OREGON AND ITS SHARE IN THE CIVIL WAR.[36]
By the Convention of 1818, renewed in 1827, the Oregon Country, comprising a large part of what is now denominated in general terms, the Pacific Northwest, was under the joint occupancy of Great Britain and the United States.
The practical evidence of this joint sovereignty on the part of the British, was the sway of the Hudson Bay Company through its network of trading stations and outfitting points for its cohorts of frontiersmen and trappers. Until the advent of the missionary movement from the States, there was little practical evidence of the coordinate sovereignity of the United States.
When the missionary movement took important shape numerically it resulted in a vital need for some form of local government, and hence there arose the Provisional Government of Oregon, as it was called, fashioned on the lines of state or territorial governments on the other side of the intervening mountains and plains, "deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed," and empowered by that consent to maintain inviolate as far as possible "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
In 1846, abandoning the political war cry of "Fifty-four Forty or Fight," which had served its demagogic use as a partisan rallying call, a boundary treaty was finally concluded between England and the United States fixing the forty-ninth parallel of latitude as the northern most boundary of the Oregon Country and of the United States in the Northwest.
But still the provisional Government of the immigrants, incomplete in concept, rude in operation, imperfect in power, was the only form of government, the ten to fifteen thousand Americans in this vast domain had to insure domestic tranquillity or oppose resistance to the ever present savage foe.
In message after message President Polk called the attention of Congress to its inaction and the dangers to which that inaction exposed the settlers and how far short of its manifest duty the national legislators were in their neglect; but there were mighty reasons back of this neglect; mighty forces were battling in the halls of legislation—the titanic combat was on between Freedom and Slavery and the Missouri Compromise line was some leagues to the northward of where California began. The Provisional Legislature of 1845 had taken firm ground on the slavery question and the ordinance of 1787 prohibiting slavery was incorporated in its organic law.
The Douglas house bill of 1846, seeking to organize a territorial government for Oregon, followed in this regard the expressed desire of the colonists, and met a prompt and instant defeat at the hands of the Southern senators. Thereupon, Douglas sought to get around the question by a different bill (he was then in the Senate) containing a clause sanctioning the colonial laws of Oregon, which would, as a matter of fact, accomplish the same result. Joseph L. Meek, an accredited representative of the colonists had undergone a dangerous overland winter journey to enforce upon the President and Congress the necessity of immediate action and of Federal aid in the constant conflict with the surrounding Indian tribes.
Judge Thornton, the personal representative of Governor Abernethy of the provisional government, was also in Washington on the same errand, having come by ocean.