Breaking Chains: Slavery on Trial in the Oregon Territory by R. Gregory Nokes (review)

R. Gregory Nokes spent several decades as an international reporter for the Associated Press, and judging from Breaking Chains, he remains a sharp investigative reporter. Although his book has grave problems, Nokes succeeded in the difficult task of locating detailed information about several of the individual black men and women who lived in Oregon Territory prior to statehood (and in some cases he provides follow-up notes about what happened to them in later years). In pursuing that information, Nokes left no stone unturned, no lead unfollowed. And where the evidence he discovered was ambiguous, his circumstantial arguments are plausible.

The centerpiece of Breaking Chains, and the biggest of the stories covered here, is a detailed account of the people and events surrounding the 1852–53 court case known as Holmes v. Ford. The case arose from efforts by Robin and Polly Holmes, former slaves of Nathaniel Ford, to gain custody of their children. Ford helped lead one of the original Oregon Trail emigrations from Missouri in 1844, and the Holmes family came with him. Making good on a previous agreement, Ford formally freed the adult Holmeses after they helped him establish his farm in the new territory. But he continued through the early 1850s to hold three of the Holmes’s children in what was effectively a state of servitude. Though slavery was prohibited in the Oregon Territory prior to the ambiguities introduced in 1857 by the Dred Scott decision, Ford exercised considerable political power among the pioneers of the central Willamette Valley, and his white neighbors tolerated his ongoing sovereignty over the children. But when Robin Holmes brought a habeas corpus action against Ford, Territorial Supreme Court justice George H. Williams remanded the children to their parents and ruled famously that “as soon as the laws of Oregon touched the parties, the relation of master and slave was dissolved,” thereby reaffirming the territory’s free soil status (92).

While Nokes found a substantial amount of previously unknown or obscured bits of largely personal information about scores of early Oregonians, both black and white, who played key roles in territorial race relations, Breaking Chains reveals the difference between reporting facts and analyzing history. Nokes reports his facts clearly and effectively; they are fresh, accurate, and inherently interesting in the abstract. But he appears unaware of the larger frameworks into which he might have embedded his findings. As a result, Breaking Chains reads like a series of short, unattached, and almost random bits of information that seem somehow afloat in this book. That impression is strengthened by Nokes’s use of choppy and seemingly arbitrary subheadings rather than conceptual or narrative transitions.

The closest Nokes comes to an interpretive frame is the application of an ahistorical, twenty-first-century sense of racial idealism. He seems stunned and appalled, for example, to discover that the vast majority of white Oregonians in the 1850s could simultaneously oppose the institution of slavery and despise black people. But that position, of course, was common throughout the North, where it profoundly affected partisan politics and often produced more violent incidents than anything encountered in Oregon. Without seriously considering those larger social and political contexts, Nokes falls back on little more than incredulous outrage when he reports that territorial voters both lopsidedly rejected slavery in their new constitution and approved a black exclusion clause. But indignation does little to advance an understanding of the past.

The lack of context is especially evident in Nokes’s treatment of the court case around which this book revolves. Many historians have addressed the legal aspects of slavery and race in the territories, but Nokes does not cite even the towering longtime standard in that literature, Don E. Fehrenbacher’s The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (1978), much less any of the scores of rich and subtle books about the legal history of race and slavery...