in 1809. Corydon competed with Charlestown, Clarksville, Lawrenceburg, Madison, and Jeffersonville to become the new territorial capital. Dennis Pennington, a Harrison County representative and the speaker of the territorial legislature's lower house, helped secure the town's selection during the 1813 session of the Indiana Territory's general assembly. Pennington pointed out that Corydon would be an ideal location. The Harrison County court had approved a design for a new county courthouse on Corydon's public square in 1811 and it could be used as an assembly building for the territorial legislature. Pennington supervised construction of the limestone courthouse, which was nearly completed when Indiana's first state legislature convened at Corydon in 1816. Prior to 1816, the territorial legislature met in the original county courthouse on High Street. Paul and Susannah Mitchem became Quakers and immigrated to Harrison County from North Carolina in 1814, bringing with them 107 slaves whom they freed after arriving. Most of the former slaves then settled around the town of Corydon. Although some of the former slaves left, the group became one of the largest communities of free blacks in the state. Constitutional convention, 1816 On April 19, 1816, President James Madison signed an Enabling Act that provided for the election of delegates to a convention at Corydon to consider statehood for Indiana. Forty-three delegates, including five men from Harrison County, convened June 10–29, 1816, to draft Indiana's first state constitution. The preamble of the constitution acknowledges the site of the historic gathering: "We the Representatives of the people of the Territory of Indiana, in Convention met, at Corydon, on Monday the tenth day of June in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixteen,..." The delegates met in an unfinished log cabin near the Harrison County courthouse, which had not yet been completed; due to cramped conditions and the summer heat, the men often sought refuge outside under a giant elm tree, later named the Constitution Elm. (A portion of its trunk has been preserved, surrounded by a sandstone memorial.) The delegates completed their work in nineteen days, adjourning on June 29, 1816, when the newly signed state constitution went into effect. As outlined in Article XI, Section 11, of the constitution of 1816: "Corydon, in Harrison County shall be the seat of Government of the state of Indiana, until the year eighteen hundred and twenty-five, and until removed by law." Corydon's selection as the capital