thousand,” and many sundown designations are qualified as “probably” rather than confirmed.