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Black
people had been traveling west long before the Philadelphia  convention.The first to
enter the region came fromcentral Mexico. Beginning in the 1600s, these Spanish-speaking blacks settled on New Spain's northern frontier, helping to found cities from San Antonio to San Francisco. They moved there to better their lives - something they found difficult to do in the Mexican interior, where success and social status were dictated by how "racially pure" (meaning white)one was. In 1821 Mexico declared its
independence from Spain, abolished slavery, and gave full citizenship rights to
all,regardless of color. Mexico's vice-president, Valentín Gómez
Farías, supported the migration of the United States' former slaves to
the area, declaring, "If they come,we will offer them land for
cultivation, plots for houses ...and tools for work, under the obligation [that
they will ]obey the laws of the country...." Soon afterward,
African-Americans began arriving in Mexico to seek freedom. But in 1836,American
revolutionaries crushed the aspirations of free blacks in Texas when they took
control of the area and turned the newly independent nation into a vast
slaveholding empire. With Texas no longer available, Afri- can-Americans looked
to the North. Like thousands of others, George Washington Bush, a Missouri
farmer,caught "Oregon fever": In 1844 he uprooted his wife and six
children and, along with four white families, set out on an eight-month,
roughly 2,000-mile journey to the Pacific Northwest. In September 1844, while
still on the Oregon Trail, Bush confided to fellow traveler that he should
"watch when we got to Oregon, what usage was awarded to peo- ple of
color." As for himself, he wrote, if he "could not have free man 's
rights," he would "seek the protection of the Mexican Government in
California or New Mexico." |