William Lysander Adams grabbed the attention of many Oregon readers in the early 1850s. His first writings, published in 1851 in The Oregonian, were strong Whig attacks on the territory’s dominant Democratic party. In February and March of the next year, Adams serialized his five-part poetic satire Treason, Stratagems, and Spoils in The Oregonian. Throughout the early 1850s, as political wars fired up in Oregon, Adams’ political satire continued to snatch attention.
Adams came to Oregon in 1848, after living his first years in the Midwest and East. Born in Ohio in 1821, he soon joined the Whig Party, studied at Knox College, and later worked with Alexander Campbell at Bethany College in West Virginia. Adams then joined the Campbellites (Christian Church). He married Francis Goodall in 1844, and they eventually had eight children. In 1848, Adams and his growing family moved west to the Yamhill County area of Oregon.
At first, Adams labored as a teacher, farmer, and preacher. In none of these occupations was he a full-time worker. Traveling west, Adams had brought with him his 250-book library, which soon spurred him to turn to journalism and literature.
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Adams’ most important piece of writing was published as A Melodrame Entitled “Treason, Stratagems, and Spoils” in Five Acts, and authored by “Breakspear.” Readers quickly realized Adams’ major purpose was to skewer the majority Democrats, who clearly outnumbered Adams’ Whigs in Oregon. All the major characters in the poetic melodrama were given pseudonyms, but their identities were easily recognized.
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Most of the plot of Adams’ drama hinges on political happenings, especially those among Democrats, in the territory’s political civil war in 1851-52. In the work’s five acts and nine scenes, Adams, as a loyal Whig, satirizes Democratic leaders and their ideas. Read discerningly, Treason, Stratagems, and Spoils becomes an illuminating guide to bombastic Oregon territorial politics in the early 1850s.
Although nearly a dozen characters function as major figures in the drama, fewer than a handful receive extensive attention. The Judge (Orville C. Pratt) is introduced first. A member of the territorial court, he is a young, ambitious jurist who dreams of rising to the top of Oregon’s political arena. In depicting Pratt as unstoppably driven, Adams creates a person more distorted than historically true.
Chicofee (Asahel Bush), Uncle Ned (Matthew P. Deady), and Joseph Lane (who does not figure in the drama) were more at the top of the Democrats than Pratt, but Adams choses the Judge as his central figure.
The Judge is parodied throughout the five acts. He is too driven by his out-of-bounds political ambitions and willing to break laws in several ways to fulfill his ambitions. One of the major political controversies of the time was the so-called Location Law, which assigned sites for the major territorial institutions: the capital in Salem, a penitentiary in Portland, and a university in Marysville (Corvallis). Democrats such as Pratt favored this three-part location; Whigs such as Adams did not.
Adams pillories the Judge for his willingness to foster bribery, illegal actions, and drunkenness to gain support for the Location Law and to advance his own political path. In the closing sections of Adams’ drama, Chicofee abandons his earlier support of the Judge, thinking him too self-driven and thus not a good prophet for the Democratic Party to follow.
One of Adams’ unusual satiric paths is linking the Judge to the Mormons. He suggests that Pratt will establish close ties with the Latter-day Saints and Brigham Young in Utah and call on the Mormons to form political connections with newly established outposts in Oregon and California. Although this picture of a possible bond with the Mormons was not based on authentic history, it fits Adams’ nonstop attempts as another way to create negative images of the Democrats.
Adams adds further to his unfavorable story by suggesting the Oregon Democrats were embracing the Mormons because people like the Judge wanted to bring polygamy into the territory so they could enjoy intimacies with several wives. Clearly, links to the unpopular Mormons were an additional way for Adams to undermine his political opponents.
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Readers seemed especially drawn to Adams’ writerly work — to his journalistic contributions but especially to Treason, Stratagems, and Spoils, particularly in the early 1850s. The 32-page drama was popular enough to be quickly reprinted twice in pamphlet form. Some recognized Adams’ title was borrowed from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice; others seemed to relish the author’s evident poetic talents.
Soon after the publication of his poetic melodrama, Adams moved on to other activities. In 1855, he established a new newspaper, the Oregon Argus in Oregon City. The new journal added another Whig source to the well-established Oregonian and leveled considerably more opposition against Asahel Bush’s Democratic Oregon Statesman. Bush labeled Adams’ newspaper the “Oregon Air Goose,” and, in turn, Adams referred to his journalistic opponent as “Ass-a-hell.” These exchanged attacks in the 1850s established what was later termed the “Oregon Style” in journalism, indicating that these competing newspapermen had established a unique way of satirizing, undercutting, and ridiculing one another.
Adams’ newspaper spoke for the new Republican Party, which surfaced in Oregon and elsewhere in the second half of the 1850s. Even Abraham Lincoln was a reader of the Oregon Argus. Once in the White House, Lincoln appointed Adams to serve as a collector of customs in Oregon.
Then Adams changed directions. In the 1870s, he traveled to Pennsylvania, where he earned a medical degree. Returning to Oregon, he set up a medical practice in Hood River. Divorcing his first wife, Adams married Mary Susan Mosier in 1881, with whom he had several children. He died on his Hood River farm in April 1906.
Adams should be remembered as the author of the first literary work in Oregon that attracted considerable notice. His poetic drama deserves continuing attention for its literary artistry and revealing illuminations of Oregon’s hectic political history of the 1850s.
Richard W. Etulain, a specialist in the history and literature of the American West, is the author or editor of 60 books. He is professor emeritus of history and former director of the Center for the American West at the University of New Mexico. He also served as editor of the New Mexico Historical Review. Among his best-known books are Stegner: Conversations on History and Literature(1983, 1996) and Re-imagining the Modern American West: A Century of Literature, History, and Art(1996). Etulain holds a PhD from the University of Oregon (1966) and taught at Idaho State University (1970-79) and the University of New Mexico (1979-2001). He served as president of both the Western Literature and Western History associations. He now lives in the Portland area with his wife, Joyce, a retired children's librarian.
