this time embroiled with the issue of the restriction or extension of slave territory and had its hands pretty well tied when it came to the task of passing enabling acts.
On this matter, however, of moving for admission as a state the people of Oregon had never manifested any enthusi- asm. The politicians among them had not failed to start the agitation of the question at the earliest possible moment and to keep persistently at it. The question of the formation of a state government was brought up in the first session of the legislative assembly of the territory in 1849. The subject was discussed at each succeeding session thereafter and in 1854 the promoters of the movement succeeded in getting the proposition submitted to a vote of the people. Then a vote was had regularly each year until a majority in favor of a convention was secured in 1857.[1]
The Anticipated Financial Burden of the Support of a State Government the Main. Cause of the Reluctance of the People to Support the Movement for the Formation of a Constitution.
Under the provisional government of the forties the older settlers had had sufficient experience in supporting the machinery of a commonwealth government to serve as a basis for suggesting to them the additional burdens involved in the exchange of the territorial for a state government. Under their territorial government they were receiving some $32,000 a year for the salaries of their officials. Special appropriations for public buildings and the territorial library made the average annual receipts of funds from Washington nearly double this sum.[2] The flow of this stream of wealth to Oregon would be arrested as soon as they passed out of the status of a territory into that of a commonwealth, and another vol-
