Laws
Over the course of nearly six years under the provisional government, the settlers passed numerous laws. One law allowed people to claim 640 acres (2.6 km2) if they improved the land, which would be solidified later by Congress’ adoption of the Donation Land Claim Act. Another law allowed the government to organize a militia and call them out by order of the Executive or Legislature. Under the first Organic Laws of 1843 inhabitants were guaranteed due process of law and a right to a trial by jury. Some other rights established were: no cruel and unusual punishment, no unreasonable bails for defendants, and no takings of property without compensation.
In 1844, the legislature passed a law banning the sale of ardent spirits, out of concern that the Native Americans would become hostile if intoxicated. Another 1844 law prohibited additional African Americans from settling in the region (slavery had already been banned in the Organic Laws). The law banning black people authorized the lashing of any black person forty times from time to time until they left the region, but this punishment was never actually carried out. In 1849, one of the last laws passed authorized the minting of coins. These coins would be called the Beaver Coins and were created as a result of significant amounts of gold dust circulating in the area due to the California Gold Rush.
Read more about this topic: Provisional Government Of Oregon
Famous quotes containing the word laws:
“The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;”
—A.E. (Alfred Edward)
“It is clear that in a monarchy, where he who commands the exceution of the laws generally thinks himself above them, there is less need of virtue than in a popular government, where the person entrusted with the execution of the laws is sensible of his being subject to their direction.”
—Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu (1689–1755)
“What comes over a man, is it soul or mind
That to no limits and bounds he can stay confined?
You would say his ambition was to extend the reach
Clear to the Arctic of every living kind.
Why is his nature forever so hard to teach
That though there is no fixed line between wrong and right,
There are roughly zones whose laws must be obeyed?”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)