Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/259

Slavery Question in Oregon. 235 and he informed me that several of his old neighbors from the Platte Purchase (Missouri) had changed their minds and would vote for a free State. He furthermore said that in his opinion Lane County would have gone for slavery six months earlier, but would not in November. At Roseburg, the home of General Lane and Judge M. P. Deady, whose influence, whether authorized or not, was in favor of the institution, I learned from a Reverend Anderson that the tide had turner^, and that he met with surprises eYevy day. In Rogue River Valley I was assured by my cousins that the tide was running out quite rapidly. The noisy slavocrats of Jackson County had been claiming that county for slavery, but many people were exercising their fancy in supposing the consequences that might ensue when runaway niggers should get with the Modoc and Klamath Indians. The picture was not agreeable. The people of Southern Oregon had had enough of Indian warfare. The aforementioned impediments to slavery exten- sion, as well as others, were brought to the front by the Judge, in plain straightforward and forcible language, which no doubt set the people to thinking more connectedly and com- prehensively thaji they otherwise would ; and while the effects of such a lesson in ratiocination may not be estimated with any ^^pp roach to accuracy, I am confident that it was the most timely and the most effective appeal published during the whole of the controversy. When arriving at this point in my dissertation, I sought in the several histories of Oregon for what had been written relative to the Judge's Free State Letter," but could find nothing. Neither the letter nor any descriptive mention of it is to be found in Bancroft's, though it is prolix, even redun- dant in things trivial by comparison. He records that a Republican convention was held at Albany on the 14th of February, just a short time before the said address came out, and really the most important meeting of Republicans, up to that time, as well as a cheering evidence that the anti-slavery cause was growing, but the influence of that gathering was not sufficient to put a candidate in the field in opposition to