Representative John Pollard Gaines

John Pollard Gaines (September 22, 1795 – December 9, 1857) was a U.S. military and political figure who served as a Whig member of the United States House of Representatives from Kentucky from 1847 to 1849 and as Governor of the Oregon Territory from 1850 to 1853, stepping down after a turbulent term in office. He was born in Augusta County, Virginia, on September 22, 1795, to Abner Gaines and Elizabeth Matthews. His family had a strong Revolutionary War heritage, with his grandfathers and great-grandfather serving during the American Revolution. Gaines received a basic education, read law, and prepared for a legal career while still a young man. He volunteered for military service in the War of 1812, an early indication of the combination of legal, political, and military pursuits that would characterize his later life.

In 1819, Gaines married Elizabeth Kincaid of Kentucky and soon established himself in Boone County, Kentucky, where he practiced law and entered public life. By the mid-1820s he had become a landowner and, in 1825, he purchased a plantation known as Maplewood in Kentucky. Around a dozen enslaved persons labored on this plantation, including the mother of Margaret Garner, who was born there in 1833. As a child of about five or six, Margaret was put to work in Gaines’s household, where her duties included caring for his children. Gaines also rose in state politics, serving as a state legislator in Kentucky during the 1820s and 1830s while maintaining his legal practice in Boone County. His ownership of Maplewood and the people enslaved there would later have lasting historical resonance through the life of Margaret Garner, whose enslavement and sexual assault became the basis for Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.

Gaines’s military career was renewed during the Mexican–American War. In 1846 he volunteered for service and was appointed with the rank of major. By 1847 he was serving as aide-de-camp to General Winfield Scott during the campaign in Mexico. In January 1847, Gaines and approximately 80 soldiers were captured at Encarnación and held as prisoners of war in Mexico City. Remarkably, while still in captivity, he was elected to the Thirtieth United States Congress from Kentucky’s 10th Congressional District. He and his fellow prisoners were released in August 1847, and Gaines proceeded to take his seat in Congress. His term in the U.S. House of Representatives ran from March 4, 1847, to March 3, 1849. As a member of the Whig Party representing Kentucky, he contributed to the legislative process during this single term in office, participating in the democratic process and representing the interests of his constituents during a significant period in American history. He sought reelection but was defeated at the end of his term.

A strong supporter of General Zachary Taylor, Gaines aligned himself with the new Whig administration following Taylor’s election to the presidency in 1848. After leaving Congress, he returned to Boone County, Kentucky, but soon accepted a federal appointment. In October 1849 he was named Governor of the Territory of Oregon. The appointment came after another prominent Taylor supporter, former Representative Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, declined offers first of the territorial secretaryship and then of the governorship. Gaines traveled to Oregon with the newly appointed territorial secretary, Edward D. Hamilton, aboard the sloop-of-war Falmouth. Before he reached his post, tragedy struck: two of his daughters, Harriet and Florella, died of yellow fever at Santa Catarina Island, Brazil, in 1850, a loss directly connected to his journey to assume the governorship.

From the outset, Gaines’s tenure as governor of Oregon Territory was marked by personal tragedy and intense political conflict. Shortly after his arrival, his wife Elizabeth was killed in 1851 while riding on the Clatsop Plains; her horse was frightened by a wagon, and she was thrown and crushed beneath the wagon’s wheels, dying from her injuries. Their remaining children were subsequently sent back to relatives in the East. Politically, Gaines faced a hostile environment in which the Democratic Party dominated the territorial legislature and much of the press. A committed Whig, he attempted to maintain Oregon City as the territorial capital and advanced Whig policies that often ran counter to prevailing local sentiment. These positions, combined with fierce partisanship, helped cement a public perception of Gaines as an Easterner out of touch with the needs and attitudes of settlers on the Pacific Coast.

During his governorship, Gaines also played a role in federal Indian policy in the region. In June 1850 he became a member of an Indian commission established by the United States government to negotiate treaties with Native American tribes west of the Cascade Mountains. The commission’s work was closely tied to the Donation Land Act of 1850, which encouraged American settlement by allowing citizens to claim up to 640 acres of land in the Oregon Territory. Federal authorities sought to open lands west of the Cascades to settlers and to relocate Native tribes to eastern Oregon. Serving alongside commissioners Alonzo A. Skinner and Beverly S. Allen, Gaines helped negotiate 19 treaties. However, these agreements generally allowed the tribes to remain on the west side of the Cascades and in the foothills of the Willamette Valley rather than effecting the large-scale removals originally envisioned by federal policymakers. The commission was disbanded in February 1851 after ratifying these treaties, which nonetheless facilitated continued encroachment on Native lands.

Gaines’s connection to slavery and to Margaret Garner continued to have consequences even after he left Kentucky. In 1849, when he departed to assume the governorship of Oregon Territory, he sold Maplewood plantation and the enslaved people living there, including Margaret and her family, to his younger brother, Archibald Gaines. In 1849 he had permitted Margaret to marry Robert Garner, an enslaved man owned by James Marshall, who lived on a neighboring plantation. In 1856 Margaret, her husband, and their four children escaped slavery and fled to Cincinnati, Ohio, but were quickly tracked down by a posse. As they were surrounded and facing recapture, Margaret attempted to kill herself and her children rather than see them returned to slavery, succeeding in killing her two-year-old daughter. The dramatic events of her life and resistance later inspired Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, linking Gaines’s earlier role as her enslaver to one of the most enduring narratives of American slavery and its legacies.

After leaving office in 1853, Gaines was succeeded as governor by Democrat Joseph Lane, who assumed the reins of government for three days before the arrival of the next regularly appointed governor. Despite the hostility he had encountered in Oregon politics, Gaines chose to remain in the territory. About fifteen months after the death of his first wife, he remarried in 1853, taking as his second wife Margaret B. Wands, one of five schoolteachers recently sent to Oregon. He settled on a farm just outside Salem and turned his attention to agriculture and stock raising. In 1854 he and two of his sons, Archibald and Abner, drove a herd of more than 200 head of cattle from Kentucky and Arkansas across the plains to Oregon, including 35 purebred Durham cattle, in an effort to help establish and improve the beef cattle industry in the region. He remained engaged in public affairs and in 1855 ran for the U.S. House of Representatives from Oregon, but he was defeated by Joseph Lane.

John P. Gaines spent his remaining years in and around Salem, Oregon, where he continued his farming and stock-raising activities and lived with his second wife. His life had been marked by military service in two wars, legislative and executive office at both state and territorial levels, deep involvement in the politics of the Whig Party, and direct participation in the systems of slavery and westward expansion that shaped nineteenth-century America. He died on December 9, 1857, in Salem and was interred in the Old Pioneer Cemetery there, closing a career that had spanned the early republic, the era of Manifest Destiny, and the turbulent politics leading up to the Civil War.