Page:The History of Oregon Bancroft 1888.djvu/436

418 more passed at this session to take the sense of the people on the holding of a constitutional convention, and to elect delegates to frame a constitution in case a majority of the people should vote in favor of it.

In order to met the coming crisis, republican clubs continued to be formed; and on the 11th of February, 1857, a convention was held at Albany to perfect a more complete organization, when the name Free State Republican Party of Oregon was adopted and its principles announced. These were the perpetuity of the American Union; resistance to the extension of slavery in free territory; the prohibition of polygamy; the admission of Oregon into the Union only as a free state; the immediate construction of a Pacific railway; the improvement of rivers and harbors; the application of the bounty land law to the volunteers in the Indian war of 1855–6; and the necessity for all honest men, irrespective of party, to unite to secure the adoption of a free state constitution in Oregon. At Grand Prairie, a free state club was formed January 17th, whose single object was to elect delegates to the constitutional convention pledged to exclude from the state negroes, slaves or freemen.

The Oregon delegate to congress, Joseph Lane, had no objection to slavery, though he dared not openly advocate it. In conformity to instructions of the legislature, he had brought a bill for admission, which was before congress in the session of 1856. The