Why were some of these fine, moral pioneers so keen on slavery?What was going on in their heads--if anything?



    By the letter of our correspondent, published Monday, it appears that the Oregon convention has adjourned, and the question of slavery or no slavery is to be submitted to a vote of the people. This is in accordance with the principles recognized in the compromise measures of 1850, and more clearly enunciated by the Kansas-Nebraska bill of 1854. It is the true reading of the doctrine that the people of a Territory shall be left to determine the character of their institutions for themselves, when they come to form a state constitution. It is, too, the true construction of squatter sovereignty.
    Our correspondent confidently expresses the opinion that the question will be decided overwhelmingly in the negative. In this opinion we concur, but we see by the preparations making that the opponents of the institution are not to be permitted to walk over the course. There are to be some vigorous efforts made in behalf of slavery, even in the latitude of Oregon. In this we confess our disappointment. Into a country so remote from any slave state, with a climate and soil not adapted to the growth of those great staples which are peculiarly the product of slave labor, we have never supposed that reasonable men could be found who would advocate the introduction of the institution of slavery. Indeed, we have doubted whether one man could be found to advocate the introduction of slavery into a community where it was not recognized by law. In this, too, we find ourselves mistaken. There are men in Oregon who avow themselves in favor of introducing slavery, with its ills, its anxieties and its blighting influences.
    Slavery on the Gulf of Mexico, where cotton, cane, rice and tobacco are made, and where the scorching sun and immense swamps render it almost impossible for the white man to live and labor in the field, may be considered an institution which a kind of overruling necessity forces upon the people. At any rate, the institution is there--inherited by the present generation; they could not, if they would, rid themselves of it, and would not if they could; therefore, it is natural and proper for people emigrating from a state bordering on the Gulf to a territory lying west, to carry slavery with them, and establish the institution by law in said territory.
    But Oregon occupies a vastly different position. She is located a long distance from any slave state, in a northern latitude, which is in the highest degree favorable to the labor of the white man. Her soil produces in agriculture those articles upon which his labor can be most profitably expended. Under this condition of things, the laboring white man in Oregon, we conclude, will never commit the folly of voting to introduce slave labor into the state. To believe him capable of so doing is to give him the credit of having parted with his natural instincts.
    Upon the profit and loss side of the question, the Jackson[ville] (Oregon) Sentinel thus discourses:
    "As to the expediency or policy of slavery in Oregon, that can and will be estimated by dollars and cents, and the cost of a slave should be compared to the amount of capital at interest, taking as a data that a slave will cost in Oregon $1,200. Now, that amount of money at ten percent interest per annum will make $120 per year profit to the owner, and if in the hands of a money lender, he may loan it in some instances at two percent per month. In that case it will amount to $24 per month, but this is hardly a fair case, for all men cannot become money lenders, for the best reason in the world: there would then be no borrowers. Rated at the last mentioned high rate of interest, the labor of the slave would be worth more than the interest on the amount of money the slave would cost."
    The question of "dollars and cents" is really but a small portion of the consideration coming under review, when arguing the proposition to introduce slavery into a community where it does not exist. But upon that branch the argument is excessively weak--the reasoning fallacious. "All men cannot become money lenders," says the Sentinel; it might, with equal truth, have added that all men cannot become slave owners in a slaveholding community. It is the few, and not the many, who own slaves where the institution exists; and the few, per necessity, become the aristocracy of the land.
    Those who own slaves must also provide themselves with more land than those need who cultivate their own farms. The slave owner, being a capitalist, must also have the best land, or the labor of his slave cannot be made as profitable as to loan out the $1,200 paid for him. Large tracts of land cause a country to be sparsely populated in a slave state; they place white neighbors at a distance from each other. This produces an unfavorable social condition, and destroys, as a general rule, all prospects of the success of a common school system. The poor white man who has his family to support, not being able, from want of capital, to compete with the slaveholder in buying good land, is gradually forced to take up with that which is classed poor, and which the slaveholder does not want.
    In political economy a negro is considered as property--capital invested. He is as much a machine as the spinning jenny, and the profits of his labor are considered as the interest paid to the owner upon the money invested. The returns of his year's work are, therefore, not the product of labor, but of capital. Whenever his work is brought into competition with the labor of the white man, it becomes at once a rivalry--a contest between the capital of the rich man, in the form of negroes, and the labor of the white man without capital. This result cannot be avoided; it may be traced in any slave state, and hence we consider it next to impossible for any white man in Oregon, who works to support himself and family, to vote to introduce slavery into that new state.
    There is another dollar and cent consideration which weighs heavily against slavery, and that is, to judge from the past history of the western states, that in ten years the land in Oregon, as a free state, will be twice as valuable as it would be were slavery incorporated in the constitution. This, in a great degree, is owing to the fact already mentioned, that slaveholders most generally own much larger tracts of land than non-slaveholders. On each tract but one improvement for a family is usually needed. The negroes live in cabins near the residence of the master. But when a country is cultivated by the labor of the white man, every head of a family strives to procure a piece of land; the country is cut up into small farms, and on every one there must be put sufficient improvements to accommodate a family. The land is vastly better cultivated, the production of the state greatly added to, and the taxable value of the soil and improvements very much augmented. This is only one view of the case, but even with this, it seems to us impossible for a laboring white man to vote to bring into competition with his labor the money of the capitalist in the shape of negro property.
Sacramento Daily Union, September 30, 1857, page 1


    The thirty-second ection of the Bill of Rights in the Oregon Constitution declares that the Legislative Assembly shall have power to restrain and regulate the immigration to this state of persons not qualified to become citizens of the United States. This points to the slave trade.
"The Latest News," New York Daily Tribune, February 14, 1859, page 4


    SLAVERY IN THE TERRITORIES.--Gen. Lane, of Oregon, thus expresses himself upon this question: In regard to the perplexing question of slavery, I hold that Congress has no power to legislate on the subject; that Congress can neither establish nor prohibit slavery in the territories; that the territories are the common property of the states of the Union, and while in a territorial condition, the people of all the states have equal rights in the enjoyment of such property as they may bring to the territories--otherwise there could be no equality of states; and further, I hold that the Legislative Assembly of a territory have no right, by non-action or hostile legislation, to exclude slavery from a territory, or, in other words, Congress cannot authorize a Legislative Assembly to do that they could not do themselves; and, that the Assembly can do nothing that Congress itself could not do. But I hold, also, that when the people of a territory come to form a state government, they then have the right to establish or prohibit slavery; and whatever their decision at that time may be on that question, Congress should admit the state into the Union regardless of that decision.
San Joaquin Republican, Stockton, California, May 7, 1859, page 2

Last revised April 13, 2021