Dangerous Subjects: James D. Saules and the Rise of Black Exclusion in Oregon by Kenneth R. Coleman

Abstract

429 Reviews REVIEWS DANGEROUS SUBJECTS: JAMES D. SAULES AND THE RISE OF BLACK EXCLUSION IN OREGON by Kenneth R. Coleman Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2017. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 240 pages. $19.95, paper. Discussions of race in Oregon almost inevitably return to the origins of the state’s overwhelming whiteness. Scholars and nonacademics who seek to explain Oregon’s striking lack of racial diversity look to the distant past, to its 1840s and 1850s statutes that prohibited African American migration and residence. Although the Oregon judiciary rarely enforced these anti-Black laws, and the Fourteenth Amendment nullified them in the 1860s, they seemingly cast a long shadow. African Americans continued to view Oregon as a bastion of white supremacy and largely avoided settling there. In Dangerous Subjects, historian Kenneth Coleman investigates this narrative of Oregon’s racial history and complicates it substantially. Coleman uses the life of James D. Saules, an early Black migrant to the Oregon Country, as a vehicle for exploring the origins of racial exclusion in the Pacific Northwest. Prior to Coleman’s research, Saules stood as a shadowy figure in the region’s early history. His involvement in the Cockstock Affair — an 1844 skirmish between Euro-Americans and Mollala people in Oregon City — and his later alleged threat to join Native resistance against neighboring whites, has long led historians to speculate that he was the inspiration for Oregon’s first Black exclusion laws. Coleman not only examines these two incidents and the anti-Black sentiment that swirled around them, he also reconstructs Saules’s life and places it in the broader context of settler colonialism that gave rise to a distinctly white supremacist legal and political regime in Oregon. What emerges from Coleman’s analysis is a complicated portrait of Saules as both an agent of empire who helped advance the United States’ conquest of the Pacific Northwest and a man who suffered from the colonial racial regime that arrived with Euro-American settlers. The documentary record on Saules is frustratingly thin, but Coleman conducts impressive detective work in genealogical sources, government records, and personal manuscripts to piece together the life of his enigmatic subject. He traces Saules’s origins to the burgeoning maritime industry of the U.S. Atlantic seaboard during the first third of the nineteenth century. Saules was a sailor whose career and travels frequently intersected with American imperial ventures. As a crew member aboard American whaling ships, Saules helped extend U.S. commercial power across the Pacific. Later, he played a more direct role in American imperialism by joining the United States Exploring Expedition (U.S. Ex. Ex.) as a ship’s cook. The voyages of the U.S. Ex. Ex. aimed both to collect data that could advance American commercial interests in the Pacific and to present a show of U.S. force to Indigenous people. As a member of the expedition , Saules may have participated in a string of violent encounters with Pacific Islanders, including massacres in Fiji and the Drummond Islands. When Saules finally deserted the expedition after his ship ran aground in the Oregon Country, he was already well versed in the workings of American colonial violence. Coleman ably demonstrates how Saules stood at the cusp of two modes of colonization in the Oregon Country. The first, merchant capitalism, had as its central aim the extraction of the Pacific Northwest’s wealth in animal pelts and exploited a diverse pool of non-white laborers. This was the world of the Hudson’s Bay Company with its small British population, multiracial workforce, and “middle ground” policies of compromise and accommodation with Native people. Overland migrations from the United States brought a new mode of settler colonialism, in which invading newcomers 430 OHQ vol. 119, no. 3 431 Reviews sought to displace and dispossess Native people , seize and settle their land, and exclude all but whites from access to productive property and political rights. Saules was able to make his way in the first colonial society by marrying a Native woman and engaging in small-scale commercial ventures such as ferrying and family farming. He fit less well in the new American regime that made whiteness a prerequisite...