History of Slavery in Indiana - Treatment of Slaves

Treatment of Slaves

The first recorded slaves in Indiana were owned by the French traders who entered the region and introduced the practice to the native tribes. Jesuit priests encouraged the tribes they lived among to adopt slavery as an alternative to executing their prisoners in war. According to some classical historians, the decline of cannibalism among the tribes was a direct result of the rise of slavery. Early slaves were often Native Americans who were sold to pay debts. The early slaves typically performed manual labor, helping the traders transport their goods and to build forts and trading posts. While part of new France, laws were enacted to give slaves some protection from their masters. Torture and mutilation of slaves was forbidden, and families were prevented from being forcibly broken up. Other laws allowed slaves to be seized by creditors as payment. Other laws required that if a master had children by a slave, the slave and her children were then to be freed. Their status under the French laws was similar to that of minors.

As the territory developed, their tasks changed; slaves also served as household servants and farm workers, as in the case of William Henry Harrison's slaves. George Rogers Clark's two slaves assisted him in running a gristmill in Clarksville. While the pro-slavery faction was in power, laws were passed permitting anyone to seize and return slaves who were more than ten miles from their home, and a one hundred dollar fine was placed on anyone who helped a slave escape. Some slaves, like "Aunt Fannie", who belonged to Dennis Pennington, refused to be set free. Pennington had freed all his slaves when he left Virginia, but Fannie did not want to be left behind and continued on as a free household servant for the rest of her life. She was buried in the Pennington family cemetery in Corydon, Indiana. Others were not so fortunate as in the case of another black woman who also lived in Corydon. When she tried to escape from her masters she was run down in the street, beaten, and carried back home. The men threatened death to anyone in the town, which was strongly anti-slavery, who interfered.

The slaves did not have a large impact on Indiana's economy as they never became a large percentage of the population and large scale plantation style farms, that were common in the southern states, never developed in Indiana. In 1820, the year all the state's slaves were freed, the census only counted 192 out of a population over 65,000. Many slaves had already been freed by that time and there over 1200 free blacks in the state during the same census.