In June of 1844, James D. Saules, a black sailor turned farmer living in Oregon's Willamette Valley, was arrested and convicted for allegedly inciting Indians to violence against a settler named Charles E. Pickett. Three years earlier, Saules had deserted the United States Exploring Expedition, married a Chinookan woman, and started a freight business on the Columbia River. Less than two months following Saules' arrest, Oregon's Provisional Government passed its infamous "Lash Law," banning the immigration of free black people to the region. While the government repealed the law in 1845, Oregon passed a territorial black exclusion law in 1849 and included a black exclusion clause in its 1857 state constitution. Oregon's territorial delegate also convinced the U.S. Congress to exclude black people from the 1850 Donation Land Act. In each case, Oregon politicians suggested the legacy of the Saules case by stressing the need to prevent black men, particularly sailors, from coming to Oregon and collaborating with local indigenous groups to commit acts of violence against white settlers. This thesis explains the unusual persistence of black exclusion laws in Oregon by focusing on the life of Saules, both before and after white American settlers came to the region in large numbers. Black exclusion in Oregon was neither an anomalous byproduct of American expansion nor a means to prevent slavery from taking root in the region. Instead, racial exclusion was central to the land-centered settler colonial project in the Pacific Northwest. Prior to the Americanization of the Pacific Northwest, the region was home to a cosmopolitan and increasingly fluid culture that incorporated various local Native groups, exogenous fur industry workers, and missionaries. This was a milieu made possible by colonialism and the rise of merchant capitalism during the Age of Sail, a period which lasted from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. This was also likely a world very familiar to Saules, who had spent his entire adult life aboard ships and in various seaports. However, the American immigrants who began arriving in Oregon in the early 1840s sought to dismantle this multiethnic social order, privatize land, and create a homogenous settler society based on classical republican principles. And although Saules was born in the United States, American settlers, emboldened by a racialist ideology, denied most non-whites a place in their settler society. Furthermore, during the early decades of resettlement, white American settlers often felt vulnerable to attacks from the preexisting population. Therefore, many settlers viewed free black men like Saules, a worldly sailor with connections among Native people, as potential threats to the security of their nascent communities.

This work is a social and cultural history of the participation of enslaved and free Blacks in the Seven Years’ War in British America. It is, as well, an intellectual history of the impact of Blacks’ wartime actions upon conceptions of race, slavery, and imperial identity in the British Atlantic world. In addition to offering a fresh analysis of the significance of Britain’s arming of Blacks in the eighteenth century, it represents the first sustained inquiry into Blacks’ experience of this global conflict. It contends that, though their rhetoric might indicate otherwise, neither race nor enslaved status in practice prevented Britons from arming Blacks. In fact, Blacks played the most essential role in martial endeavors precisely where slavery was most fundamental to society. The exigencies of worldwide war transformed a local reliance upon black soldiers for the defense of particular colonies into an imperial dependence upon them for the security of Britain’s Atlantic empire. The events of the Seven Years’ War convinced many Britons that black soldiers were effective and even indispensable in the empire’s tropical colonies, but they also confirmed that not all Blacks could be trusted with arms. This work examines “Tacky’s revolt,” during which more than a thousand slaves exploited the wartime diffusion of Jamaica’s defensive forces to rebel, as a battle of the Seven Years’ War. The experience of insecurity and insurrection during the conflict caused some Britons to question the imperial value of the institution of slavery and to propose that Blacks be transformed from a source of vulnerability as slaves to the key to the empire’s strength in the southern Atlantic as free subjects. While martial service offered some Blacks a means to gain income, skills, a sense of satisfaction, autonomy, community, and even (though rarely) freedom, the majority of Blacks did not personally benefit from their contributions to the British war effort. Despite the pragmatic martial antislavery rhetoric that flourished postwar, in the end the British armed Blacks to perpetuate slavery, not to eradicate it, and an ever more regimented reliance upon black soldiers became a lasting legacy of the Seven Years’ War. / text