Note: This story discusses human enslavement, sexual abuse, violence, murder and infanticide.
In late 1849, Maj. John Pollard Gaines sold his Kentucky plantation — and approximately 12 enslaved people — to his brother. He then met with President Zachary Taylor before making his way to the Oregon Territory, where he arrived in August 1850 to assume his newly appointed role as its second governor.
Some records report he brought enslaved people with him to Oregon, though there is not historical consensus. It’s also not clear if Gaines was the father of one of the people he sold, Margaret Garner.
What historians do know is about seven years after Gaines sold her, 22-year-old Garner fled the Gaines family’s abuse on the night of January 27, 1856.
A pregnant Garner, her husband, their four children and her husband’s parents raced about 20 miles north on a sled her husband had taken from his enslavers. They crossed the frozen Ohio River into the North and headed to a nearby cabin where Garner’s free family lived.
Because of the 1850 federal Fugitive Slave Act, however, making it across the Mason-Dixon Line didn’t mean safety. The family planned to shelter at the cabin before following the underground railroad to freedom in Canada.
But by the morning, they were surrounded by their enslavers who had come to kidnap them and return the family to slavery. Before the men broke in, Garner used a knife to kill her 2-year-old daughter, Mary. Two of her other young children also received head wounds.
Roughly three-quarters of a century later, Toni Morrison came across an 1856 newspaper clipping about the devastating saga and resulting court case, which became a national news spectacle.
The ordeal so clearly captured the horrifying situations Black Americans were subjected to during American chattel slavery that the Nobel Prize-winning chronicler of American life based her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Beloved” (1987) on Garner’s decision.
Morrison saw that Garner’s experience revealed something about slavery at large. And according to historians Street Roots spoke with, Governor Gaines’ involvement in slavery reveals the largely overlooked history of slavery in the Oregon Territory.
The Oregon Territory’s founding fathers also legalized slavery for one year starting in 1844. But history unearthed by researchers like Darrell Millner, Greg Nokes and Marc Carpenter shows Black people were enslaved in Oregon both before and after that.
“There is a huge gulf between illegal and anything like enforcement,” Carpenter said. “So, I’d say the general norm was that it was illegal, and it was being practiced, and everybody knew about it.”
Slavery and settlement in the west
While manifest destiny and white settler colonial expansion was a virtually unquestioned doctrine among white settlers, historians said slavery remained the main debate on the mind of whites in the U.S. That was the case from when meaningful numbers of settlers started arriving in the Pacific Northwest in the 1840s through when the Oregon Territory was established in 1848 and into when Oregon was admitted to the U.S. as a free state in 1859.
(The Oregon Territory contained what are now the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho, as well as parts of Montana and Wyoming. It was governed from Oregon City. Prior to 1846, it was known as the Oregon Country, also contained British Columbia and was a partly disputed territory between the U.S. and the United Kingdom.)
Darrell Millner is a retired professor in the Black Studies department at Portland State University. He was also director of multicultural education for Portland Public Schools.
“To fully understand the origins of Oregon in American history,” he said, “you have to understand the institution of slavery and the public policy that revolved around it — not just in Oregon, but in the whole nation.”
That’s because the settlers who were populating the Oregon Territory were from the rest of the country — including the South — and they brought their views with them.
Many early white Oregonians opposed slavery, not as abolitionists but out of basic economic self interest, according to both Millner and Zachary Stocks, executive director of Oregon Black Pioneers.
“They just saw slave owning as something that was an existential threat to their ability to be self-sufficient farmers,” Stocks said.
Whites doing wage labor or working on their own farms could not compete with the low prices slavery enabled by stealing enslaved people’s labor. But that wasn’t the only reason, said Carpenter, an associate professor of history at the University of Jamestown, who specializes in the history of the Pacific Northwest in the 1800s and early 1900s.
“There’s worries about labor competition from enslaved labor among many white Oregonians,” he said. “Along with sort of a feeling that slavery is morally bad for white people for reasons other than what we might like, that it’s not about the moral wrong of slavery itself, but it’s that ‘People will become lazy,’ or that ‘Men will be tempted to sexually assault enslaved people.’”
Stocks said settlers also brought laws with them across the Oregon Trail — including the Black exclusion laws that the Oregon Country’s provisional government made.
“Those laws were taken almost verbatim from other states — from Illinois, from Indiana, from Iowa, Michigan,” he said.
When slavery was legal in Oregon
While the Oregon Country’s 1843 provisional laws banned slavery, the leaders of its provisional government modified that in 1844.
“That in cases where slaves shall have been, or shall be, brought into Oregon,” the new law read, “the owners of such slaves respectively shall have the term of three years from the introduction of such slaves to remove them out of the country.”
Slavery was officially legal in Oregon.
The law also promised lashings to free Black people who did not leave the territory. Historical records show leaders removed references to “lashing” in December of that year. Instead, the updated law said Black people would be arrested and auctioned off to anyone willing to pay the police for up to six months of work then remove them from the territory.
Some modern day accounts say the full law was rescinded in 1845. “Brown’s Political History of Oregon” (1892), which many sources cite, shows the law appeared to remain, but the territory’s de facto constitution was updated to ban slavery in July 1845, and legislators approved a resolution to the same effect.
Either way, the constitutional ban left the door open to slavery with a carve out for “the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” In 1849, politicians enacted another exclusion law banning Black people that lasted until 1854.
In the meantime, however, the historical record shows Black people in Oregon were being enslaved.
Historian Greg Nokes found that one of his own ancestors had brought an enslaved man with him to Oregon from Missouri. The story became his 2013 book, “Breaking Chains: Slavery on Trial in the Oregon Territory.”
In the years he spent reporting the book, Nokes found about 50 other cases where enslaved people were brought to the Oregon Territory.
One of those people was Robin Holmes, who settler/enslaver Nathaniel Ford brought alongside five other enslaved people from Missouri to what is now Polk County, Oregon.
After six years of enslavement in Oregon — double what the law permitted — Ford granted Holmes his freedom along with his wife and their first child. But Ford continued to enslave four of the couple’s other children.
In 1852, Holmes launched a worldshaking legal challenge to his children’s enslavement by Ford, who Nokes found had by then been elected a state legislator, nominated for chief judge of Oregon’s provisional government and was an organizer of Oregon’s powerful Democratic Party.
Holmes got the new prosecuting attorney for Oregon to take his case, Nokes wrote. After three judges refused to rule, the fourth delivered a miracle in 1853.
The judge returned the children to their parents and ruled “without some positive legislative enactment establishing slavery here, it did not and could not exist in Oregon,” Nokes found.
Illegal yet allowed
Even after the ruling, slavery continued in the Oregon Territory, and later after Oregon became a state.
As Carpenter said, settlers and leaders were able to openly practice slavery in Oregon because there was no enforcement of prohibitions.
Maybe the most notable example of that came in the early 1860s, revealed in the unpublished autobiography of Joseph Nathan Teal, which Carpenter found deep in the Teal family’s papers at the Oregon Historical Society.
Teal was born to pioneer parents in fall 1858.
“My first recollection which I can say I actually remember,” he later wrote, “is driving around the streets of Eugene with a big Newfoundland dog named Jedde hitched up with a negro boy named Coleman, both of which we owned. This may sound strange being in the State of Oregon but it is true.”
Carpenter said the fact that happened is revealing, but so is the reality that Oregon in the 1920s was tolerant enough of slavery that Teal could open his autobiography with the story.
Teal was not the only case. Often slavery was practiced in all but name, historians said.
“For example,” Carpenter said, “when eventual Oregon Senator James Nesmith is compelling Indigenous people to work his land under conditions that are pretty bad without pay, that’s compelled labor without pay with a racial lens in it, that’s, if not slavery, it’s certainly a form of unfree labor.”
Black people were expressly forbidden from coming here as free people, and the only ones who were coming were those who were made to come here, and then they were told that they did not belong.
Zachary Stocks
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF OREGON BLACK PIONEERS
He said that continued into the boarding school period in the 1900s when children from Chemawa Indian School were forcibly leased out to white families to do free labor.
Millner, the longtime PSU Black studies professor, said where people lived was the biggest factor determining whether Black Oregonians could be enslaved.
“So,” he said, “if you lived in a part of Oregon — like say Medford, Oregon, Jacksonville, Oregon in the 1840s and 50s, parts of Oregon where mostly settlement was done by people with a pro-slavery attitude — then you could practice virtual slavery, whether legal slavery was allowed in Oregon or not.”
Millner said he believes the practice was more widespread than we know today.
Oregon’s founding enslavers
A key part of why slavery was allowed to exist in the region may have been the fact that the Pacific Northwest’s founding fathers were themselves enslavers.
The Oregon Territory’s first governor, Gen. Joseph Lane, is likely most known for being John C. Breckinridge’s vice president pick in the 1860 election. The pair lost to Abraham Lincoln.
But, about a decade earlier, Lane — a Southern-born, pro-slavery Democrat — took over the Oregon Territory as its first governor.
He is widely suspected to have enslaved at least two young children. The first was a Native child who Carpenter said Lane claimed to have received during treaty negotiations and enslaved for an unknown period of time in the 1850s. The other was a young Black child named Peter Waldo.
“After slavery was abolished nationally, he (Lane) had as a quote-unquote ward, a young African descended man named Peter in all but slavery-like conditions,” Carpenter said. “I’ve read his (Lane’s) diary, this clearly wasn’t a young person who was being treated as a full member of his family — it looks very similar to slavery, it’s slavery in all but name.”
Lane was succeeded by John Pollard Gaines in 1850.
Born in 1795, Gaines’ family relocated from Virginia to Kentucky before the turn of the century. By 1804, Gaines’ father had purchased at least three enslaved people, according to Kentucky Historic Travels, which cites historic tax records.
The family built wealth from a stagecoach line between Cincinnati and Lexington, and an inn, according to Kentucky government history accounts. In 1814, around the time Gaines was serving as a volunteer in the war of 1812, his father expanded the inn into a giant brick house that stands today. (Other sources say it was built earlier and expanded by the elder Gaines.)
“The slaves made the bricks out of local mud, and they were dried locally,” said Katherin Huit.
Huit is a records manager for an engineering company, and runs a business doing historical research for clients including the Yamhill County History Museum. Before that, she was a director of collections for the Evergreen Aviation Museum.
She got her start as an undergrad at Linfield University in the late 1980s, when she discovered she and Gaines share a distant relative. Her mother’s birth name was also Gaines. Huit went on to produce the most significant work on Gaines as her 1996 thesis for a master’s degree in history from Portland State University.
She found that Gaines became a lawyer in 1816. By the 1820s, his practice was successful as a result of focusing on land title disputes from overlapping land grants. His work in the state legislature further boosted his profile.
Sources vary, but sometime between 1825 and 1827, Gaines bought the Maplewood Plantation. According to the Encyclopedia of African American History (2010), he would go on to enslave approximately 12 people simultaneously by the time he sold the plantation to move to Oregon and assume his role as governor. It is unclear how he obtained them. Huit suspects it may be from his wife or father.
She and Carpenter both said it was possible Gaines was Margaret Garner’s father but it’s almost impossible to know.
Nikki Taylor is a professor of history at Howard University, and the author of “Driven Toward Madness,” a 2016 book about Garner. She said descendants of the Garner family say they don’t believe Gaines was Garner’s father.
Historical records show Garner was biracial, which some take as evidence Gaines was her father, but Taylor found records showing Garner’s mother was also fair-skinned.
Further complicating public understanding of Gaines, Huit found records showing that while Gaines was a congressman representing Kentucky in 1848, he introduced a petition to abolish the enslaved persons trade in Washington D.C.
Lane, on the other hand, spent his time representing Oregon in Congress during the late 1850s advocating for slavery, according to Archives West.
Past shapes present
Stocks, the executive director of Oregon Black Pioneers, said many people think that while there is a large absence of Black Oregonians, there has also been an absence of anti-Blackness.
Instead, he said, the legacy of anti-Black policies has caused Oregon’s present day lack of diversity.
“Black people were expressly forbidden from coming here as free people, and the only ones who were coming were those who were made to come here, and then they were told that they did not belong,” he said. “Those created the conditions which made Oregon a place where the presence of Black people was not welcomed, and it’s been something that has had to be overcome for the past two centuries.”
Historians Street Roots spoke to warned that what we know is limited by what historical gatekeepers decided was important enough to record and preserve.
“Black people were 1% of Oregon’s population as we entered the 20th century,” Millner said, “but you’re still talking about hundreds of people with hundreds of different stories that are personalized and that represent every possible reaction to the racial circumstances of that generation.”
Millner said part of the power of knowing history is in how it changes you — and your actions, like it did for people like Abraham Lincoln or John Brown, he added.
“The most powerful thing that you can do is to learn the real history of the country,” he said. “But I’m not going to tell you that if you don’t learn it, you’re going to be unsuccessful or unhappy, because exactly the opposite of that is true. You are rewarded in American culture and education for not learning the truth.”
This article appears in June 17, 2026.
