Breaking Chains: Slavery on Trial in the Oregon Territory

An Army Slave

112 d D Breaking Chains comprehend, or chose to ignore, the impact of forced servitude on an individual when he or she is denied an education, freedom of movement, choice of labor, and, all too often, spouses and children. There was the added insult of not even having a surname of one’s own. Burch also blamed abolitionists for the problems that beset her family over the slavery issue: “The abolitionists and others who had prejudice against the negro race began in 1850 and earlier to agitate against and harass the several pioneer families who had brought negroes.’’ An Army Slave At least one Army officer—and probably others—brought a slave to the Oregon Territory. The following documents refer to a slave named Monimia Travers, freed by an officer at Fort Vancouver in 1851: Mommia (sic) Travers, a black woman, aged about forty-five, bought by me from Isaac Burbayge (sic), in April 1849, I have this day given her freedom unconditionally, and she is in all respects free to go and do as may seem most to her advantage, without let or hindrance from me, my agents, heirs or assigns. Witness my hand and seal, at Vancouver, May 5th , 1851. Llewellyn Jones, Captain, U.S.A. Also: The above named woman, Mommia, is an honest and perfectly conscientious woman and deserves kind and good treatment at the hands of every one. Llewellyn Jones, Captain, U.S.A., Recorded, July 29th , 1857.1 It was not uncommon for an Army officer to hold a slave as a servant or personal assistant. Dred Scott, the subject of the Supreme Court’s 1857 decision, had been a slave of John Emerson, a U.S. Army surgeon. The 1850 U.S. Census for Clark County, then part of the Oregon Territory, listed Travers’ first name as Monimia and gave her birthplace as Virginia. She lived with Captain Jones, his wife, and two daughters at the Columbia Barracks, adjacent to Fort Vancouver.2 Jones was a recent West Point graduate from New York, assigned to the U.S. Army’s Regiment of Mounted Riflemen. An Army Slave d D 113 He purchased Travers in St. Louis in April 1849 from Isaac Burbbayage, a wellknown dealer in slaves.3 This was just a month before Jones’ unit of mounted riflemen departed on May 10, 1849, on a five-month, two thousand-mile march from Fort Leavenworth to Fort Vancouver. The cross-country march is chronicled in a book, The March of the Mounted Riflemen. Jones was one of four officers who brought families. The mounted riflemen’s march gained fame because it was the first military unit to travel the entire length of the Oregon Trail. As first envisioned, a unit of ten companies of sixty-four privates each was authorized by Congress in May 1846 to establish and secure military posts along the Oregon Trail to protect emigrant wagon trains.4 However, once organized, the regiment was instead diverted to Mexico to fight in the Mexican-American War, during which it lost four officers and forty-five men in combat.5 At war’s end, the regiment returned to its original mission of safeguarding the trail to Oregon. However, while Captain Jones and the other officers stayed with the original regiment, their veteran troops were released from service. According to Major Osborne Cross, the chief quartermaster, the replacement troops were undisciplined and poorly trained, “many of them foreigners who scarcely knew enough of the English language to understand an order given to them.’’6 The unit was plagued by desertions of men lured to California by the discovery of gold. Seventy men either died or deserted during the trip.7 The expedition set out from Fort Leavenworth with about six hundred and forty mounted riflemen, plus thirty-one officers. Counting teamsters and other non-military personnel, there were as many as one thousand personnel. They took with them seven hundred horses, twelve hundred mules, five hundred cattle, and one hundred and seventy-one wagons. They staffed military posts at Fort Kearney, Fort Laramie, Fort The Dalles, and, temporarily, a post near the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Hall known as Cantonment Loring. Jones was in charge of Company D, one of several companies that made the entire trip. A camp along the way was named Camp Frederica after his ten-year-old daughter.8 There was a second African American at the Columbia Barracks, nineteenyear -old Zacara Richardson, listed in the 1850...