Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 12.djvu/145

 POLITICAL PARTIES IN OREGON 137 free and independent citizens to secure the adoption of a "Free State Constitution" for Oregon. "We therefore ... an- nounce ourselves as the 'Free State Republican Party* of Ore- gon, and as such will fight the political battle of freedom." Another important plank in the platform was that declaring for the immediate construction of a central Pacific Railroad and for the improvement of rivers and harbors of a national character, by congressional appropriations. A Territorial Executive Committee was elected and more thorough county organization urged. A committee composed of W. L. Adams, Thos. Pope and Stephen Coffin was selected to prepare an address to the people of Oregon. This address was prepared at length, with great care and was not published until two months after the convention. 1 It was a complete and most able presentation of the slavery question in American politics, since 1784, when a resolution denouncing the slave trade was passed in the Con- tinental Congress. Facts were cited to show that the General Government in all its legislation for seventy years, showed a strong tendency to carry out the wishes of the founders of the government, who looked upon slavery as a great national calamity to be tolerated where it existed, but who shaped the Constitution and all their legislation so as to prepare the way for its gradual extinction. In all this salutary legislation, from the time of the passage of the Ordinance of 1787, onward, the opposition of South Carolina had been marked. The growth and extension of this opposition throughout the South was traced, resulting finally in the Kansas-Nebraska bill, "which has raised the present storm that now rocks the fabric of the Union to its center." The farce of popular sovereignty was shown in a vivid sketch of conditions in Kansas. The modern Democratic party was declared by its policy to have made slavery the paramount issue. The only security for the per- petuity of the Union now lay in "non-extension" the cardinal principle of the Republican party. Clear-cut and well defined, iFor txt, see Oregonian, April 18, and Argus, April n.