INIndiana History

Indiana wrote its first constitution in June 1816 under a single elm in Corydon, because the little courthouse was unbearable in the heat. Twenty five years later the state that document created was bankrupt, having borrowed roughly $10 million to dig canals and build roads it could not finish. The replacement constitution of 1851 forbade Indiana from carrying debt at all, and that clause is still in force.

Kekionga, the portage and the nations of the Wabash

Angel Mounds near present day Evansville was a walled Mississippian town of perhaps a thousand people, left by about 1450. Centuries later the dominant power was the Myaamia, the Miami, whose town of Kekionga stood where the St. Joseph and the St. Marys join to form the Maumee, now Fort Wayne. Kekionga controlled the portage between the Great Lakes and the Wabash, and therefore between the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, which is why every empire wanted it. Potawatomi held the northern marshes, the Lenape were invited onto the West Fork of the White River in the 1790s, and Wea and Piankashaw villages lined the lower Wabash. When the United States sent armies to take the Ohio country, the confederacy under Little Turtle of the Miami and Blue Jacket of the Shawnee destroyed two of them. St. Clair's defeat near the headwaters of the Wabash on 4 November 1791 cost about 630 soldiers killed, the heaviest loss the US Army has suffered against a Native force.

Vincennes, a winter march, and a territory

France built a post at Vincennes around 1732, still the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the state. In February 1779 George Rogers Clark marched about 180 men from Kaskaskia across flooded Illinois bottomland, at times chest deep, and took Fort Sackville at Vincennes from Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton.

Indiana Territory split from the Northwest Territory in 1800, with Vincennes as its capital and William Henry Harrison as governor. Harrison's work as he understood it was to acquire land, culminating in the Treaty of Fort Wayne in 1809, which took about three million acres. Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa built a town at the mouth of the Tippecanoe and argued that land was held in common and could not be sold by any one nation. Harrison marched on Prophetstown while Tecumseh was recruiting in the south, and the fight of 7 November 1811 gave him a battle name that carried him to the White House in 1840.

Statehood in 1816 and slavery in a free state

Congress admitted Indiana on 11 December 1816 as the 19th state, without the sectional bargaining later admissions required, because the Northwest Ordinance had settled the slavery question in 1787. Slavery existed regardless: Harrison and the territorial legislature had authorised indentures running for decades, and the 1810 census counted enslaved people at Vincennes. In 1820 the Indiana Supreme Court decided Polly v. Lasselle, freeing a woman named Polly Strong and holding that the state constitution admitted no exception. The 1851 constitution added Article XIII, barring Black people from settling in Indiana and fining anyone who hired them; it was voided after the Civil War and struck from the text in 1881.

The capital moved in 1825 to Indianapolis, laid out on empty ground by Alexander Ralston as a mile square with diagonal avenues around a circle. The Mammoth Internal Improvement Act of 1836 committed the state to canals, turnpikes and railroads on borrowed money; the panic of 1837 stopped the work, Indiana defaulted in 1841, and creditors took the unfinished Wabash and Erie Canal. Between September and November 1838 soldiers marched about 859 Potawatomi from Twin Lakes to eastern Kansas, and more than forty died on the way, most of them children, in what Indiana calls the Trail of Death.

A state at war with itself

Roughly 200,000 Indiana men served the Union, but sentiment at home was not uniform. Southern Indiana had been settled from Kentucky and North Carolina, and Copperhead opposition ran deep enough that when Democrats took the legislature in 1862, Governor Oliver P. Morton refused to call it into session and ran the state for two years on federal and private loans. John Hunt Morgan's cavalry crossed the Ohio in July 1863, and the Battle of Corydon on 9 July was the only pitched engagement fought on Indiana soil; the old capital paid a ransom to avoid burning. Ex parte Milligan, decided in 1866, arose from a military commission that sentenced Lambdin Milligan to hang in Indianapolis; the Supreme Court held such tribunals cannot try civilians while civil courts sit.

Gas, bricks and steel

In 1886 drillers near Portland struck the Trenton field, then the largest natural gas field known anywhere. Towns advertised free fuel to any factory that would move: the Ball brothers shifted their jar works to Muncie in 1887, and dozens of glass and tin plate plants followed. Operators burned gas in open flambeaux to advertise the abundance, and the pressure was gone within twenty years. In 1906 US Steel bought lakeshore dunes and built both a mill and a city, naming it for chairman Elbert Gary; Gary Works became the largest steel plant in the world. Indianapolis was one of America's first automobile centres, home to Marmon, Stutz, Cole and Duesenberg, while the Studebaker brothers in South Bend turned an 1852 wagon works into a car company. Carl Fisher opened the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1909 and, after the crushed stone surface killed drivers, repaved it with 3.2 million bricks. Ray Harroun won the first 500 mile race there on 30 May 1911.

The Klan decade and the long industrial retreat

In the early 1920s the Indiana Klan under Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson enrolled a membership commonly estimated near 250,000, the most powerful state organisation the second Klan ever built. Its targets were Catholics, immigrants and drink more than the Black population, and it controlled the 1924 elections, including the governorship of Ed Jackson. It collapsed in 1925 when Stephenson was convicted of second degree murder in the death of Madge Oberholtzer, a state employee he had abducted, and then released ledgers that ended dozens of political careers. Studebaker then closed its South Bend plant in December 1963, putting some 7,000 people out of work after 111 years, and Gary peaked at 178,320 residents in 1960 before losing well over half of them.

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