Oregon black exclusion laws

[3] The laws, born of anti-slavery and anti-black beliefs,[2][4] were often justified as a reaction to fears of black people instigating Native American uprisings.

[5] Early white settlers in the Oregon Country often held both anti-slavery and anti-black beliefs, and many came from states, such as Missouri, which had some version of exclusion laws.

In addition, they believed that allowing slavery could lead to the land in Oregon being taken over by large plantations as in the Southern states and force them to compete with bonded labor.

[7] An 1850 census showed fewer than 50 black residents in the state of Oregon,[3] including a mixed-race man from Pennsylvania, George Bush, who was forced to move North of the Columbia River after the first exclusion Law was passed.

[5] On June 24, 1844, within days of the Cockstock incident, the Oregon Provisional Legislature suspended its rules to allow Peter Burnett to propose a bill "for the prevention of slavery" without reference to a committee.

[2] A week after the law's passage, Burnett wrote in a personal letter that the bill was intended to "keep clear of that most troublesome class of population.

"[2] Decades later, Burnett publicly described the exclusion law as intended to prevent disenfranchised black people from being exposed to politically empowered white people, which he wrote "reminds them of their inferiority", and suggested that their presence was "injurious to the dominant class itself, as such a degraded and practically defenseless condition offers so many temptations to tyrannical abuse".

[1] However, its threatened enforcement against African American settler George Bush led the Bush-Simmons party, which arrived shortly after the law's adoption, to cut a new spur of the Oregon Trail northward across the Columbia River into disputed, British-controlled territory, where they founded the first U.S. settlement on the Puget Sound in present-day Washington State.

Section 4: That when any free negro or mulatto shall have come to Oregon, he or she (as the case may be), if of the age of eighteen or upward, shall remove from and leave the country within the term of two years for males, and three for females, from the passage of this act, and that if any free negro or mulatto shall hereafter come to Oregon, if of the age aforesaid, he or she shall quite and leave the country within the term of two years for males and three for females, from his or her arrival in the county.

Section 2: That if any such free negro or mulatto shall fail to quit and leave the country, as required by the act to which this is amendatory, he or she may be arrested upon a warrant issued by some justice of the peace, and if guilty upon trial before such justice ... the said justice shall issue his order to any officer competent to execute process, directing said officer to give ten days' public notice, by at least four written or printed advertisements, that he will publicly hire out such free negro or mulatto from the country for the shortest term of service, shall enter into a bond with good and sufficient security to Oregon, in a penalty of at least one thousand dollars, binding himself to remove said negro or mulatto out of the country within six months after such service shall expire,; which bond shall be filed in the clerk's office in the proper county, and upon failure to perform the conditions of said bond, the attourney prosecuting for Oregon shall commence a suit upon a certified copy of such bond in the circuit court against such delinquent and his sureties.In September 1849, the legislature passed another exclusion law, with a preamble arguing that "it would be highly dangerous to allow free negroes and mulattos to reside in the Territory or to intermix with the Indians, instilling in their minds feelings of hostility against the white race".

A white resident of the city brought a case against Vanderpool, who was arrested and ordered to leave Oregon within 30 days.

[5] The family of Abner Hunt Francis were ordered out of the state within 40 days, but were allowed to stay after a petition was signed by 225 citizens.

The petition formed the basis of a failed coalition to amend the exclusion law to allow for good behavior bonds by black settlers.

[5] Oregon's congressional delegate, Samuel Thurston, while seeking to limit federal land grants to white people, described the law to congress: The negroes associate with the Indians and intermarry, and, if their free ingress is encouraged or allowed, there would a relationship spring up between them and the different tribes, and a mixed race would ensue inimical to the whites; and the Indians being led on by the negro who is better acquainted with the customs, language, and manners of the whites, than the Indian, these savages would become much more formidable than they otherwise would, and long and bloody wars would be the fruits of the commingling of the races.

[16][4] Historian Cheryl Brooks has argued that Oregon's small Black population has made it difficult for Oregonians to recognize racial discrimination problems in the state.