6. Suffrage Committee Report, 1857

Delazon Smith, Chairman of the Committee on Suffrage and Election, presented this handwritten report to the Oregon Constitutional Convention in Salem on August 25, 1857.

Oregon became a territory in 1848 and functioned under a system of laws that combined the original Organic Law of the Oregon Provisional Government (1845), the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and the Territorial Enabling Act of 1848. The white male settlers who had written Oregon’s provisional government laws and pressed for territorial status shared a common political culture, the populist principles of Jacksonian democracy. Foremost among these principles was a passionate belief in popular sovereignty and an antipathy towards non-white minorities. As a result, the male settlers believed that the citizenry held an inalienable right to form a “compact” to govern civil affairs and protect private property, yet they did not include women or non-whites in this compact because they believed those groups naturally lacked the intellectual qualities necessary for conducting civil affairs.