Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 5.djvu/285

. 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 lie arrested upon a warrant issued by some justice of the peace; and if guilty upon trial before such justice had, 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 to the lowest bidder, on a day and at a place therein specified. On the day and at the place mentioned in said notice, such officer shall expose such free negro or mulatto to public hiring; and the person who will obligate himself to remove 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 attorney prosecuting for Oregon shall commence suit upon a certified copy of such bond in the circuit court against such delinquent and his sureties.

It will be readily seen how much the original act differs from Mr. Gray's statement of its substance.

Not a word is said in the original act about the criminality of the master of a vessel in bringing a colored man into the country. The assertion that "the sheriff was to catch the negro and flog him forty lashes at a time until he left the country," is not only untrue, but the statement conveys the idea that the sheriff was himself to be the sole judge, both as to the guilt of the negro and as to how often the flogging should be repeated. The act, on the contrary, required a judicial trial before a justice of the peace, and that the punishment should only be afflicted in obedience to his order by a constable. The general right of appeal to a higher court existed in these, as in other cases, under Section 3, Article II., of the "Act regulating the judiciary and for other purposes."

The statement that the principles the original act "made it a crime for a white man to bring a negro to the country" is equally untrue as will be readily seen. A crime