Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/356

 328 T. W. Davenport. good people were not impelled by slaveholding habits to the decision they registered, which was more of an error of the head than the heart, a sort of outside view of a situation they had never felt, and which they had very imperfectly considered. There is another aspect which should lead us to a charitable judgment of those pioneers, who, probably, were not ac- customed to critical inquiry. The dominant political forces of that time were all on the side of slavery and exerted to propagate the assumption, very soothing to the pride of the lordly Anglo-Saxon, that the negro was an inferior animal, so inferior that he could not be entrusted with freedom, and it was so by the ordination of the Almighty; that he was not a citizen and had no rights which a white man was bound to respect. Add to these the studied silence of a majority of the people upon the subject, and the example of some of the ablest men in the Territory who were inculcating such senti- ments, and no one should wonder that uninquiring but well- meaning citizens fell in with the political current. Now, it is a fact that the persons who were foremost in the anti-slavery work were also foremost in other reforms, and classed by the Democratic editors as temperance fanatics, ghost-seers, free- lovers, meddlers with everybody's business, etc., all of which tended to discredit them in the minds of uninformed people — and is it not a wonder, in view of all this, that many more people did not vote for slavery and expel the fanatics? After close inspection I have observed that when good men go wrong they are carried along in the corrupted currents of this world, set in motion by forces over which they have little or no control. And by good men I mean those who, under ordinary temptations would not depart from the path of rectitude; or adhering to the previous metaphor, those who are capable of resisting the ordinary currents of corruption. Or it may mean those who would do right, but whose minds have been employed so unremittingly with business affairs that they have never been awakened to the ethical relations arising from social life; or those who have been perverted ])y