OREGON MEANING, ORIGIN AND APPLICATION 331
part of their very being and their American patriotism, but they were convinced without much inquiry about Drake's voyages of discovery and England's old treaties with Spain that their feet stood, not on the soil of a stranger, but on that of home." 39
So, in 1843, at Champoeg, Oregon, was organized the first American civil government west of the Rocky Mountains which provisional government soon sought to extend its juris- diction north of the Columbia River, which attempt resulted in the democratic campaign slogan of 1844, of "fifty-four forty or fight". However, pending difficulties with England over this matter, the organization of the territory was deferred until the boundary line was settled.
In 1848, during the Thirteenth Congress, Oregon was finally organized into a territory from the anomalous "Territory of Oregon", with boundaries defined as, "All that part of the territory of the United States which lies west of the summit of the Rocky Mountains, north of the forty-second degree of north latitude, known as the Territory of Oregon, shall be or- ganized into and constitute a temporary government by the name of the Territory of Oregon", 40 which territory was reduced, in 1853, by the formation of Washington Territory.
The political destiny of Oregon became entangled, for awhile, with the slavery question and its original fundamental law prohibited slavery by putting into force the provisions of the Ordinance of 1787. When a convention met, in 1857, to draft a constitution for statehood, three parties existed in the State ; one in favor of slavery, a second opposed to it and a third opposed to negro immigration, which division of opinion re- sulted in an "anti-negro clause" in the constitution and pre- vented, for some time, its adoption and the admission of the State which, however, was accomplished in 1859, with her present boundaries and making the thirty-third State of the American Union. 41
39~Ibid., 45.
40 Gannett's Boundaries, 137.
41 Lalor's Ency. Political Science, III, 34.
