By Dillon Bergmann
What would the world be without the state? This seems impossible to our eyes in 2024. The State performs so many parts of our lives, we have grown up with them doing these things. The State is the political organization of the current age. The whole of the international system is based around a State, and when approaching lower income nations, international organizations always try to build up the State. Take for example these two translations of the opening line of Aristotle’s Politics. In 1912 the line was rendered, “a we see that every city is a society, and every society is established for some good purpose,” compare this to the standard translation today which says that “every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for everyone always acts in order to obtain that which they think good.” Notice how the word State has come to substitute the “political community.” As if that is the only way that Polis (the word which the Greeks used for political organization) could be understood though a State. As if then, there is only one kind of political organization where politics can occur: the State.
How did these come about? This is a process known as “political development,” and even more specially “state development.” State development can be understood as overcoming the four crisis of development: (1) identity, people considering themselves as part of the Nation-State; (2) legitimacy, the belief of weather or not the rulers should have the ability to control the monopoly on the use and distribution of force; (3) penetration, the ability for the State to be able to control society; and (4) participation, the extension of rights of representation to gain compliance.
Due to its isolation, the Pacific Northwest provides us with an interesting case study into the processes of state-building, and how these four crises would be overcome to create the current day Nation-State: the Beaver-State.
The first real crisis was the lack of penetration. The Federal Government would have little if any provisions for law enforcement in the area. Prior to the 1846 Oregon treaty, which would divide the territory between the British and the Americans, the only policing force of note would be the British Hudson’s Bay Company. There were no contingency plans for what would come after Oregon’s annexation. Lawenforcment would not be dispatched. And so, Oregononians would have to try and find some way to create rules and measures of their behaviors on their own. These would be built, bit by bit, through spontaneous decisions. These laws would evidently form into a small proto-territorial government.
Overtime, these would culminate in resentment towards the federal government. These were U.S. citizens, and yet it felt as if their own Government was not protecting them. The government that the settlers would form would be, taking from the U.S. and Iowa constitutions combined with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Declaration of Indepence. The new government would have a council of three acting as its executive. Taxation would be voluntary. This would last only a year, after a wave of settlers would come flying in on their Prairie Schooners, the social cohesion that had kept the whole system in place would be gone. The system would be revised, and taxation would be once more made involuntary with a unitary executive. This proto-territorial government would reign over the territory. However, there would still lack central control due to the simple fact that this government was not a proper territorial government.
Fed up with the lack of a federal government response, the territory would then send a delegation down to Washington, D.C. to be led by frontiersmen Joseph Meek. Meek, showing the Oregonian annoyance with the federal government would announce himself (and delegation as) “Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary from the Republic of Oregon to the Court of the United States.” Suffice to say, this would be quite the entrance, with Congress making Oregon into a territory a few months later.
One thing of note is that there was not much questioning when it came to whether or not the U.S. should have power over the area, with little to no debate on whether or not the then Oregon country should become independent. The people who migrated into the region considered themselves as Americans, not as what Thomas Jefferson had predicted in 1813, that the first settlements in the Pacific Northwest would be the creation of a new “empire,” on the western shores. Yet, this did not occur. Why this has occurred has not yet been established by scholars. However, there still remained a congenial feeling to the U.S. This did not cause there to be any crisis of legitimacy in the Pacific Northwest for the State to overcome.
The second crisis would come about, due to attempts to end the first problem: identity. At this time, slavery was indeed the question of the age. Senators would infamously cane each other on the Senate floor when things did not go their way on slavery. In fact, debates on slavery would at times get so heated that members would attempt to shut down the other side on the regular. This topic would also divide Oregonians. Some would argue that Oregon would become a free state, others a slave state. This question, not being resolved, would cause resistance to any attempts to make Oregon into a state in the Union. The unresolved slavery question would cause votes to fail for statehood in 1854, 1855, and 1856. Finally, in 1857, the vote on ratification would be adopted. The conditional convention itself could not find a solution, and at the urging of the concept of popular sovereignty would end up resulting in a referendum.
Finally, the convention would also handle solutions to the problem of participation. Whom should rights be given to and why? At first, the convention assumed that rights would be mandated through the constitutional processes—failing to appoint a committee on rights. After debate, this would be changed to create a committee to draft a bill of rights. More or less, this bill of rights was based on the U.S. Bill of Rights, combined with the Indanian one. One thing of note, which would help bring about problems later, was two things. Firstly, the state convention would bar any “free Negro, or Mulatto, not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this constitution, shall come, reside, or be within this state, or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein.” In addition the provision on voting would exclude any “Negro, Chinaman, or Mulatto” from voting in state elections.
As we have seen, the Pacific Northwest also had to overcome the four crises of state building in its own way. The State would slowly gain control over Civil Society, though better and better organization. This was not planned by any outside force by any means. The development of the Oregon Beaver-State can be thought of people conforming challenges on their own terms, and coming to conclusions about how to resolve these challenges.
