asked the secretary of war if the immigration of negroes could not be prevented, and the executive committee had thought the subject of sufficient importance to recommend the passage of a law on the subject of such offences as the negro had been guilty of. The opportunity offered for ridding the infant empire of Oregon of the negro, and all the questions dependent upon his presence in the community, was too good to be neglected. There was a deep-seated hatred of slavery by leading men of the western immigration. Most of them were natives of slave states, who, not having been of the privileged class of wealthy planters, well understood the evils of poverty and slavery together. They knew that education, honors, and all desirable attainments and dignities were denied to the poor white class of the slave states; and when they emigrated from them they determined to leave behind the clinging curse of caste, and to have for their own a free country, and free institutions to leave to their children. By a curious and contradictory impulse of the mind, no southern man, desiring freedom for himself from the evils of slavery, ever could be brought to look with complacency upon a free negro. The black man, though not to blame for the condition of society his presence entailed, was never forgiven for it, nor admitted to be a sufferer by it.
Undoubtedly something of this feeling of caste, where no caste was to be tolerated, influenced the founders of the provisional government of Oregon. Article 4 of the organic laws prohibited slavery or involuntary servitude except for the punishment of crimes whereof the party should have been duly convicted. The new legislation was intended, besides settling the matter of slavery in Oregon, to rid the country, in time, of every free negro or mulatto in it, and to prevent the coming of others,[1] by inflicting
- ↑ 'Be it enacted by the legislative committee of Oregon as follows: Sec. 1. That slavery and involuntary servitude be forever prohibited in Oregon. Sec. 2. That in all cases where slaves shall have been, or shall hereafter be, brought
