The Oregon Constitutional Convention in 1857 drafted the Oregon Constitution in preparation for the Oregon Territory to become a U.S. state. Held from mid-August through September, 60 men met in Salem, Oregon, and created the foundation for Oregon's law. The proposal passed with a vote of 35 for adoption to 10 against. Oregon then became the 33rd state of the Union on February 14, 1859.[1]
In June 1846 the Oregon Question was decided with the United States gaining sole possession of all disputed land south of the 49th degree of latitude.[1][2] Afterward, on August 14, 1848, the United States government created the Oregon Territory, and in 1853 the northern and eastern sections of the territory became the Washington Territory.[3] In 1854 and 1855 bills in the Territorial Legislature pressing for statehood for the territory were defeated.[2]
Finally on December 12, 1856, the legislature passed a bill authorizing a convention to establish a constitution.[4] On June 1, 1857, the voters in the territory approved the resolution and elected delegates to a constitutional convention.[4] The vote was 7,209 in favor of holding a convention to 1,616 against the proposal.[5]
On August 17, 1857, 60 delegates selected by the voters met in Salem to write a state constitution in preparation of statehood.[2] The convention assembled at the Salem Courthouse, with Asa Lovejoy named president pro tem of the gathering.[6] On the following day Judge Matthew Deady was elected the permanent president of the convention.[6]
The delegates selected officers, set up rules for the meeting (a total of 45 in all), and divided into committees on various subjects such as military, judicial, legislative, and elections.[4] At the convention, Chester N. Terry was elected as the secretary of the group, while several people served at different times as the chairperson including Lovejoy, William W. Bristow, Delazon Smith, and La Fayette Grover.[4] The group also settled the debate over a disputed seat at the convention in favor of Perry B. Marple over F. G. Lockhart to represent Coos County.[4]
Thirty-four of the delegates were farmers, while 18 were lawyers, including the three justices of the Oregon Supreme Court.[5] Two of the delegates were newspaper editors, five were miners, and another was a civil engineer.[7]
The main debates concerning a constitution revolved around slavery and the exclusion of Blacks, liquor laws, and what would be the boundaries of the new state.[2] After meeting for 31 days, the convention ended on September 18, when the delegates voted to approve the document as the constitution.[8] The final tally was 35 votes for passage and 10 against; 15 members of the convention were absent and did not vote.[2]
Draft Constitution
The document approved by the convention was modeled after Indiana's 1851 Constitution and included a provision that denied the right to vote to "negro, Chinaman or mulatto" citizens in the state to be, and though female suffrage was discussed, women were also denied the right to vote, as was typical of the era.[7]
Provision was made for the ability of the legislature to regulate the immigration into the state of "persons not qualified to become citizens of the United States," thereby allowing legislative restriction of the number of free blacks coming into the state in the event that an outright ban did not achieve majority approval.[9] Another section forbade any "Chinaman" who immigrated into the state after adoption of the constitution from ever owning real estate or working a mining claim, expressly giving the legislature power to enforce this provision.[10]
Even as far back as the 1880s such racial measures were regarded as socially retrograde, with historian Hubert Howe Bancroft remarking:
These proscriptive clauses, however they may appear in later times, were in accordance with the popular sentiment on the Pacific coast and throughout a large portion of the United States ... However that may be, the founders of the state government in Oregon were fully determined to indulge themselves in their prejudices against color, and the qualities which accompany the black and yellow skinned races.[11]
The final draft submitted to the populace contained a total of 18 articles.[4] Over half of the document's content was derived in part from the Indiana constitution.[12]
Members
Of the 60 delegates in the convention, exactly half were farmers and an additional 19 were lawyers.[13] All members of the convention and what county they represented:[14]
On November 9, 1857, the voters approved the document to serve as a state constitution upon statehood.[2] At this same vote, measures to allow slavery and to allow free Blacks to live in the state were defeated[15] after they had been submitted as separate items to vote on by the convention.[2][4] The vote to approve the constitution by the citizens of Oregon was 7,195 for the constitution and 3,215 against the document.[5] The vote on slavery was 2,645 to allow slavery and 7,727 to make it illegal, and the vote to make it illegal for Blacks to live in the state was 8,640 to ban them and 1,081 to allow them to live in the state.[5] All white men over the age of 21 were allowed to vote, and after the passage a delegation was sent east to Washington, D.C. to press for statehood.[8]
Oregon then waited on the United States Congress to accept the constitution and approve Oregon for statehood.[2] Due to the ongoing debate over slavery in the country as the nation approached the American Civil War, the U.S. Senate did not pass legislation to bring Oregon into the Union until 1859, when Oregon became the 33rd state on February 14.[2] The Oregon Constitution was not altered until 1902.[2]
The Oregon Constitution is the governing document of the U.S. state of Oregon, originally enacted in 1857. As amended the current state constitution contains eighteen sections, beginning with a bill of rights. This contains most of the rights and privileges protected by the United States Bill of Rights and the main text of the United States Constitution. The remainder of the Oregon Constitution outlines the divisions of power within the state government, lists the times of elections, and defines the state boundaries and the capital as Salem.
The Portland metropolitan area is a metro area in the U.S. states of Oregon and Washington centered on the principal city of Portland, Oregon. The U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) identifies it as the Portland–Vancouver–Hillsboro, OR–WA Metropolitan Statistical Area, a metropolitan statistical area used by the United States Census Bureau (USCB) and other entities. The OMB defines the area as comprising Clackamas, Columbia, Multnomah, Washington, and Yamhill Counties in Oregon, and Clark and Skamania Counties in Washington. The area had a population of 2,512,859 at the 2020 census.
The Oregon Republican Party is the state affiliate of the United States Republican Party in Oregon, headquartered in Salem. The party was established in the Oregon Territory in February 1857 as the "Free State Republican Party of Oregon" and held its first state convention on April 1, 1859, after Oregon achieved statehood.
Delazon Smith was a Democratic Party politician who briefly represented the state of Oregon in the U.S. Senate in 1859. He served for less than one month, making his term among the shortest on record in the Senate. Smith was also a newspaper editor in New York and Ohio, and served in the Oregon Territory's legislature.
Asa Lawrence Lovejoy was an American pioneer and politician in the region that would become the U.S. state of Oregon. He is best remembered as a founder of the city of Portland, Oregon. He was an attorney in Boston, Massachusetts before traveling by land to Oregon; he was a legislator in the Provisional Government of Oregon, mayor of Oregon City, and a general during the Cayuse War that followed the Whitman massacre in 1847. He was also a candidate for Provisional Governor in 1847, before the Oregon Territory was founded, but lost that election.
Oregon's 5th congressional district stretches from the Southeast suburbs of Portland through the eastern half of the Willamette Valley and then reaches across the Cascades to take in Sisters and Bend. It includes a sliver of Multnomah County, the majority of Clackamas County, the rural eastern portion of Marion County, all of Linn County, a very small section of southwest Jefferson County, and the populated northwest portion of Deschutes County. It was significantly redrawn when Oregon gained a 6th congressional district after the 2020 Census.
Reuben Patrick Boise was an American attorney, judge and politician in the Oregon Territory and the early years of the state of Oregon. A native of Massachusetts, he immigrated to Oregon in 1850, where he would twice serve on the Oregon Supreme Court for a total of 16 years, with three stints as chief justice. Early in his legal career, he worked as a district attorney.
The Provisional Legislature of Oregon was the single-chamber legislative body of the Provisional Government of Oregon. It served the Oregon Country of the Pacific Northwest of North America from 1843 until early 1849 at a time when no country had sovereignty over the region. This democratically elected legislature became the Oregon Territorial Legislature when the territorial authorities arrived after the creation of the Oregon Territory by the United States in 1848. The body was first termed the Legislative Committee and later renamed the House of Representatives. Over the course of its six-year history the legislature passed laws, including taxation and liquor regulation, and created an army to deal with conflicts with Native Americans.
Oregon's Territorial Legislature was a bicameral legislative body created by the United States Congress in 1848 as the legislative branch of the government of the Oregon Territory. The upper chamber Council and lower chamber House of Representatives first met in July 1849; they served as the region's legislative body until Oregon became a state in February 1859, when they were replaced by the bicameral Oregon State Legislature.
Oregon's circuit courts are general jurisdiction trial courts of the U.S. state of Oregon. These courts hear civil and criminal court cases.
Oregon Ballot Measure 57 (2008) or Senate Bill (SB) 1087 was a legislatively referred state statute that increased term of imprisonment for persons convicted of specified drug and property crimes under certain circumstances. The measure enacted law which prohibits courts from imposing less than a presumptive sentence for persons convicted of specified drug and property crimes under certain circumstances, and requires the Department of Corrections to provide treatment to certain offenders and to administer grant program to provide supplemental funding to local governments for certain purposes.
David Logan was an American attorney and politician in the territory of and later state of Oregon. A native of Illinois, he moved to Oregon in 1850 where he served in the Oregon Territorial Legislature and in the Oregon Constitutional Convention. A founder of the Oregon Republican Party, he also served as mayor of Portland.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the U.S. state of Oregon:
Robert Crouch Kinney was an American businessman and politician in what became the state of Oregon. A native of Illinois, he helped found Muscatine, Iowa, before crossing the Oregon Trail and settling in what became Oregon. In Oregon he was a prominent businessman in the milling business and served in the Oregon Territorial Legislature before being a member of the Oregon Constitutional Convention.
Robert Valentine Short was an American politician and land surveyor in Oregon. A native of Pennsylvania, he traveled the Oregon Trail where he eventually settled in Yamhill County. He was a member of the Oregon Constitutional Convention and later the Oregon House of Representatives. Short also served in the Indian Wars and lived in Portland.
Sildalcea campestris is a species of flowering plant in the mallow family known by the common name meadow checker-mallow. It is native only to portions of western Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest region of North America.
Ira Francis Marion Butler was an American politician who served in the Oregon Territorial House of Representatives and the Oregon House of Representatives as a member of the Democratic Party. He served as Speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives from 1857 to 1858, which was the last session before Oregon's statehood. Before immigrating to Oregon, Butler served as sheriff of Warren County, Illinois, and was circuit court clerk for Stephen A. Douglas when he was an Illinois judge. After moving to Oregon in 1853, he operated a farm in Polk County and was later the county’s judge.
William Myron King, also known as Colonel King for most of his life, was an American pioneer merchant and Oregon state legislator. He served four terms in Oregon's territorial legislature. This included one term as Speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives during the 1851 legislative session. Before immigrating to Oregon, King lived and worked in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Missouri. After moving to Oregon in 1848, he became a merchant in Portland, and was later the county judge for Multnomah County and a member of Portland's city council.
Lafayette F. Cartee was an American pioneer surveyor and civil engineer who conducted the initial surveys of many areas of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. He was also an Oregon state legislator, served two terms in Oregon's territorial legislature. This included one term as Speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives during the 1854 legislative session. He was later appointed surveyor general of the Idaho Territory, a position he held for 14 years. While in Idaho he became an expert horticulturist, developing the territories first commercial plant nursery. He also built the territory's first greenhouse and its first fruit and vegetable cannery.
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