Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/265

Rh few in the State. He was not, as a speaker, as forcible as Delazon Smith, but in breadth of intellectual grasp and as an acute thinker he was much superior. One humorously cynical citizen who was well acquainted with Mr. Smith's oratorical efforts, remarked that "Delusion" was a big gun on the stump but that, like big metal guns, he required to be loaded to do effective work. He had observed that when Smith got from under the control of the "Salem clique" his speeches lacked pith and marrow. This was a rather severe animadversion, but others had observed a change without attributing a cause. There was, however, a probable reason, and it might have been this which I shall put in words.

As a consequence of the break between Senator Douglas and the Buchanan administration, about the Lecompton Constitution, a silent cleavage was soon perceptible in the Oregon Democracy, General Lane and his friends (among them Delazon) taking the side of the administration, and the "Salem clique" et al. ranging with Douglas. It was in the main a rearrangement of the partisan units with reference to the new assumption of the extensionists, that slave property is protected in the territories by the Constitution, without consulting the squatter sovereigns. The two wings here continued to act together for a short time, but in their private conferences were quite distinct. Delazon's associates in the pro-slavery wing were a non-progressive sort of folk whose intellectual atmosphere was unfavorable to thought-laden oratory. Hence his decline. I here notice an unsuccessful attempt to organize the Republican party in Marion County, in the fall of the same year. The writer spent several days in a house-to-house visitation in the eastern part of the county, inviting those supposed to be favorable to the movement to attend at the Hunt school house on the 11th of October, which about thirty promised to do. On the day appointed six persons appeared—Paul Crandall, Orange Jacobs, Rice Dunbar, E. N. Cooke, Dr. Benjamin Davenport and T. W. Davenport, all of them whilom Whigs, but wise enough to see that a non-committal party has no