“[A]lthough we may now be unknown as a state or power, yet we have the advantages by united efforts of our increasing population, in a diligent attention to agriculture, arts, and literature, of attaining, at no distant day, to as conspicuous an elevation as any state or power on the continent of America.”
– Osborne Russell to the Provisional Legislature of Oregon, 1844
The news arrived in the country in March, 1845, on one of the Company’s ships. Its captain had a sly smile on his face as he delivered it. “It’s a rum tale for you,” he told the only American at Fort Vancouver that day, a trapper come down from the Sawtooths. “Your man Polk lost the election. It seems as though we’ll be neighbors for some years yet.”
The trapper told the captain that point of fact, he didn’t give a damn one way or the other, but that the townsfolk and the preachers up at Oregon City might. On his way back into the mountains, he spread the word to a Company employee bound upriver for Dr. McLoughlin’s store.
The bustling metropolis of Oregon City.
Over the next couple of days, word wound its way up the Willamette and fanned out into the surrounding plains, carried on pursed and grim lips. It was indeed a rum tale to hear for many in the scattered community of American settlers. Responses ranged from a dejected sigh or a muttered curse (typically from the farmers and Methodist missionaries) to a hearty spit and shrug (typically from the former trappers and mountain men). The Whigs had carried the day back East. It took a while before anyone had the heart to tell Joe Meek, the community’s sheriff. Polk’s wife was his cousin, and he’d been bragging for months about how he was about to have family in the White House.
Henry Clay – the great compromiser, the champion of the American System, the foe of territorial expansion – had been elected President of the United States. In fact, he had been President for several weeks; by the time news got to the Oregon Country it was always stale. To be sure, Clay had barely mentioned Oregon during the campaign, but his impassioned stance against Texas annexation had shown where his sympathies lay. [1] Most Americans in the Willamette Valley had hoped a boldly expansionist Polk administration would recognize their Provisional Government, conclude a border settlement with Britain, and bring law and order to the Northwest in the form of the U. S. Marshals’ guns. A Clay victory almost certainly condemned them, instead, to four more years of fending for themselves.
Of course, they would weather it out. They had all survived the trek out West, after all, and many had spent their lives on the frontier. The vote just smacked of a smack in the face from their mother country.
“I told you so,” Osborne Russell said when he rode into town to pick up his groceries. “They don’t give a fuck in Philadelphia.” More than a few of the valley’s settlers found themselves agreeing with the buckskinned mountain man. The Methodists, of course, didn’t think much of his language, but then again they didn’t think much of him in the first place.
*
The bad news from the East arrived just as the Oregon Country was starting to break out in a bad case of politics. Almost two years ago, the American settlers had voted to create a Provisional Government, a temporary authority to run the ferries and provide bounties on wolf pelts until the Marshals rode in. As more and more folks followed the Oregon Trail west each year, the government had assumed greater responsibilities. With greater responsibilities, of course, came good old Party and Faction: the curses every sage warns against, but nobody seems able to avoid.
The “independents party” figured that the government in Washington was just too far away to provide for the safety and well-being of the settlers. The white settlers of Oregon, they held, needed their own government (mostly in order to protect themselves against the Indians whose land they were busily dividing up). They advocated for a Constitutional Convention and a so-called “Republic of the Pacific.” Quite a few of the Canadians, and a smaller minority of the Americans, were “independents.” Dr. John McLoughlin, Chief Factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Oregon City, was on their side – albeit passively, since vocal support from the hated British wouldn’t have helped the cause at all.
The “American party,” on the other hand, claimed that Oregon was already American by right, all the settlers were still American citizens (or British subjects), and that it was only a matter of time before the authority of the United States extended to the Willamette Valley. The Methodist Mission and those attached to it formed one wing of this party, while the veteran trappers – many of whom had long resented the Hudson’s Bay monopoly – made up another.
The sides were by no means organized and their supporters were by no means consistent. During a debate at the Oregon Lyceum in 1841, the settlers approved a proposal by Dr. McLoughlin’s secretary that it would be “expedient” for Oregon to organize an independent government. They then immediately turned around and voted that it would “not be expedient” if the U. S. government took possession of the country in the next four years. Party lines were drawn more deeply, however, with the creation of the Provisional Government in 1843. At the American party’s insistence, the first Organic Law included language promising that the new government was only to last until the U. S. arrived.
By the spring of 1845, however, both parties could agree on at least one thing: the three-man executive committee established by the Organic Law was awkward and unwieldly. The legislature passed an amended Organic Law, which provided for a single executive governor, and organized elections for July.
The settlers of the Willamette Valley were to elect a new legislature and the territory’s first governor. They were also to settle the parties’ main dispute in a referendum: would they approve of the new Organic Law, which reiterated that the Provisional Government was temporary, or would they call a constitutional convention? [2]
Of course, they hadn’t expected that the bad news from the East would arrive just in time to make the election nice and contentious.
George Abernethy, a lay employee of the Methodist Mission who had tabled the “not be expedient” resolution at the Lyceum back in 1841, was the leading gubernatorial candidate of the “American party.” He’d been the early favorite to win, and was so confident in his odds that he’d left on a business trip to the Sandwich Islands several months before the election. Since he wasn’t around to campaign, lawyer Asa Lovejoy effectively took his place as the main “American” candidate.
Osborne Russell, on the other hand, was prepared to capitalize upon Clay’s victory. The former mountain guide was a member of the Executive Committee and was the loudest voice for independence in the colony. He was an oddity: an American face for a party composed mainly of British subjects, running on a platform opposed by most of his friends from his wilderness days. Yet odd as he was, Russell was no inarticulate barbarian. Eloquent despite the occasional vulgarity, he made his case to anyone who would listen. The Whig triumph, he charged, was yet more proof of the fact that America was both unable and unwilling to protect and provide for anyone in the Oregon Country. As his supporters (some of whom were more concerned with propriety than he) began to say, they don’t give a fig in Philadelphia.
The candidates. From left to right: Abernethy, Russell, Lovejoy.
The electorate numbered only a few hundred, clustered in one town – Oregon City, on the falls of the Willamette – and its surrounding homesteads and farms. The community was still too small and too closely knit for any truly scurrilous claims to be made in public. Of course, as in every small community, scurrilous claims were whispered and insinuated instead. The charges were, generally, that Abernethy and Lovejoy were weak-kneed do-nothings who would twiddle their thumbs for years until the U. S. came knocking. Russell, on the other hand, was said to be an unlettered dupe of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and independence was supposedly a fig leaf for British dominion. John McLoughlin, wisely, kept his mouth shut.
*
Osborne Russell made a fairly dignified victor, for a half-civilized separatist mountain man. He refrained from calling himself “Mr. President,” or indulging in celebratory gunfire, or waving an improvised Flag of the Republic, or any of the other trappings of nationalist revolution. He and some supporters enjoyed a few rounds of whiskey and drafted an inaugural address which only hinted and teased at independence. They were nothing if not realists.
Russell had won, but only just, with the vote of the “American party” split between Abernethy and Lovejoy. He hadn’t even received an overall majority, and it was clear that most of the Oregon settlers did not yet share his dream of an independent republic. Moreover, the motion for a constitutional convention had been defeated at the polls. Russell would still lead a Provisional Government, with an Organic Law vowing eventual absorption by the United States. [3]
Nevertheless, the Provisional Government now had a single and streamlined executive, a change welcomed by all parties. In another encouraging development, Francis Ermatinger had been elected treasurer. Ermatinger worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company as the chief trader at McLoughlin’s store, and his election was a hint of the rapprochement that was taking place between the Company and the settlers. Canadian and American had to work together on the frontier, or neither would survive. The settlers were close to having a stable government, and the “independents” were now in position to take advantage of the next batch of bad news.
[1] And there’s our departure. ITTL, Clay did not publish his equivocating “Alabama letters,” and maintained a firmer stance against annexing Texas throughout the campaign. That shored up his support among anti-slavery Whigs, some of whom in OTL bolted the party to support James Birney’s abolitionist Liberty ticket. Without as many defectors #feelingthebirn, Clay carried New York, and with it the election.
[2] Oregonians have always loved referendums.
[3] Some background on the OTL election is in order, since it’s a fairly obscure one. Abernethy, the “moderate American” candidate, won, with Russell about a hundred votes behind him, and Lovejoy and a fourth candidate with a handful between them. One source I’ve read claims that quite a few pro-independence voters picked Abernethy as a safe alternative to the more belligerently anti-British Lovejoy. ITTL, due to the developments in American politics, Russell has both won over new supporters and convinced his cautious supporters that he can win. Meanwhile, Lovejoy’s picked up some voters that would have gone for Abernethy but are concerned about the independents’ better fortunes.