Breaking Chains: Slavery On Trial In The Oregon Territory, by R. Gregory Nokes

There is definitely room for a good or even great book on the subject of slavery and the freeish black experience during the territorial phase of Oregon. This is not that book. Aside from the fact that this book is written by an elite race hustler who attempts–rather unsuccessfully–to put Oregon on trial for its racism and its smug self-satisfaction in its own progressiveness, which is something that deserves to be taken down it must be admitted, this book is simply not very well written. That is not due to the fragmentary nature of sources–there is enough good information here that a skilled historian could craft a compelling book about the struggle for freedom that blacks had to make in Oregon in the face of intense racism and some real legal chicanery on the part of slaveowners and their supporters in the state. Even as badly written as this book is–and it is a real turgid peace of terrible half-digested quotes from primary sources, tedious repetitiveness, and strident self-righteousness all rolled up into an unappealing mess of a book that focuses on the least interesting and compelling parts of what could have been an amazing story–there is still the raw material of a good story here for someone to take on, if they wanted to.

Unfortunately, it is easy to see why this book is such a mess when one gets to the end and realizes that the author’s discussion of the connections of the early black settler elite of the area (which includes connections to Washington and California), all of which demonstrate that from the beginning there existed the beginnings of a black elite that was connected to the state’s early settler white elite through kinship and political ties, which is one of the most boring parts of this book is also a part of the book that is nearest and dearest to the author’s heart because it is an exploration of his own family ties. At the center of this book exists the possibility that someone could have written a taut courtroom drama about the fate of Nathaniel Ford and his erstwhile slaves. The possibility still exists that someone could examine the human consequences of free blacks gone wild in racist country and the threat of lashes and exile to those blacks who dared to enter Oregon without the support of its inhabitants in a compelling and exciting fashion. One would think this could be done based upon the drama that is pretty inherent in such vivid and shocking scenes. Yet this author takes such potentially dramatic material and turns into a boring sleep-inducing book that is precisely the sort of overrated trash that is assigned to bored schoolchildren to read by their woke idiotic progressive teachers that leads them to think of history itself as a boring subject without blaming those who make history boring for so many, terrible authors like this one.

This book is just shy of 200 pages and is made up of a large number of short but largely uninspired chapters. The author begins with a prologue and a timeline with dates and events. This is followed by a discussion of Oregon’s first slaves, what led Missouri people to take their families (and their slaves) to Oregon, the deals they made to preserve their control over blacks who by law and justice should have been freed, the clearing of the Applegate Trail, the laws they passed against free blacks, slavery in the mining areas, a narrative of a slave who sued his politically important master for freedom with the threat of his children being sold or returned to Missouri, and other slaves whose experiences are less well known. There are chapters of an army slave, the political debates over slavery and the desire for free white soil in Oregon (and other places), and other trials that blacks faced in the area, despite the fact that some had good connections. The book ends with acknowledgements, two appendices that discuss the author’s own family ties as well as an attempt to enumerate the number of slaves in Oregon, notes, bibliography, and an index.