Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 12.djvu/366

 358 L. B. SHIPPEE United States directed that times, manner, and places of hold- ing elections for Representatives should be fixed by the State Legislatures, unless Congress should act in the matter; no provision allowed these details to be fixed by a constitutional convention ; besides, the section of the schedule of the Oregon constitution, on which the election of Sheil was predicated, was special and terminated with the first election. Again, the idea that a member of Congress should be elected eighteen months prior to the date of the opening of his term was ridicu- lous; political issues might have changed much in the mean- time. If the contestant relied upon a section in the body of the state constitution, he could not find here authority for other than the general election of state officers, to be held bi- ennially on the first Monday of June. If this section did pro- vide for an election of Representative, then the legislature of Oregon clearly exceeded the constitutional bounds when it appointed an election for the 27th of June, 1859, at which time Lansing Stout had been elected. (Note: This election had been set in order that Oregon might not be unrepresented at the first session of the Thirty- sixth Congress; had the election been allowed to wait till the first Monday in June of 1860, the long session would have ended before the succesful candidate could have gotten well on his way to Washington. La Fayette Grover, elected to Congress in June of 1858, sat for Oregon from the 14th of February, 1859, when the state was admitted, till the 4th of March.) It was further claimed by the contestant that, under the Ter- ritorial statutes, which had not been modified, and which had been declared in force till repealed or changed, a delegate to Congress was elected in June, consequently a Representative should be chosen at this time. But, Mr. Thayer pointed out, the Territorial Legislature had modified the original law, and the election came in the odd numbered years ; hence this was not consistent with the, state constitution which fixed the gen- eral election for the even numbered years. The forms, pro- vided for in the Territonallaw, had not been conformed to in