Breaking Chains: Slavery on Trial in the Oregon Territory

The Free State Letter

116 d D Breaking Chains lot, and could scarcely be prevented from doing those things.’’ As a result, some thought Johnson remained a slave. However, wrote Root, “such was not the case and only showed that Travis’ devotion to grandfather was not understood.’’ She also wrote of strong pro-slavery sympathies in the local Baptist church. Johnson’s date of death is unknown.18 The Free State Letter If all that was known of Judge Williams was the road he paved, leading away from slavery in Oregon, he might be seen as a heroic figure. And to some in his day, he was such a figure. However, the arguments he used would today earn him more condemnation than praise. During the summer and autumn of 1857, “slavery overshadowed every other issue’’ in Oregon.1 Pro-slavery forces believed their views were ascendant. One argument they used was that slavery would provide cheap labor for the farms and other needs of the developing region. Wrote historian Charles Carey: Some pro-slavery democrats, confident of the approval and patronage of the Washington administration, would not be silenced . . . and they were far more numerous than those democrats of free-state proclivities who dared speak out. And, of the latter, some would say, ‘I shall vote against slavery, but if it carries, I shall get me a nigger.’ Add to these the fact of the great donations of land by the general government . . . and the scarcity and high price of labor, and we may not wonder at their [opponents of slavery] anxiety.2 d D Judge Matthew P. Deady was considered “the point man for slavery’’ in Oregon.3 Deady, who sat with Williams on the Territorial Supreme Court, was originally from Maryland. He was remembered as an imposing figure, tall for his day at six-foot-two, and, in middle age, “inclined to portliness, which was fashionable among substantial people, with large protuberant eyes.”4 During the height of the slavery debate, Deady wrote to a friend, “If a citizen of Virginia can lawfully own a Negro (of which there is no doubt) then I a citizen The Free State Letter d D 117 of Oregon can lawfully obtain the same right of property in this Negro by either purchase or inheritance.”5 Another prominent supporter of the right to own slaves was Joseph Lane, Oregon’s first governor and later its territorial delegate to Congress. Lane was not an imposing figure physically—five-foot eight-inches tall, with dark hair, a high forehead, and a “long leathery face”—but he “was endowed with an ego sufficient for two men.”6 Echoing Deady, he once declared, “We have, under the Constitution, as much right to hold our property—slaves—and have them protected as we have to hold our cattle and have them protected.’’6 In later years, Lane would be described by the future president Andrew Johnson as “more Southern than the South itself.’’7 Williams, Lane, and Deady were all prominent members of the Democratic Party, which dominated Oregon politics until the outbreak of the Civil War. While the party took no official position on slavery, many of the most recognizable names in the party voiced pro-slavery views. Among them was the soon-to-be first statehood governor, John Whiteaker, who “championed the introduction of slavery on the ground that to do otherwise would be to invite race equality.’’8 The smaller political parties, the Whigs and the emerging new Republican Party, were firmly opposed to slavery. Judge Williams stepped into the middle of the debate in a letter that came to be known as the “Free State Letter’’ in which he argued forcefully that slavery would be wrong for Oregon. A remarkable document at the time, it appeared in the July 28, 1857, Oregon Statesman, three weeks before the convening of Oregon’s Constitutional Convention. Rather than challenge slavery on moral or ethical grounds, however, Williams attacked it as wrong for Oregon’s young economy—a dollars and cents argument. He had nothing good to say about blacks, nor did he condemn their treatment as slaves. He seemed even to defend slavery in the South as an economic necessity for Southern states. As with his ruling in the Holmes vs. Ford case, Williams’ Free State Letter hasn’t received the attention it has deserved in Oregon history. Partly this is because Williams’ approach to the issue makes people uncomfortable. His arguments are repugnant, insulting, and highly racist to most...