the Senate committee, to which this bill was referred, proposed to abrogate that prohibition; and in the delays and vexations to which that amendment gave rise, the whole bill was laid upon the table and lost for the session. This will be a great disappointment to you, and a real calamity; already five years without law or legal institution for the protection of life, liberty and property and now doomed to wait a year longer. This is a strange and anomalous condition, almost incredible to contemplate, and most critical to endure, a colony of freemen 4,000 miles from the metropolitan government, and without law or government to preserve them. But do not be alarmed or desperate. You will not be outlawed for not admitting slavery. Your fundamental act against that institution, copied from the ordinance of 1787, the work of the great men of the South in the great day of the South, prohibiting slavery in a territory far less northern than yours, will not be abrogated, nor is that the intention of the prime mover of the amendment. Upon the record the judiciary committee of the Senate is the author of that amendment, but not so the fact. It is only midwife to it. Its author, Mr. Calhoun, is the same mind that 'generated the firebrandresolutions, of which I send you a copy, and of which the amendment is the legitimate derivation. Oregon is not the object. The most ardent propagandist of slavery cannot expect to plant it on the shores of the Pacific, in the latitude of Wisconsin and the Lakes of the Woods. A home agitation and disunion purposes is all that is intended by thrusting this firebrand question into your bill, and at the next session, when it is thrust in again, we will scourge it out, and pass your bill as it ought to be. I promise you this in the name of the South as well as of the North; and the event will not deceive me. In the meantime the President will give you all the protection which existing laws and detachments of the army and navy can enable him to extend to you; and until Congress has time to act, your friends must rely upon you to govern yourselves as you have heretofore done under the provisions of your own voluntary compact, and with the justice, harmony and moderation which is due to your own character and to the honor of the American name."
On August 18, 1857, the delegates to the Oregon State Constitutional Convention met at the Marion County court house in Salem and took action toward deciding whether Oregon should be a slave state or a free state. Article 18
