PAGE 18 • GO! MAGAZINE
COVER STORY
Thursday, February 4, 2021 • The buLLeTIN
19th-century exclusion laws:
a horrific chapter in Oregon’s past
BY DAVID JASPER • The Bulletin
W
hen West Linn author R. Gregory Nokes was working on his 2013 book “Breaking Chains: Slavery on Trial in the Oregon Territory,” about two
Willamette Valley slaves who were freed in 1850 but then had to fight their former owner in order to have their three children returned to them, there
was no telling the story without getting into Oregon’s three exclusion laws.
If this is news to you, you’re hardly alone
in being unaware of the laws, which were
written in 1844, 1849 and 1857 to prevent
Blacks from settling in “Oregon Country,” as
it was known prior to statehood in 1859.
In 1843, the Provisional Government of
Oregon banned slavery.
“This law flatly banned slavery in Oregon,
no ifs ands or buts. No slavery,” Nokes said.
That same year, however, settlers arrived
with slaves in tow.
“The first major wagon train came out
from Missouri. The captain was Peter Bur-
nett, and he brought a couple of slaves, as
did several other people on the wagon train,”
Nokes said.
Burnett got elected to the area’s Legisla-
tive Council, which in 1844 doubled-down
on the slavery ban, “but people that brought
slaves would have three years to free them.
In effect, that meant you could keep your
slave in Oregon for up to three years,” Nokes
said. It also included a lash law provision.
“If after three years the slave, the Black
man, also women, did not leave Oregon,
they would be subjected to a severe lashing,”
he said. “So Oregon had rather onerous laws
against Blacks, plus practically permitting
slavery for up to three years in this period.
Not many people know that, in Oregon his-
Uncle Lou
Southworth
poses with
violin in
this 1915
photo.
Southworth
was born in
the South
and was
brought
to Oregon
in 1853,
eventually
settling in
Jacksonville
and
buying his
freedom.
test
la
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tory, and one of the reasons, of course, is
because it’s embarrassing. People don’t want
to know there was a brief period in Oregon
where slavery was lawful.”
Prior to the 2013 publication “Breaking
Chains” publication the exclusion laws were
“not widely known, not taught in schools,
and I think my book is probably the first
to focus on it in any meaningful way,” said
Nokes, who has also written about the laws
for Columbia Magazine, a quarterly pub-
lished by the Washington State Historical
Society, as well as for an entry in the Oregon
Encyclopedia.
In the latter, he writes, “These laws, all
later rescinded, largely succeeded in their
aim of discouraging free Blacks from set-
tling in Oregon early on, ensuring that Ore-
gon would develop as primarily white.”
Nokes was born and raised in Oregon but
left as a young journalist, going to work in
Washington, D.C., and later traveling the
world as a foreign correspondent for the As-
sociated Press. Later in his career, when he
returned to Oregon and went to work for
The Oregonian, he made it his mission to
learn more about Oregon history, he said.
Continued on next page