Page:The History of Oregon Bancroft 1888.djvu/175

Rh could be made for the administration of the laws. The president should be plainly told that there were "many respectable individuals in Oregon capable of discharging the duties of judges, or filling any offices under the territorial government, who would either discharge their duties or resign their offices." The arrival of the new chief justice, and Pratt, brought a temporary quiet. Strong went to reside at Cathlamet, in his own district, and the other judges in theirs.

At the first term of court held in Clackamas county by Chief Justice Nelson, he was called upon to decide upon the constitutionality of the law excluding negroes from Oregon. This law, first enacted by the provisional legislature in 1844, had been amended, reënacted, and clung to by the law-makers of Oregon with singular pertinacity, the first territorial legislature reviving it among their earliest enactments. Thurston, when questioned in congress concerning the matter, defended the law against free blacks upon the ground that the people dreaded their influence among the Indians, whom they incited to hostilities. Such a reason had indeed been given in 1844, when two disorderly negroes had caused a collision between white men and Indians, but it could not be advanced as a sufficient explanation of the settled determination of the founders of Oregon to keep negroes out of the territory, because all the southern and western frontier states had possessed a large population of blacks, both slave and free, at the time they had fought the savages, without finding the negroes a dangerous element of their population. It was to quite another cause that the hatred of the African was to be ascribed; namely, scorn for an enslaved race, which refused political equality to men of a black skin, and which might raise the question of slavery to disturb the peace of society. It was not enough that Oregon