causes which have led to these unhappy results",—the most pleasureable part of the mission to which it had committed itself. Northern fanatics were denounced and the South tacitly exonerated. A kind of bogie man was made of "Coercion," which was declared to be a very different thing from executing the federal laws against the individual citizens of a state.[1] The Oregon Democrat, assuming even more advanced ground, made a distinction between nullification and secession, holding that while the former was wrong and monstrous, secession was eminently right and proper.[2] While very few Democratic papers in Oregon made so free and open confession of faith as this, the attitude which they for the most part generally assumed was expressive of such conviction.
By May, Slater of the Union was advising Oregon to assume a neutral ground in the struggle. In an editorial, "What Will the Pacific States Do?" he went no farther than to "presume" that Oregon and California were loyal, and he would not favor any scheme looking to their severance from the Union, "unless, in the progress of the general conflagration, some such step should become absolutely necessary for self-preservation." He maintained that as the war was not against a foreign nation, the people of the Pacific Coast should assume neutral ground and refuse to be involved in "this general melee which politicians have kicked up over the mountains."[3] "There is high blood in Oregon as well as elsewhere, and it will be well for all concerned to keep quiet and cool," admonished Slater. He continued to make perfunctory professions of loyalty, but took no position in favor of maintaining the Union. In an editorial on "Where We Stand," he failed to give the information indicated. While protesting that he acknowledged no flag but that of the Union, he avowed unalterable opposition to any policy which looked toward waging a war of subjugation on the South.[4] This harmonizes not at all with his fulsome declaration of December first.
