In 1860, Putnam County was a rural agricultural community with more than twenty thousand residents, including nearly six thousand white males between the ages of 14 and 60. Although at some geographical distance from the central sites of the contest over freedom, citizens in Putnam County debated the questions raised during this rise of sectional crisis including Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott, and John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Rumors circulated about fugitive slaves passing through the county, and the 1851 Indiana Constitution required the county’s few black families to post bond if they wanted to remain in the state.
By 1856, Republicans, a new political party opposed to slavery’s spread into western territories, challenged Democrats who favored allowing local residents in the territories to decide whether they wanted slavery or not. As the nation lurched towards disunion, attention focused on the election of 1860, and attending to the issues of slavery, secession, and states’ rights.
After Fort Sumter’s fall, President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to suppress southern secession. By war’s end, more than two thousand Putnam County men and boys fought to preserve the Union. The county and the nation would be irrevocably altered. More