Last updated: March 9, 2023
Person
Amanda Gardener Johnson
Quick Facts
“I was afraid to accept my liberty, much as I would have liked to stay [in Missouri]. The word of a Negro, even if a free Negro, was of no value in court…. for Negroes were the same as cows and horses and were not supposed to have morals or souls….so I came to Oregon with my owners.”
--Amanda Gardener Johnson
Amanda Gardener was born in Liberty, Missouri, on 30 August 1833 and became a wedding present to her owner’s daughter, Nancy Wilhite. When Gardener was seven years old, she was given to Wilhite’s daughter, Lydia, who had recently married Anderson Deckard. She declined Deckard’s offer of emancipation in 1853 as he planned his family’s emigration to Oregon Country; he thought she might want to stay in Missouri with her family, but Gardener knew life as a free Black woman in a slaveholding state could be perilous. Deckard also declined to sell the twenty-year-old Gardener to a local merchant, telling the would-be buyer she was “the same as one of our family.” Gardener left for Oregon in March 1853 and arrived there six months later.
Early Oregonians’ attitudes towards slavery can best be described as “complicated.” Most Anglo emigrants to Oregon Territory in the 1840s and 1850s opposed slavery, yet they did not want to live alongside African Americans; many were non-slaveholders from Missouri that knew all too well the impossibility of competing with slaveholding farmers. In July 1843, the small Anglo population of Oregon voted to approve a provisional territorial government—and to prohibit slavery. Less than a year later, that same government passed an exclusion law against Blacks giving slaveholders a deadline to remove their slaves from the territory. Slaves were freed automatically if their masters failed to remove them, but—once free—they could not stay in Oregon (under penalty of a “lash law,” which voters repealed the following year). The second of the three exclusion laws, passed in September 1849, prohibited new Black emigrants from settling in the state but stipulated that those already there could stay; it remained in effect until 1854.
As controversy about the westward expansion of slavery swept the United States in the 1850s, Oregon Territory law continued to prohibit the ownership of slaves. In 1857 voters doubled down on their previous positions, enthusiastically endorsing an exclusion clause while rejecting slavery. When Oregon was admitted to the Union in 1859, it was the only free state with an exclusion clause in its constitution; Black people could not own property, make contracts, or reside in the state. For this reason, many African Americans, whether free or enslaved, faced significant challenges at the western end of the Oregon Trail.
After the six-month journey to Oregon, Deckard found a donation land claim, taking possession of it via Oregon’s federally-sanctioned Donation Land Law. The family lived at Oakville, between Albany and Peoria, in present-day Linn County. Gardener lived with the Deckard family for at least five years and found a job that paid $3.50 per week at Magnolia Mills, James Foster’s flour-making business; as she later recollected, “I had come to the land of promise, a land that was flowing with milk and honey.” She married Ben Johnson, a blacksmith and former slave who had also made the trek from Missouri to Oregon in the same party as Gardener. They had a “fine wedding” on 12 April 1870, at the home of her employer, Mr. Foster. The couple lived in Albany, where Johnson had opened a blacksmith shop.
Amanda Johnson remained close with the Deckard family, continuing to care for Lydia’s children and grandchildren. She stated, “I never get over feeling that my first duty is to my family. Whenever any of the Deckards are sick I always go to nurse them and take care of them, for, you see, they are my people, and the only people I've got.” At the age of eighty-eight, living with a Deckard granddaughter, Amanda Johnson related that she was “strong and well” and had been free “since I was twenty.” She died in 1927 at her home in Albany.
(Special thanks to UNM PhD candidate Angela Reiniche for compiling this information)