Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Residents of Indiana debated the status of Blacks from the time the area was part of the Northwest Territory until the Civil War. An anti-slavery faction gained control of the Indiana territorial legislature and assured Black’s rights through early statehood; however, from the mid-1820s until 1851 anti-black leaders passed repressive legislation. Officials in the southeastern Indiana counties and cities ignored the repressive laws unless events forced them to act. In 1820 one in four Blacks in Indiana lived in the southeastern counties of Jefferson, Clark, and Floyd. By 1850, those county’s seats - Madison, Jeffersonville, and New Albany, respectively - were the largest urban areas in Indiana. Businesses of those counties and cities relied on trade with the slave state of Kentucky, but also relied on the industry of their Black residents. For these two reasons, those counties and cities developed distinctively from the rest of the state.
DOI: 10.18297/etd/1485
Author: D. Varble
Institution: University of Louisville
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: University of Louisville
OpenAlex ID: W2256429018