Slavery Question in Oregon.

247 opinion that the Southern people were not virtuous enough to emancipate their slaves, voluntarilj^ and that nothing short of adversity would compel them. This vras an estimate of his people which he resented with observable warmth of manner, but in temperate language, showing a provincial spirit quite new to me. Still, I was at fault, in not then com- prehending that the beneficiaries of privilege, whether North or South, East or West, never let go except upon compulsion. After fifty-two years of experience, we smile when recollect- ing our youthful ignorance, but vre have advanced and are still advancing, in the only possible wa}^ for human beings, by groping. For further information concerning the educa- tional antecedents of Mr. Craig's Oregon career, see Mr. Himes' Press History, before mentioned. One of the most conspicuous figures in Oregon during the time between 1850 and 1860, was T. J. Dryer, editor of The Oregonian newspaper. He was a fluent, effervescent and popular speaker and writer ; in politics a Whig with a lineage reaching back to the Revolutionary War, and with never a doubt that anything the Whig party proposed was right and needed no vindication, and that everything the Democrats favored was wrong and deserved nothing but denunciation. Hence, as the Democratic party was the preferred instrument for advancing the slave-holding interest, Mr. Dryer, from the habit of opposition as well as from principle, naturally fell into the ranks of the free-state men of Oregon, who pro- claimed themselves as such. One writer whose article upon that subject was published in the Oregon Historical Quar- terly, makes Mr. Dryer the chief influence and factor of re- sistance to the adoption of the institution in this State, but from what I saw of The Oregonia^n in those days, and a recol- lection of my impressions formed at the time, I am quite sure that Mr. Dryer's services in that connection are much over- rated by his biographical friend. The Oregonian was a dis- tinctively Whig journal with incidental anti-slavery proclivi- ties, and remained so for two years after the birth of the Republican party, its editor, Mr. Dryer, appearing for the