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OHQ vol. 117, no. 4506

The Unwanted Sailor

© 2016 Oregon Historical Society

Exclusions of Black Sailors in the Pacific Northwest and the Atlantic Southeast

JACKI HEDLUND TYLER

“That, if any vessel shall come into any port or harbor of this State, from any

other State or foreign port, having on board any free negroes, or persons of

color, as cooks, stewards, mariners, or in any other employment on board said

vessels, such free negroes or persons of color shall be liable to be seized and

confined in jail until said vessel shall clear out and depart from this State . . . ”1

— South Carolina Negro Seamen Acts, 1822

“No negro or mulatto shall be permitted to leave the port where vessels upon

which they are or may be employed, shall be lying, without the written permission

of such master or owner, unless under their immediate control and superinten-

dence. Sec. 4 That it shall be the duty of masters and owners of vessels having

brought negroes and mulattos into Oregon as aforesaid, to cause such negro

or mulatto to leave the territory with such vessel, upon which they shall have

been brought into the territory, or upon some other vessel within forty days.” 2

— Oregon Territorial Law, 1849

OUR STORY BEGINS in the West. Although the national narrative tends to ignore the history of racial oppression in the West prior to the Civil War, early policy-makers in the Oregon Country established exclusionary laws reflective of those appearing in the eastern United States. By the 1840s, foreigners — including British fur traders; American, French, and Spanish missionaries; Hawaiian (Kanaka) and Chinese laborers; sailors of vari-ous nationalities; and American immigrants — began in large numbers to occupy the Pacific Northwest, already home to numerous American Indian

Jacki Hedlund Tyler was awarded a 2014 Donald J. Sterling, Jr., Graduate Research

Fellowship in Pacific Northwest History, which supported this work.

Tyler, The Unwanted Sailor 507

peoples. The foreigners staked claims to Oregon in accordance with what they hoped to gain from the space. After the Oregon Treaty of 1846, land claims by Oregon settlers were absorbed into the legal framework of an American territorial government, but the history of exclusions in the region began before then and continued past Oregon’s statehood in 1859.3 Orego-nians’ racial exclusions shared notable similarities with legal restrictions in the Atlantic Southeast. In both regions, exclusion laws attempted to control non-white populations, and thereby supported white inhabitants’ desire to protect their ownership of land and property.4

This article focuses on Pacific Northwest sailor laws from 1844 to Oregon’s statehood, comparing them with policies in the Atlantic Southeast in order to understand the national context for Oregonians’ actions as well as how their laws compared to those of the slave states.5 Ultimately, different groups of white legislators created Oregon’s exclusion of black sailors and the Negro Seamen Acts (implemented by South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas) as a means of control-ling people and property. The white populations of the Pacific Northwest and the Atlantic Southeast had tentative authority over their property and physical space, and their restrictions of black sailors were linked to debates

BEGINNING IN 1844, Oregon laws prevented black sailors from leaving their vessel without permission and supervision. The USS Shark, a schooner pictured here in a photograph of an 1830s watercolor painting by artist Francois Roux, was a merchant ship identified as having carried black sailors to Oregon ports during that era.

Image of painting courtesy of the Naval History and Heritage Command

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over the institution of slavery; the desire to regulate maritime trade; and efforts to prohibit the spread of “contagion” in the form of racial hostilities. Legislators created anti–black sailor laws to protect white settlement and land ownership in the Pacific Northwest and to maintain racial slavery in the Atlantic Southeast.

On the eve of the Civil War, Oregonians created laws that applied solely to black migrants. Beginning in 1841, American and European settlers developed Oregon’s provisional government, which operated outside the nation-state’s jurisdiction. Through the provisional government, they enacted legislation restricting the presence of black individuals in the region. Some historians have addressed the exclusion of black Americans from Oregon as well as how those exclusions connected to the Democratic Party’s growing influence in the region by the 1850s.6 Here, the focus is on laws restricting black sailors in the Pacific Northwest, how those laws reflected similar exclusions in the Atlantic Southeast during the antebellum era, and the connections between those laws and debates around slavery, race, and property ownership.

The history of black American sailors during the nineteenth century has almost exclusively focused on the maritime industry of the Atlantic coast. Historians such as Jeffrey Bolster have persuasively demonstrated that black American sailors were valuable members of the seafaring community and that the occupation allowed black American men greater personal and economic liberties than they generally experienced on land.7 Maritime scholars have also noted the severe laws restricting free black sailors in the Atlantic Southeast, beginning with the 1822 South Carolina Negro Seamen Act.8 Their evaluations have been vital to understanding black American and Atlantic maritime histories. An examination of black sailors along the Pacific coast offers a more comprehensive understanding of black sailors’ experience during the early American Republic.9 This article demonstrates how the Pacific Northwest’s governing bodies created laws restricting black sailors that reflected both legislation oppressing black sailors in the Atlantic Southeast and Oregonians’ efforts to reserve settlement for white immigrants.

Absent from previous evaluations of the Negro Seamen Acts, which eight Atlantic Southeast slave states eventually enacted, is the fact that the Pacific Northwest constructed strikingly similar policies against black sailors. In the Atlantic states, the Negro Seamen Acts clearly aided con-tainment of free black sailors, away from enslaved populations, to prevent slave insurrections.10 What could Oregon — where slavery was outlawed beginning with the earliest Euro-American government structures — pos-

509Tyler, The Unwanted Sailor

sibly have gained from excluding or restricting black sailors? Historians have attributed Oregon’s constitutional provision prohibiting the immigra-tion of black Americans to inhabitants’ desires to avoid issues connected with slavery and to prohibit the continued presence or immigration of black Americans to their region. Evaluating Oregon’s policies pertaining to black sailors, however, complicates this history by demonstrating how Oregon simultaneously restricted black individuals in a fashion reflective of slave states while also prohibiting slavery.

This analysis approaches the construction and implementation of anti–black sailor laws in the Pacific Northwest and the Atlantic Southeast through evaluation of the three major issues that legislators related to these policies: maintenance of slavery, changes in maritime labor, and prevent-ing the spread of a “contagion.” Each piece of anti–black sailor legislation helped legitimize claims of authority and ownership made by white inhabit-ants over non-white populations and over land and property ownership. As this article demonstrates, justifications for these laws rested on prejudiced perceptions of race and narrow definitions of political rights. Although the reasoning behind the laws was specific to each region, comparison reveals the uncertainty of white authority in opposite corners of the country on the eve of the Civil War. The laws prohibiting the movement and actions of black sailors enabled legislators of both regions to defend white citizens’ control of property. In the Pacific Northwest, this property was in the form of land claimed by white settlers, and in the Atlantic Southeast, it was in the form of enslaved people claimed by white slave-owners.

SLAVERY

The connection between slavery and exclusionary sailor laws was not entirely the same in both coastal regions. Part of the reason for this difference was the discrepancy in the regions’ enslaved populations, which were quite small in the Pacific Northwest and massive in the Atlantic Southeast. Sup-port for the institution of slavery varied in Oregon, where white inhabitants’ authority over lands remained a dominant concern, resulting in debates over property ownership in relation to both slaves and acreage.11 Nevertheless, policy-makers in both regions argued that legislation restricting the move-ment and rights of black settlers and sailors was necessary to manage the institution of slavery.

In 1822, South Carolina courts accused, convicted, and hanged Demark Vesey, a free black American and former sailor. According to the forced testimony of detained and interrogated slaves, Vesey had acted as a leader

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of an attempted slave revolt, and his experience in the maritime industry had influenced his actions. As slave insurrections and resulting revolutions broke out in the West Indies during the early nineteenth century, American slave-owners became increasingly concerned that their enslaved people would attempt similar acts of revolt. Slave-owners and state officials therefore began enacting laws that targeted free black sailors, whether American or otherwise, because they viewed this specific group as having the greatest access both to ideas of revolution and to American locations with enslaved populations.12 Sentiments such as those put forth in David Walker’s Appeal challenged the republican and Christian nature of slavery, referencing the very words of Thomas Jefferson to call for freedom and liberties for all men. Walker’s notoriety, however, derived from his statement that “it is no more harm for you to kill a man who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty.”13 The mere suggestion that enslaved individu-als should seek freedom through violence if necessary separated Walker, a black abolitionist, from his white colleagues, and roused white Americans’ fear of slave insurrections. Particularly following the Haitian Revolution in 1791–1804, lawmakers of the Atlantic Southeast attempted to prevent slave revolts in order to maintain the institution of slavery.14 Eventually, these pre-vention efforts took the form of legislation restricting the movement and actions of black sailors.

The South Carolina Negro Seamen Act of 1822 was the first step in this anti–black sailor legislation, and over the next thirty-four years, seven other states of the Atlantic Southeast adopted similar legislation. Collectively referred to as the Negro Seamen Acts, the laws imprisoned black sailors brought into port or prohibited black sailors from leaving their vessels while in port. The policies also prohibited non-resident, free black Americans from entering their states and restricted free black Americans who had left their states from returning, with specific variances depending on the state.15

Legislators defending the Negro Seamen Acts made several arguments for the necessity of such racial exclusions, but an overwhelming connection among most was concern for preserving the institution of slavery. A mas-sive slave insurrection, slave-owners suggested, could dismantle the whole institution.16 Legal “precautions” against the incitement of slave insurrections were widespread across the American South by the mid nineteenth century, and legislators as well as their constituents supported the Negro Seamen Acts as part of that collection of policies.17 The enactment of similar laws in the Pacific Northwest reflects a related concern.

A considerable, although frequently overlooked, history exists of black sailors working along the Pacific Northwest coastline. Marcus Lopez, a cabin boy and cook aboard the Lady Washington, sailed with American Captain


IN 1829, anti-slavery activist David Walker’s Appeal stoked existing fears of slave insurrections with calls for abolition.

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Robert Gray. Gray is famous for sailing into and naming the Columbia River in 1792, but during an earlier expedition in 1788, Lopez accompanied him into present day Tillamook Bay. A skirmish between Gray’s crew and Tillamook

Indians led to Lopez’s death, making him one of the first immigrants to walk upon the Pacific Northwest shores as well as to die there.18 Residents of the Pacific Northwest identi-fied a black American sailor by the name of Saul as possibly being the first English-speaking settler of Pacific County, Washing-ton. Aboard a vessel that shipwrecked in the mouth of the Columbia River sometime during the mid nineteenth century, Saul survived, abandoned the wrecked vessel, and con-structed a cabin between Illwaco and Fort Canby.19

Lopez and Saul were only two of several black immigrants to arrive in the Pacific Northwest via vessels and prior to the Civil War.20 Legislation in Oregon both explicitly singled out black sailors and included more laws

pertaining to slavery and to free black settlers, which technically applied to all black sailors who came into its ports.

In 1844, Oregon’s provisional government enacted the Lash Law, which prohibited slavery and required the removal of any recently freed individuals from the region. If a black person remained in Oregon, the law instructed local officials either to fine the owner and then free the

THE 1844 “LASH LAW,” championed by provisional government member Peter Burnett, attempted to prevent black individuals from entering Oregon. Pictured here is an excerpt from the act, as published in Burnett’s 1880 book, Recollections and Opinions of an Old Pioneer.


enslaved person, or to arrest the “free negro or mulatto” for not leaving and subject him or her to a punishment of up to thirty-nine lashes. The law also included sections about the removal of free black immigrants new to the region, after a designated period of time, and punishment for their failure to leave Oregon.21 Similar to the Negro Seamen Acts, the Lash Law attempted to keep specific racial groups from the region. Moreover, both directly related to debates over the institution of slavery; the preservation of slavery was the goal for Atlantic Southeast states, while Oregon’s law sought to remove slavery from its borders. Neither the initial Lash Law nor its revisions later that year included language about sailors. Nevertheless, this anti-slavery policy was the beginning of Oregonians’ repeated restric-tions of black individuals from the Pacific Northwest that later specifically included black sailors.

Peter Burnett, a white Oregon settler and member of the provisional government, later insisted that the “principal provision” behind the Lash Law aimed to prevent all black individuals from coming to Oregon, includ-ing those aboard vessels. He explained that, “in case a colored man was brought to the country by a master of a vessel,” Oregonians needed to require captains or masters to pay “bonds to take him away or be fined.”22 In 1849, when legislators separated the policy concerning slavery from a law restricting black Americans from coming to or residing in Oregon, three sections specifically addressed restrictions on black sailors (and the responsibilities of captains or ship owners entering Oregon’s harbors with black sailors). That attention to black sailors became a consistent theme in Oregon’s immigration restriction laws.23 Still, Pacific Northwest settlers had not yet separated the issue of slavery in legislation pertaining to black sailors. In spite of continuous laws prohibiting slavery in Oregon, support remained for the institution and for those choosing to carry slaves into the state, via land or water. Protection of property ownership, whether in the form of land or enslaved individuals, was a right that many legislators adamantly supported.24

Historians including Quintard Taylor have demonstrated that Americans brought slaves to Oregon both before and after the enactment of legisla-tion prohibiting slavery in the region. Throughout the 1850s, numerous court records reveal a struggle within the Oregon Territory over slavery, through slave-owners’ attempts to keep their human property despite local legislation or, in cases where attorneys or judges referenced the Northwest Ordinance, even federal policy.25 Individuals such as Luteshia Censor, for example, found themselves held in enslavement within a free

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territory. After the death of Censor’s owner, David Censor, she attempted to recover her wages for “services rendered” while in Oregon between 1845 and 1852. David Censor had not paid Luteshia Censor for her labor since moving her from the slave state of Missouri. Jury members of the Benton County District Court, however, decided against Censor, denying her right to wages.26 In mid-nineteenth-century Oregon, having anti-slavery legislation and enforcing such laws were two different matters. Similar to the Censor case, several enslaved individuals were brought to the free territory of Oregon and ultimately faced limited support from regional institutions for their petitions for freedom.27 In other words, legal actions in Oregon could resemble those in a slave state, even though Oregon had laws prohibiting slavery within its borders.

Debate over allowing slavery in Oregon continued into the drafting of the state’s constitution. Linn County representative Democrat Delazon Smith admitted to his colleagues in January 1857 that he was “in favor of slavery in Oregon; he was willing to show his hand,” and that he objected to the law restricting black Americans from coming to or residing in Oregon “because it prohibited negroes and mulattoes, bond or free, from com-ing into Oregon....He was opposed to the passage of the bill because it would prevent slave owners from any other states from coming here with their niggers”28 The constitution’s drafters decided to defer the question of slavery to the white, male electorate, which voted 7,727 to 2,645 to ban slavery, and also voted 8,640 to 1,081 to ban free blacks from residing in Oregon. Some historians have argued that the votes in opposition to slavery likely reflected white inhabitants’ not wanting any black individuals to live in Oregon rather than their rejection of the institution of slavery.29 These historians have cited the additional provision restricting black Americans from coming to or settling in Oregon as one proof of such perspective. Nevertheless, free black Americans posed a different dilemma than enslaved individuals; slaves were legally property, not people, and thus slaves could not own property. The desire to protect the permanence of white settlement in Oregon crossed partisan lines, and enslaved individu-als did not threaten white settlement. A free black American, however, held the potential of acquiring or at least attempting to purchase land in the region. The small population of Oregon at statehood in comparison to the large acreage still unclaimed by white settlers created an unease about the presence of non-white individuals who might challenge white settlement. Democratic legislators, who represented Oregon’s largest partisan contingency, furthermore did not close the door on the issue of


slavery with the passage of the state constitution. Immediately following the voters’ ratification, Oregon territorial legislators proposed a series of bills to “provide protection of Slave property.”30 California lawmakers had successfully passed a similar policy a few years after the adoption of its free-state constitution, and several Oregonians believed the enactment of such a law before Congress granted them statehood would somehow protect slave property in the new state.31 Slavery therefore did have some support in Oregon during the late 1850s, with the desire to protect existing slave property reflecting a level of acceptance for the institution — but not for black individuals, and especially not for black sailors.

THE CABIN PICTURED HERE belonged to Reuben Shipley, who was brought to Oregon from Missouri as a slave in the 1850s. Shipley was just one of several enslaved individuals to have lived in Oregon during this time of early white settlement.

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Those Oregon bills pertaining to the protection of slave property (which were never enacted) each contained a section referencing the need to keep sailors in Oregon ports from carrying slaves away from the region. Section 2 of House Bill 38 in January 1858, for example, stated, “No master or owner of any ships or other vessels, nor any other person shall entice, transport, or carry away from the owner or overseer thereof, any slave or slaves, without the consent, writing of said owner or overseer.”32 These proposed policies contained similarities to the Negro Seamen Acts of the Atlantic Southeast, both drawing on the possibility that free black individuals could, and did, aid fugitive slaves in escaping bondage. Sometimes sailors smuggled American slaves from the Southeast to northern states or to harbors under another nation’s jurisdiction, regardless of the serious consequences for such actions,

STEAMERS SUCH AS the Eliza Anderson, pictured here in an undated photograph, frequented ports in the Pacific Northwest during the nineteenth century.

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including death or life-long servitude.33 The absconding of slaves from their owners in the Pacific Northwest was also possible, as the region was in close proximity to British and Mexican borders.

In fact, a slave was carried away from the Pacific Northwest (the Wash-ington Territory) immediately following Oregon’s statehood; he was a young man by the name of Charles Mitchell. Sometime in either 1855 or 1856, Major James Tilton brought Mitchell to the free territory of Washington, settling in Tacoma, where Tilton was the territory’s Surveyor General. In September 1860, Mitchell stowed away aboard the Eliza Anderson. The American crew, on discovering Mitchell, locked him in a cabin with the intention of sending him to Olympia, Washington Territory, but the vessel did not come to port until it reached Victoria, in Vancouver Island Colony. Black residents of Victoria ultimately secured Mitchell’s release from the Eliza Anderson, and despite lengthy protest by American attorneys, the colonial courts declared Mitchell free under the laws of Great Britain by virtue of the vessel’s residing in a British port.34 Mitchell’s case demonstrates that a region did not need a large population of enslaved individuals in order for the legal conundrums of slavery, familiar in slave states, to be relevant.

As addressed above, after the creation of a territorial government in 1849, Oregon legislators dealt separately with the issues surrounding black sailors and slaves, as black sailors became a group considered in the restriction of black Americans from the region. Throughout the 1850s, revised and re-enacted legislation prohibiting the immigration of black individuals to Oregon continuously included sections specifically on black immigrants arriving via vessels. These sections required black individuals to remain onboard their vessels while in an Oregon port and mandated that “masters or owners of vessels” ensure all black individuals aboard the vessel on its entrance were present at its departure.35 Like the connected debates over slavery and the presence of free black Americans, the legis-lation dealing separately with black sailors and black slaves did not mean they were mutually exclusive. The potential presence of black sailors in Oregon prompted debates on slavery and pressed lawmakers to consider the region’s actual stance on the issue. As in the debates related to the Negro Seamen Acts of the Atlantic Southeast, Oregon legislators regularly referenced the region’s need to control slavery when debating the restriction of black sailors. Policies restricting black sailors in the Atlantic Southeast, although complex, had a more direct connection to slavery, due to free black sailors’ potential proximity to enslaved populations. Oregon’s legislation regarding black individuals in relation to vessels served both pro-slavery objectives and the desire to restrict black Americans from living in the Pacific

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Northwest. Overall, Oregon’s legal relationship to slavery was unclear, and as a result, its legal treatment of black indi-viduals and sailors remained complicated and contradictory. Ultimately, the Negro Seamen Acts did not relieve whites of the Atlantic Southeast of their anxiety over free black popula-tions, while Oregon’s various stances on slavery required additional policies to restrict the movement of black sailors, and to keep authority of the region in the hands of its white inhabitants.

MARITIME LABOR

Employment in the maritime industry provided many advan-tages otherwise unavailable to black Americans, but during the antebellum era, new legal restrictions began limiting black sailors’ occupational mobil-ity. In his decision for Davis v.

Marshall in 1821, U.S. Attorney General William Wirt found that black American sailors did

not qualify as citizens “within the intent and meaning of the acts regulating foreign and coastal trade,” and thus, they could not serve as commanders of vessels in states where the position was accessible only to citizens.36 This restriction from higher positions aboard vessels limited the jobs available to black American sailors and, as historians such as Bolster have demon-strated, diminished other sailors’ respect for this group. White sailors could now draw distinctions between themselves and lower-ranking black sailors, emphasizing a racial divide that previously had not been apparent in the Atlantic maritime industry.37

ROBERT SMALLS, pictured here in about 1875, was an enslaved crew member on ships traveling to the Atlantic Southeast during the years leading up to the Civil War. In 1862, Smalls commandeered the C.S.S.

Planter and navigated the ship up the coast of South Carolina to freedom.

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The passage of South Carolina’s Negro Seamen Act of 1822 intensified both the growing division between white and black sailors and restrictions on the employment of black Americans. The law required imprisonment of black sailors while their vessels remained in any South Carolina port, and on the vessel’s departure, the captain had to “pay the expenses of his [black sailor’s] detention.”38 Despite protest by various northeastern merchants, legislators, and community groups, the South Carolina law continued with little objection from the federal government, and within fifteen years, four other Atlantic Southeast states had enacted similar policies. The related costs and inconveniences to ship captains and owners led to a decreased number of black American sailors hired for shipments to the Atlantic South-east coastline.39 By the mid nineteenth century, with European immigrant populations on the rise and ship owners accepting lower standards of sea-faring experience, black American sailors along the Atlantic coast provided little competition to white sailors seeking employment.40

Oregon legislators adjusted occupational restrictions according to who they deemed desired laborers, which did not include black individuals. In 1844, when the provisional government legally restricted black immigrants (free or enslaved) from coming to or settling in the region, the legislators considered also excluding people of Chinese and Hawaiian descent from immigration. They instead deemed those groups necessary laborers and thus permitted them to live and work (with some limitations) in the region.41 In 1855, an Oregon legislator by the name of James Gazley, Sr., spoke on behalf of Chinese laborers, explaining to his colleagues: “If they are enter-prising, industrious and rich people, let us, then instead of preventing, invite their capitalists to come here; let us place no barrier to their free ingress.”42

Legislators made exceptions they believed were warranted by economic necessity, and during the mid nineteenth century, Oregon was in great need of laborers for a variety of occupations, including sailors.

One black sailor who appears in popular narratives of the Pacific Northwest, although rarely connected to the maritime industry, was a black settler by the name of Jacob Vanderpool. Originally from the West Indies, Vanderpool arrived in the Oregon Territory in 1850 on board the Louisiana. Vanderpool chose to remain in Oregon, and within a year had established himself as a resident of Oregon City.43 In August 1851, a white settler, Theophilus Magruder, identified Vanderpool as a “mulatto” and brought charges against him for illegally residing in the territory. Subse-quently, U.S. Marshal Joseph L. Meek arrested Vanderpool under the law restricting the immigration and settlement of black individuals in Oregon.

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The course of the accusation, arrest, trial, and conviction took only six days, and the three witnesses brought in on Vanderpool’s behalf could not dis-suade territorial Chief Justice Thomas Nelson from ruling against the black Oregonian, requiring that a court-appointed official remove Vanderpool from the region. This forced removal of a black settler, who had come in aboard a ship, represented not only the enforcement of the immigration restriction law in Oregon but also the willingness of the territorial courts to banish someone due to their race, in spite of the region’s need for laborers. Regardless of Vanderpool’s specific role aboard the Louisiana, by 1851, his experience at sea exceeded that possessed by most overland migrants arriving in the Pacific Northwest.44

By the 1840s, the Pacific Northwest, like many states along the Atlantic coast, had problems with sailors deserting ships while at port. As stated above, the Oregon immigration restriction prohibited black sailors from leaving their vessels while in port, unless under the supervision of their captain or ship owner. The law also required the captain or ship owner to depart with all black sailors brought into an Oregon port.45 This restriction of black sailors could prevent black Americans from deserting a ship in Oregon and remain-ing in the region. Oregon’s specific problem with desertion was not limited to black Americans coming into Oregon, however; it also applied to all sailors.

By the mid nineteenth century, the Atlantic Southeast was home to a large number of people with mariner experience. This was not the case in the Pacific Northwest, where a majority of immigrants to the region pos-sessed agrarian or inland merchant backgrounds.46 Although the Gold Rush had improved the diversity of laborers available in California, Oregon was unable to re-staff ships that lost their crews while harbored in its bays.47 The very vessel that a black sailor by the name of Saul was accused of dam-aging in 1846, the schooner USS Shark, had “some eight to nine regularly enlisted seamen” desert during its two weeks in Oregon.48 The desertion level became such a problem during the 1840s that Oregonians worried that it would affect their ability to receive shipments.

Focusing on the implications of sailors deserting in Oregon ports, an editorial appearing in the Oregon Spectator during the summer of 1846 drew attention to the lack of legislation protecting vessel owners and merchant companies from desertion. The author noted: “Scarcely a vessel touches our coast without losing a portion of her crew” and warned readers that

So long as merchant ships are subjected to the risk of losing their men without

the hope of getting them back again, or even supplying their place — so long

will those who freight by them, be compelled to pay a higher price for freight

in proportion to the estimate of risk — and so long as freighters pay a higher


freight, so long will consum-

ers be compelled to pay a

higher price for the good they

consume.49

Oregon, according to this set t ler, had become a place where ship captains dreaded coming and sailors seemed to disappear, never to return to the occupation. A solution to this problem, the author argued, was to restrict deserted sailors from the right to own land or to vote.50 Not everyone was in agreement with these harsh penalties. One response accused the “Deserting Sea-men” author of being an Oregon merchant attempt-ing to bend the public will to his own economic gain. Another editorial agreed that desertion was a prob-lem, but that author would not restrict the rights of sail-ors in order to punish them.51

Oregon lawmakers enacted legislation that December entitled “An Act to Prevent Desertion.”

The deserter law (and its subsequent revisions into the 1850s) criminalized the act of desertion, defined as “any person [who] has deserted or absconded from the service of a master or captain of a vessel” with whom they made a contract

ON JANUARY 7, 1847, the Oregon Spectator published the text of “An Act to Prevent Desertion.” Enacted by Oregon lawmakers in December 1846, the law revealed Oregonians’ fear of how desertion would impact the flow of shipments to the region.

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to serve or “any person who shall entice a seaman to leave his ship.”52 It reached beyond penalties incurred for violation of a civil contract, making it illegal to assist or harbor a deserted sailor.53 These laws were operating parallel to the immigration restriction act, and there was no mention of race within them. Rather, the laws applied to all sailors. In Oregon, it was illegal for both a black sailor to leave his vessel for any period without permission and supervision, and for any sailor to abandon permanently his vessel. Maintaining the maritime industry was very important in the Pacific Northwest, as even the 1846 annual “Message of the Governor of Oregon Territory” noted the need for residents to uphold these policies and to impose a heavy penalty on those who enticed a sailor from his ves-sel or in any way assisted a sailor in deserting.54 Criminalizing desertion and prohibiting black sailors from leaving their vessels also benefited ship owners by creating captive laborers.

Around the same time that Oregon initiated its restrictions on black immi-grants and on all sailors, during the 1840s, states in the Atlantic Southeast began revising their Negro Seamen Acts to lessen commercial difficulties, namely to reduce or eliminate the cost and inconveniences to ship captains and owners. North Carolina and Georgia had originally allowed black sailors to remain onboard while in port, and other states later followed suit, thereby eliminating the incarceration fee and significantly reducing the liability for a black sailor who did not leave with the vessel on which he arrived. By 1856, the year Texas became the last state to adopt a Negro Seamen Act, even the harshest enforcers of the law (South Carolina and Louisiana) had revised their statutes restricting black sailors to remaining on their vessels.55 But without the ability to leave the ship, the black sailors also lost the ability to seek dif-ferent seafaring employment. The Negro Seamen Acts, similar to Oregon’s restrictions on all sailors, permitted employers to retain their crews, potentially against their will, as long as the vessel traveled to states where these laws were in place. Changing vessels was common practice among sailors in the Atlantic as well as the Pacific, especially in cases where captains mistreated or neglected their workers. During the 1850s and 1860s, for example, San Francisco courts documented several cases in which sailors took legal action against abusive captains in order to find new maritime employment.56

Another reason the Atlantic states eventually reformed the Negro Sea-men Acts was to address and relieve trade problems. Northern merchants and European nations (especially Great Britain) prohibited slavery, and a considerable number of black sailors resided in and worked out of both


locations. Although Great Britain’s lawmakers eventually accepted that they could not force the Atlantic Southeast states to make exceptions for foreign subjects, the Negro Seamen Acts nevertheless damaged the maritime com-merce between the slave and free trading partners. British merchants had avoided ports under the Negro Seamen Acts for a time, and even after resum-ing those routes, continued to voice to the U.S. government displeasure over the black sailor laws and their supporters.57 European and northeastern vessels also entered Oregon ports in great number.

The maritime industry along the Pacific Northwest coast differed from its Atlantic counterpart in many respects, but as the nineteenth century progressed, global trade increasingly looked to the Pacific. One argument for the United States acquiring the Pacific Northwest as a territory in the 1840s was the region’s potential as a launching point to Asian markets.58

Oregon’s law restricting black sailors, therefore, had the potential to hurt trade relations with several nations as well as financially injure merchants from states in the Atlantic Northeast. According to the sailor sections of the immigration restriction laws, the owner of a vessel faced a fee if the owner lost a black sailor on entering Oregon harbors, which not only denied the ship an employee but also financially penalized the ship owner.59 Alluding to as much on the eve of Oregon’s constitutional convention, a territorial rep-resentative identified as “Rogers” made note that the desertion laws insured sailors (regardless of their race) would not be able to flee while harbored in an Oregon port. Rogers further insisted that the additional restriction on black sailors was therefore unnecessary and would only “injure our coast trade.”60 Debates during the constitutional convention focused mostly on the immigration restriction and legislators’ desire to keep black individuals out of Oregon, and the sections pertaining specifically to black sailors were ultimately not included in the state constitution.

Legislators did not strip the sailor provisions from the Oregon Constitution because Oregonians had deemed black American sailors as worthy laborers. Rather, the convention delegates determined that any benefit from explicitly restricting this group in the maritime industry did not outweigh the negative impact that the legislation could have on commercial trade.61 The fear of a slave insurrection in the Atlantic Southeast would not dissipate until after the Civil War, thus a few states retained the Negro Seamen Acts regardless of their adverse impact on trade. In the Pacific Northwest, the willingness of legislators to revise sailor restrictions in light of their adverse effects on trade weakened the justification that the exclusion of black individuals from

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Oregon was necessary to control the maritime industry. Concerns over the maritime industry may have seemed a reasonable justification for restricting black sailors, but once commerce was threatened, the underlying desire to exclude black settlers from Oregon and keep authority over the region within the hands of the white inhabitants became more apparent.

ALTHOUGH PUBLISHED years after the laws restricting black sailors were lifted, newspaper illustrations such as the one pictured here still revealed legislators’ fear of racial hostilities in the coastal regions. This illustration, titled “The Head of the Nation’s Nightmare — see what dreams may come from too free an indulgence in the ‘pipe of peace’,” was published in Frank

Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1873; it depicted a black American revolt in Louisiana and the Modoc War in Oregon.

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CONTAGION

A contagion, when referenced in a political or legal capacity, is the potential or imminent spread of something deemed dangerous to the public. Although contagion has generally been associated with a disease epidemic, govern-ing bodies sometimes also view ideas and specific actions as contagion. Attempts to control a contagion broaden government powers, and the connection to public safety trumps most opposition to contagion policies. As a result, lawmakers can use the argument of contagion-control to craft legislation that is in fact motivated by desire for political power or social control, as was the case with the Negro Seamen Acts and Oregon’s exclu-sion laws against black sailors and black immigrants. The threat of racial hostilities was a justification for restricting the presence of black inhabitants in the Atlantic Southeast as well as in the Pacific Northwest. The groups that allegedly posed this threat of violence were, however, specific to each region.

Legislators of the Atlantic Southeast enacted the Negro Seamen Acts to limit the possibility of a slave insurrection, and in several instances, legislators as well as public supporters equated slave insurrection with an epidemic. The South Carolina Association, a non-governmental but highly influential political organization, had both shaped and defended the state’s Negro Seamen Act as necessary to keep free black sailors from “introducing among our slaves, the moral contagion of their pernicious principles and opinions.”62 Equating slave insurrections with an epidemic that threatened the state, southeastern legislators upheld that neither the federal government nor international trade treaties could take precedence over the safety of the state.

Defending South Carolina’s law from federal and British criticism, Charles-ton attorney Benjamin Hunt argued, “We have more reason to believe in the moral contagion they [free black sailors] introduce, than in the importation of yellow-fever.”63 U.S. Attorney General John Macpherson Berrien further supported the Negro Seaman Act of South Carolina, stating that to deny a state the power to guard its citizens from the contagion of disease would be “too revolting to arrogate to the federal government.”64 Berrien continued, stating that when the institution of slavery and the “peculiar situation of the slaveholding State is considered,” the state must have the “power of protect-ing themselves as they may, against the introduction among their colored people of that moral contagion [i.e. ideas of freedom].”65 Control over the movement of free black sailors, advocates of the law insisted, was the only viable way to avoid the spread of slave insurrections, which were increas-ing on a global scale during the antebellum era. Slave-state lawmakers suggested that incidences such as the Nat Turner slave insurrection were

526 OHQ vol. 117, no. 4

products of abolitionist rhetoric in the United States and in Europe that helped support both ideas of freedom and revolts that encouraged acts of violence to obtain that freedom.66 Legislators therefore depicted slave insurrections as a contagion that had to be contained to ensure public safety, rather than solely a threat to the institution of slavery.

Considerable physical distance generally separated the few enslaved people who lived in the Pacific Northwest, significantly reducing the chance of a slave revolt. Nevertheless, Oregon legislators also employed the dis-course of contagion to justify restrictions on black sailors and black immi-grants. Their goal was to maintain and increase white inhabitants’ control over land during the early decades of American settlement in the region.

Pacific Northwest slave insurrections did not pose the same threat wit-nessed in the Atlantic Southeast, but Oregonians were greatly concerned about hostilities between white settlers and American Indians. The larger the migrant populations became, the more tension developed between settlers and Native peoples — especially over claims to land and property. Black Americans were a very small group within the settler population of Oregon, but after the story of an incident in March 1844 known as the “Cockstock Affair” became widespread, Oregon legislators (and even federal officers) began drawing connections between the presence of black settlers and potential wars with American Indians.

On March 4, 1844, an altercation allegedly broke out between two black Oregon settlers, James D. Saul and Winslow Anderson, and a Wasco Indian named Cockstock, who died as a result. Saul and Anderson report-edly had a disagreement with Cockstock over the ownership of a horse.67

This was not an isolated incident; that same day, another confrontation had occurred, resulting in the death of an American Indian at the hands of white settlers.68 Nevertheless, local accounts and historians have viewed the Cockstock Affair as an impetus for legislation restricting the presence of black immigrants — although no actual evidence exists of the incident occurring in the way sources described it. Accounts of the altercation were widely published, and even a decade later, its notoriety allowed legislators supporting the exclusion of black settlers to reference the Cockstock Affair without providing explanation or context.69 This narrative of the event and the related legislation reveal white lawmakers’ opinion that black settlers, such as Saul and Winslow, provoked hostilities between the region’s new settlers and its longtime Native inhabitants. By associating the presence of black settlers with the contagion of an “Indian war,” white Oregonians offered a legal justification for the restriction of black sailors and black immigrants in


Oregon.70 The lack of actual evidence about the Cockstock Affair, moreover, echoed the Demark Vesey case years earlier in the Atlantic Southeast. These stories, documented by white individuals, validated legislators’ actions as well as public opinion, but they did not prove the crime.

In 1849, the newly formed territorial government in Oregon enacted an immigration restriction specifically focused on black individuals. The law included a preamble stating: “Whereas, situated as the people are, in the midst of an Indian population, it would be highly dangerous to allow free negroes and mulattoes to reside in the territory or to intermingle with Indians, instilling into their mind feeling of hostility against the white race.”71 Similar to the Atlantic Southeast states’ argument that free black sailors would instill a desire for emancipation among the enslaved populations, Oregon legislators insisted that violent resistance to white control of the region would be the result of black immigrants having contact with Native Americans.

Shortly thereafter, Oregon Territory Congressional Delegate and Demo-crat Samuel Thurston found it necessary to defend the immigration restric-tion law, as well as the exclusion of black Americans from land claims, during congressional debates over the Donation Land Act of 1850. Thurston informed the House of Representatives that “such as [black Americans] have gone there, have preferred to rove with Indians, encouraging them to acts of hostility against the whites instead of settling down and laboring like the settlers.”72 Although cultivated in the Far West, these ideas were not especially questioned by the rest of the nation, because some eastern newspapers had begun to address the connection between restrictions of black immigrants and sailors and the potential confrontation between set-tlers and American Indians.73 One Ohio newspaper suggested that Ameri-can Indians had corrupted black Americans, noting the “knowledge of the influence which numerous Indians have over them.”74 The fear of relations between American Indians and black individuals in the Pacific Northwest also included the potential act and results of miscegenation.

Relationships between American Indian women and American or Euro-pean men was a reality of life during the fur trade and early settlement eras in the Pacific Northwest. Reporting to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s London headquarters in the 1830s, Chaplain Herbert Beaver complained multiple times about the mixed-race marriages and relationships between employees and local American Indian women at Fort Vancouver.75 Oregon lawmakers viewed miscegenation between American Indian women and anyone other than white men as dangerous. Uncontrolled relations threatened settlers’ ability to control land. If the mere interaction between black sailors or

528 OHQ vol. 117, no. 4

migrants and Native people did not create enough of a supposedly danger-ous situation, legislators could truly evoke the fear of racial hostilities by pointing to the intimate relationships between these groups.

During legislative assemblies in preparation for the Oregon Constitutional Convention, delegates supporting the exclusion of black immigrants drew on language about miscegenation between black immigrants and American Indians to combat their opponents’ arguments about the need for laborers. Legislators asserted that if Oregon permitted black individuals in the region, they would “mix up with the aboriginees [sic] and create the most vilest race on earth.”76 Democrat La Fayette Grover argued, “those who framed our [Oregon’s] earlier laws, found that negroes were coming into the Territory and affiliating with the Indians and both became enemies of the whites.”77 Grover built on the argument that the simple presence of black immigrants encour-aged possible wars between American Indians and white settlers through his claim that “the cross between the Indians and the negro produced bad

A FEW BLACK INDIVIDUALS, such as Columbus Sewell, settled in Oregon despite its exclusion laws. Sewell is pictured here (center foreground) in about 1863, after moving to Canyon City, Oregon, to work as a miner and freight hauler.

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blood — a clan liable to become hostile to the white settlers.”78 Miscegena-tion between these groups, legislators claimed, had the potential to spread hostility through generations. Similar to Atlantic Southeast lawmakers’ claims that the Negro Seamen Acts would defend against slave insurrection vio-lence that could spread like a contagion, Oregon legislators used the fear of war with American Indians to criminalize relationships between Indians and black immigrants. Hostilities between white inhabitants and American Indians, viewed in that context, served as a justification for the exclusion of free black individuals from their future state.

Within the Oregon Constitutional Convention, a smaller number of politi-cians opposed to the immigration restriction. Delegates such as Leander Holmes challenged their colleagues to explain the actual danger or trouble that black migrants had caused, asking if black Americans were any worse than other non-white populations and pointing to those black Oregonians who had successfully established businesses in their territory.79 In many cases, however, these arguments against the exclusion law were more supportive of additional laborers than of black Americans as a group. Even some of the pro-slavery delegates held this minority opinion, because the restriction of black individuals could prevent future legal discussions of slavery in the state. In fact, Holmes had voiced nearly the opposite posi-tion two years earlier, describing the co-mingling of black settlers and American Indians as a “state of pollution.”80 Ultimately, a majority of the delegates maintained that the presence of black Americans in the region would be harmful to the success of the state. Black individuals were not responsible for violence between settlers and American Indians, but this argument of contagion nevertheless found sympathizers in the region. Oregonians separately voted for the exclusion of black Americans from their state. Once outside the Pacific Northwest, however, Oregonians had to defend their legislation.

As Congress considered Oregon’s statehood application, Oregon’s congressional delegate and Democrat Joseph Lane found himself having to justify the constitutional clause that would restrict black Americans from living, owning property, or filing a suit in Oregon. Responding to criticism of Oregon’s laws by Representative and Republican H.J. Farnsworth of Illinois, Lane insisted that black Americans in Oregon had:

already caused as much trouble; a population which has already cost this Gov-

ernment much expense, and which has cost the sacrifice of the lives of many

white men in Oregon for the negroes there have gone amongst the Indians,

530 OHQ vol. 117, no. 4

and have instigated trouble and hostility. If there had been more considerable

free negro population among us than there was, it was not at all certain that

our whole white settlements would not have been cut off.81

Lane argued that the presence of free black immigrants would destroy the region through the instigation of violence with American Indians. Their exclu-sion, therefore, was a matter of safety to Oregon and its white settlements, and only this restrictive legislation against black individuals could control the contagion of violence their presence would create.82

Violence between Oregon settlers and the region’s Native peoples remained an actual possibility throughout the nineteenth century. Attributing potential warfare between Oregonians and American Indians to the presence of black immigrants or sailors, however, was more convenient for white set-tlers than reflective of the actual causes of conflict. Oregon lawmakers had marginalized black settlers with their first pieces of legislation and continued to identify this specific group as unwanted. Access to and authority over land remained the overriding goal of Oregon white settlers, and conflict between them and American Indians threatened this objective. In the Atlantic Southeast, the major goal had been to preserve the slave-based society. As historian Ira Berlin argues, the reason coastal states such as Virginia did not adopt the Negro Seamen Acts was that they did not view incoming black sailors as any more dangerous than the free black Americans who already lived there. The lower Southeast, however, with larger percentages of enslaved peoples, feared disruption to their “fragile three-caste system” by outsiders such as black sailors.83 The perceived threats in the Atlantic Southeast and the Pacific Northwest were real, but the arguments of contagion that both regions used to prevent black sailors from entering their ports came from different objectives crafted by the white inhabitants in power. Both feared violence between races, but those in the Southeast wanted to control the spread of ideas, whereas those in the Northwest restricted social and physical relationships. Contagion rhetoric itself became a way to control specific non-white groups and protect white inhabitants’ claims to their property.

CONCLUSION

The Pacific Northwest and the Atlantic Southeast had several similarities in their laws restricting the presence and movement of black sailors during the antebellum era. The specific motivations for the enactment of their laws were different and particular to each region, but the fundamental objective of leg-islators to keep the control of property in the hands of the white inhabitants


1. Acts and Resolutions of the General As-

sembly of the State of South Carolina Passed in

December, 1822 (Columbia: Daniel Faust, 1823).2. Oregon Provisional and Territorial

Government Records, MSS 1226, Index 3515, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland, Oregon, [hereafter OHS Research Library]; spelling errors edited.

3. The term settler refers to persons and their descendants who permanently occupied a space that was not their place of origin. This is not to suggest, however, that the space was unsettled before their existence there; rather it reflects how these foreign occupants viewed themselves in Oregon.

4. The term race references the social and political perception of a person’s skin color, although this perception was not always based on physical appearance.

5. Sailor laws applied to both black indi-viduals working on a vessel and those aboard a vessel. Here, the term sailor is used to apply to both groups as reflected in the policies.

6. For scholarship on Oregon’s racially exclusive laws during the mid nineteenth cen-tury, see La Fayette Grover, Commissioner, The

Oregon Archives: Including Journals, Gover-

nors’ Messages, and Public Papers of Oregon

(Salem: Asahel Bush, Public Papers of Oregon, 1853); Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial

Frontier (New York: W.W. Norton Co., 1998); David Alan Johnson, Founding the Far West:

California, Oregon, and Nevada, 1840–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Eugene H. Berwanger, The Frontier Against

Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudices and

the Slavery Extension Controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967); Robert Jo-hannsen, Frontier Politics and the Sectional

Conflict: The Pacific Northwest on the Eve of

the Civil War (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1950); as well as my own work, “The Power of Political Chatter: Settler Colonialism and the Construction of Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Oregon,” (Ph.D. diss., Washington State University, 2015); and “The Color and Gender of Citizenship: Immigration Restriction in the Development of Oregon,” Western Legal

History 24:1 (Winter/Spring 2011): 59–91.7. Jeffrey W. Bolster, Black Jacks: African

American Seaman in the Age of Sail (Cam-bridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

NOTES

by attempting to control non-white populations created parallels between the coastal locations on the eve of the Civil War. Preserving the institution of slavery lay at the heart of many motivations for the Negro Seamen Acts, and Oregon legislators who desired to preserve white inhabitants’ property claims relied on laws restricting the presence of black sailors and black immigrants. Oregon’s expansion and varied demographics between 1844 and 1859 funda-mentally altered its motivations for excluding black individuals, and ultimately supported the restriction of black sailors in the region in ways similar to their Atlantic Southeast counterparts, but with important differences.

532 OHQ vol. 117, no. 4

8. Although the multiple anti-black sailor laws possessed different names at times, they are collectively referred to in this article as the Negro Seamen Acts. For discussion of black American sailors in the Atlantic during the antebellum period, see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed

Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the

Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

(Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Michael Alan Schoeppner, “Navigating the Dangerous At-lantic: Racial Quarantines, Black Sailors and United States Constitutionalism,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Florida, 2010); Philip Hammer, “Great Britain, the United States, and the Negro Seaman Acts, 1822–1848,” Journal of Southern

History 1:2 (May 1935): 3–28; Harold D. Langley, “The Negro in the Navy and Merchant Service, 1789–1860, 1798,” Journal of Negro History 52:4 (October 1967): 273–86; Alan January, “The South Carolina Association: An Agency for Race Control in Antebellum Charleston,” South

Carolina Historical Magazine 78:3 (July 1977): 191–201; Bolster, “ ‘To Feel Like a Man’: Black Seamen in the Northern States, 1800–1860,” Journal of American History 76:4 (March 1990): 1173–99; and Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812:

American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Reb-

els, & Indian Allies (New York: Vintage, 2010). 9. I hope that this work will inspire re-

search into black sailors’ occupational migra-tion patterns as well as the maritime industry’s reaction to western prejudices.

10. This basis is discussed at much greater length below. See Hammer, “Great Britain, the United States, and the Negro Seaman Acts, 1822–1848,” Journal of Southern History 1:2 (May 1935).

11. Conflict between white settlers and American Indians over land continued for another two decades after Oregon statehood, although by 1859, legislators and voters had settled the issue of slavery — at least within their state constitution. See Jeffrey Ostler, The

Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis

and Clark to Wounded Knee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

12. Extensive disagreement among histo-rians over the validity of testimony and court recordings for the Vesey trial has resulted in

some historical accounts being in complete opposition. For discussion of the trial as well as this disagreement, see Michael P. Johnson, “Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators,” William and Mary Quarterly 58:4 (October 2001): 915–76; Lionel H. Kennedy and Thomas Parker, ed. The Trial Record of Denmark Vesey (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970); and Edward A. Pearson, ed. Designs Against Charleston:

The Trial Record of the Denmark Vesey Slave

Conspiracy of 1822 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

13. Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles;

Together with a Preamble, To the Coloured

Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and

Very Expressly, to Those of the United States

of America, Written in Boston, State of Massa-chusetts, September 28, 1829, Third and Last Edition, with Additional Notes, Corrections, etc., (Boston: Revised and Published by David Walker, 1830).

14. Ronald G. Walters, The Anti-Slavery

Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

15. Acts and Resolutions of the Gen-

eral Assembly of the State of South Carolina

Passed in December, 1822; “Memorial of Masters of American Vessels,” Congressional

Globe, 17th Cong., 2nd Sess., Appendix, pg. 1305–06; H. Jefferson Powell, ed. The Con-

stitution and the Attorney General (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1999), 36–50.

16. Hammer, “Great Britain, the United States, and the Negro Seaman Acts, 1822–1848”; Michael Schoeppner, “Status Across Borders: Roger Taney, Black British Subjects, and a Diplomatic Antecedent to the Dred Scott Decision,” Journal of American History 100:1 (June 2013): 46–67.

17. See William Freeling, The Road to

Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis: America

Before the Civil War, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper Row, 1976); and Steve A. Channing. Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina

(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970). 18. Portland Bureau of Planning, The

History of Portland’s African American Com-


munity, 1805–Present (City of Portland, 1993). 19. “Pacific County Settlers,” Morning

Oregonian, November 2, 1899.20. For examples of black individuals who

arrived in the Pacific Northwest via vessel, see Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontiers; and Keith Richard, “Unwelcome Settlers: Black and Mulatto Oregon Settlers,” Oregon

Historical Quarterly, 84:2 (Summer 1983): 29–55, 173–205.

21. Peter H. Burnett, Recollections and

Opinions of an Old Pioneer (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1880), 213.

22. Ibid., 212.23. Oregon Provisional and Territorial

Government Records, MSS 1226, Index 6035 and 7903, OHS Research Library.

24. Journal of the Ninth Regular Session

of the House of Representatives of the Ter-

ritory of the legislative Assembly of Oregon

Territory, commencing December 7th, 1857 (Salem: Asahel Bush, Territorial Printer, 1858); Oregon Provisional and Territorial Govern-

ment Records Access Project, Index 8661, 9671, 10974, Oregon State Archives, 1990; “House,” Oregonian, December 26, 1857; “Bill to Protect Slave Property,” Oregon Sentinel, February 6, 1858; “Report of the Judiciary Com-mittee from Slave Petitions,” Oregon Sentinel.

25. Taylor, In Search of the Racial Fron-

tiers; R. Gregory Nokes, Breaking Chains:

Slavery on the Trail in the Oregon Terri-

tory (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2013).

26. “District Court, Benton County,” Or-

egon Statesman, October 17, 1854.27. Quintard Taylor, “Slaves and Free Men:

Blacks in the Oregon Country, 1840–1860,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 83:2 (Summer 1982): 153–70; Case files for Vanderpool vs.

Magruder, 1851, Philip Foster Collection, MSS 996, OHS Research Library; Richard, “Unwel-come Settlers”; Nokes, Breaking Chains.

28. “Council,” Oregonian, January 24, 1857. Note, this source inaccurately identifies Smith from Jackson. Other parts of the na-tion were aware of this sentiment, as several newspapers reported in surprise that Oregon prohibited slavery in its state constitution. One South Carolina newspaper noted “Oregon had

a strong tendency to adopt African slavery by her constitution. She did not do this, however, though there was a considerable popular vote for it.” See “Hon. W.W. Boyce,” Charleston

Mercury, August 23, 1858.29. Charles Carey, The Oregon Constitu-

tion and Proceedings and Debates of the

Constitutional Convention of 1857 (Salem: State Printing Department, 1926); Johnson, Founding the Far West; Berwanger, The Fron-

tier Against Slavery. 30. See, for example, Journal of the

Ninth Regular Session of the House of Rep-

resentatives of the Territory of the legislative

Assembly of Oregon Territory, commencing

December 7th, 1857 (Salem: Asahel Bush, Territorial Printer, 1858).

31. Stacey Smith, Freedom’s Frontier:

California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor,

Emancipation, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

32. Oregon Provisional and Territorial Government Records, MSS 1226, Index 8661, OHS Research Library.

33. Bolster, Black Jacks, 211–13.34. “U.S.M.S.S. Eliza Anderson,” Olympia

Pioneer and Democrat, September 28, 1860; “H.P. P. Cease,” British Colonist (Victoria, B.C.), September 27, 1860; Robbie L. Reid, “How One Slave Became Free,” British Columbia Histori-

cal Quarterly, vol. 6 (October 1942): 251–56. 35. Oregon Provisional and Territorial

Government Records, MSS 1226, Index 3515, 6035, and 7903, OHS Research Library; “House,” Oregon Statesman, January 20, 1857; also, for discussion and numerous examples of these connections, see Tyler, “The Power of Political Chatter,” 50–117

36. Davis v. Marshall, 14 U.S. 96 (1821). 37. Bolster, Black Jacks, 170–8938. Acts and Resolutions of the Gen-


Passed in December, 1822; “Memorial of Masters of American Vessels,” Congressional

Globe, 17th Cong., 2nd Sess., Appendix, pp. 1305–1306

39. Scholars have also demonstrated that these laws allowed merchant companies to justify lower pay (although illegal), or a refusal to hire black American sailors.

534 OHQ vol. 117, no. 4

40. Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra; Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in

the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 1961); Bolster, “ ‘To Feel Like a Man’,” 1173–99.

41. For discussion of race-based laws in the American West, see Taylor, In Search

of the Racial Frontier; Najia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and

Racial Anxieties in the United States, 1848–82

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); and Journal of the House of Representatives of the

Territory of Oregon Being the Eighth Regular

Session 1856–7 (Salem, Oregon: Territorial Printer, 1857), 11, 64, 90.

42. “What the Present Legislature Finds to Do,” Oregonian, January 6, 1855.

43. Scholars disagree over whether Vanderpool was a business owner while a resident in Oregon. Some have attributed the ownership of a saloon and/or boarding house to Vanderpool. Some have also placed Vanderpool in the city of Salem sometime before he became a resident of Oregon City. See Elizabeth McLagan, A Peculiar Paradise:

A History of Black in Oregon, 1788–1940 (Port-land, Ore.: Georgian Press, 1980); and Taylor, “Slaves and Free Men,” 153–170.

44. Case Files for Vanderpool vs. Magrud-

er, 1851, Philip Foster Collection, MSS 996, OHS Research Library; Taylor, In Search of the

Racial Frontier, 82–91.45. Oregon Provisional and Territorial


46. William A. Bowen, The Willamette Val-

ley Migration and Settlement on the Oregon

Frontier (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978); Dorothy O. Johansen, “A Work-ing Hypothesis for the Study of Migrations,” Pacific Historical Review 36 (February 1967): 1–12; Richard, “Unwelcome Settlers,” 193–95.

47. For a discussion of growing occupa-tions in California because of the Gold Rush, see Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The

Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000).

48. “Deserting Seamen,” Oregon Specta-

tor, August 20, 1846.49. “Deserting Seamen,” Oregon Specta-

tor, August 6, 1846.50. Ibid. Similar accounts and argu-

ments about deserters include: “Ship’s crew Deserters,” Oregon Spectator, July 10, 1851; and “Deserting Seamen,” Oregon Spectator, August 20, 1846.

51. “For the Spectator,” Oregon Spectator, August 20, 1846; “Deserting Seamen,” Oregon

Spectator, September 3, 1846. 52. “An Act to Prevent Desertion,” Oregon

Provisional and Territorial Government Re-cords, MSS 1226, Index 1123, OHS Research Library.

53. Ibid.54. George Abernethy, “Message of the

Governor of Oregon Territory,” Oregon Spec-

tator, December 10, 1846; “Deserting Seamen,” Oregon Spectator, August 20, 1846.

55. Acts and Resolutions of the Gen-


Passed in December, 1822; Acts Passed at the

Second Session of the Fifteenth Legislature of

the State of Louisiana, Begun and Held in the

City of New Orleans, December 13, 1841 (New Orleans: J.C. De St. Romes, State Printer, 1842); General Laws of the Sixth Legislature of the

State of Texas, Passed at Its Adjourned Ses-

sion, Convened July 7, 1856 (Austin: Marshall & Oldham, state printers, 1856); William Finely Swindler, comp. Sources and Documents of

the United State Constitutions (New York: Oceana Publications, 1973–1976), vol. 2, 327.

56. See for example, Bolster, Black Jacks, 190–204; and “Illegal and Cruel Treatment of Sailors,” Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco) June 16, 1860.

57. Hammer, “Great Britain, the United States, and the Negro Seaman Acts, 1822–1848,” 3–28; Michael Schoeppner, “Status Across Borders: Roger Taney, Black British Subjects, and a Diplomatic Antecedent to the Dred Scott Decision,” 46–67.

58. William Speer, The Oldest and the

Newest Empire: China and the United States


(Hartford: S.S. Scranton & Co., 1870). 59. Oregon Provisional and Territorial


60. “House,” Oregon Statesman, January 20, 1857. Although the newspaper report of the constitutional convention identified the speaker as “Rogers,” there was no delegate by this name.

61. In addition to many newspaper articles, for discussion of the immigration restriction during the Oregon Constitutional Convention, see Charles Carey, The Oregon Constitution

and Proceedings and Debates of the Con-

stitutional Convention of 1857 (Salem: State Printing Department, 1926).

62. “Memorial of the South Carolina As-sociation,” November 1823, South Carolina De-partment of Archives and History, Columbia.

63. “The Argument of Benj. Faneuil Hunt,” Charleston Mercury, September 6, 1823, continued in the Charleston Mercury on September 13, 1823.

64. Powell, ed. The Constitution and the

Attorney General, 47.65. Ibid.66. Michael Schoeppner, Peculiar Quar-

antines: The Seamen Acts and Regulatory Au-

thority in the Antebellum South, 559 University of Illinois, Law and History Review, 31 (2013); Walters, The Anti-Slavery Appeal; William A. Link. Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics

in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2003).

67. W.H. Gray, A History of Oregon,

1792–1849: Drawn from Personal Observa-

tions and Authentic Information (Portland: Harris & Holman, 1870), 395–97; Taylor, “Slaves and Free Men,” 156.

68. La Fayette Grover, Commissioner, The Oregon Archives: Including Journals,

Governor’s Messages, and Public Papers of

Oregon (Salem: Asahel Bush, Public Printer, 1853), 36–37. No name is given for the Ameri-can Indian killed, only that the white settlers originally wanted him to be punished by the Cayuse Indians for undisclosed crimes, but

then set out to capture this individual them-selves. No names were given of the white settlers involved in this altercation either.


70. For examples of correlations between black Americans and migrants and violence with American Indians, see “For the Oregon Spectator,” Oregon Spectator, October 14, 1847; “Intelligence from the Interior,” Oregon

Spectator, July 27, 1848; “Oregon,” Oregon

Spectator, August 22, 1850; and “Drowned,” Oregon Spectator, December 30, 1851.

71. Oregon Provisional and Territorial Government Records, MSS 1226, Index 3515, 3596, 3666, OHS Research Library.

72. “Oregon,” Oregon Spectator (Oregon City) August 22, 1850.

73. See, for example, “News from Or-egon,” The Weekly Herald (NY), November 12, 1853.

74. No title, Ohio Observer (Hudson, OH), February 1850.

75. Thomas E. Jessett, ed. Reports

and Letters of Herbert Beaver, 1836–1838,

Chaplain to the Hudson’s Bay Company and

Missionary to the Indians at Fort Vancouver (Portland: Reed College Champoeg Press, 1959).


77. “House,” Oregon Statesman, January 13, 1857.

78. Ibid.79. “The Constitution,” Oregon Argus,

October 17, 1857.80. For a discussion of this minority argu-

ment, see Jacki Hedlund Tyler, “The Color and Gender of Citizenship: Immigration Restriction in the Development of Oregon,” Western Le-

gal History 24:1 (2011): 71–75.81. “Admission of Oregon,” Congressional

Globe, 35th Cong., 2nd Sess. p. 108.82. Ibid.83. Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters:

The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 216.

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