Legislation and its effects on race relations in southeastern Indiana, 1785-1860.

TL;DR

This thesis argues that Indiana’s early anti-slavery protections gave way to repressive anti-Black legislation from the mid-1820s to 1851, while officials in Floyd, Clark, and Jefferson counties often ignored those laws unless events forced action. It contends that those southeastern counties developed distinctively because of proximity to slave-state Kentucky and reliance on Black labor, and that the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and 1851 state constitution failed to resolve racial tensions.

Key findings

• In 1820 one in four Blacks in Indiana lived in Jefferson, Clark, and Floyd counties; by 1850 Madison was the largest city in the state with over 9,000 residents, New Albany was second with over 8,000, Jeffersonville had over 2,500, and the combined New Albany-Jeffersonville area was Indiana’s largest urban area. Nearly one in four Blacks in the state still lived in those three counties.
• After 1824 Indiana shifted toward concessions to slaveholders: an 1831 law required new Black arrivals to post a $500 bond, an 1840 law prohibited marriages between whites and persons with one-eighth or more Black blood and imposed fines up to $5,000 and prison terms of 10 to 20 years, and the 1851 constitution’s Article XIII banned Black immigration, passing 113,828 to 21,873 while the constitution itself passed 113,230 to 27,638.
• Courts and communities both constrained and occasionally protected Black residents: *State v. Lasselle* (1820) ended legal slavery in Indiana, *In re Clark* (1821) allowed adult indentured servants to seek release, and after *Prigg v. Pennsylvania* the Indiana Supreme Court overturned Luther Donnell’s conviction and reversed an Elkhart County verdict. In New Albany’s 1850 fugitive case, citizens raised $600 to purchase the freedom of a family who appeared white; in the Mitchum case, an elderly Black man who had lived near Vernon for 19 years was returned to a claimant based on dubious identification.
• Despite exclusion laws, Indiana’s Black population grew by 4,536 in the 1830s and 4,094 in the 1840s; in 1850 Clark, Floyd, and Jefferson counties held 1,724 Blacks, 15.3% of the state total, and during the 1850s the state’s Black population increased by one percent to 11,428, with Floyd County rising by 183 to 757 in 1860 while Clark and Jefferson declined.

Methods

• Historical and legal thesis covering 1785–1860, organized into chapters on the territorial period, the post-1824 legislative shift, 1850s national legislation, and historiography.
• Focuses on Floyd, Clark, and Jefferson counties in southeastern Indiana, comparing when possible to Ohio and Illinois, and uses census data, statutes, court cases, legislative journals, the *Congressional Globe*, newspapers, and secondary histories.
• Main analysis is a narrative synthesis of legislation, court decisions, and local incidents to argue that southeastern Indiana’s proximity to Louisville and reliance on Black labor produced distinctive race relations.

Limitations

• The paper states that no records exist of the numbers of Blacks kidnappers carried into slavery, and that it is difficult to say with certainty whether the Fugitive Slave Act affected Indiana’s 1851 elections.
• The paper states that more scholarship is needed and that few historians analyzed the motives behind the laws, calling for a more complete evaluation of lawmakers’ motives.
• Evident from the text: the thesis relies heavily on secondary sources, especially Emma Lou Thornbrough, and its three-county focus limits broader claims about the rest of Indiana.