Statehood and the Exclusion Clause: A Constitution with a Condition

Oregon became a state on February fourteenth, eighteen fifty-nine. Valentine's Day, as it happened, though there was nothing especially warm about the document it entered the Union with.

The Oregon Constitution that Oregon voters ratified in eighteen fifty-seven contained two provisions relating to race that were written in plain language and voted on by the white male electorate of the territory. The first prohibited slavery. The second, in a separate section, prohibited Black Americans from coming to reside in Oregon, from owning property, from making contracts, and from using the courts. Oregon was the only state admitted to the Union with an explicit Black exclusion clause in its founding document.

This was not an accident or an oversight. The delegates to the eighteen fifty-seven constitutional convention debated both provisions at length. The anti-slavery majority and the exclusion majority overlapped almost entirely. The political argument being made was not a contradiction in the minds of those making it: Oregon was to be a free white state, free both from slavery and from the presence of Black Americans. The two clauses expressed the same underlying ambition in different forms.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in eighteen sixty-eight, made the exclusion clause legally unenforceable. But the framers of Oregon's constitution had not written the clause in secret, and removing it required a deliberate act of the Oregon electorate. That act did not happen until nineteen twenty-six, when Oregon voters approved a ballot measure striking the exclusion language sixty-seven years after statehood. The language had sat in the founding document through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and fifty years of the twentieth century, removed not by the legislature but by popular vote, and only then.

Oregon's constitution as it currently stands does not contain the exclusion language. The history of its presence and the length of its tenure is documented at the Oregon State Archives and in the collections of the Oregon Historical Society, which holds the original convention proceedings.

The exclusion clause had practical consequences that stretched long beyond its legal invalidation. The patterns of settlement, property ownership, and economic exclusion it reinforced shaped Oregon's demographics for generations. As of the two thousand twenty census, Oregon remains one of the least racially diverse states in the American West, a legacy that has multiple causes and one very explicit original instruction.