What this is
The Oregon Admission Act, signed by President Buchanan on February 14, 1859, after a fifteen-month delay caused by the sectional crisis in Congress, admitted Oregon to the Union on an equal footing with the original states and offered six propositions for the state’s free acceptance or rejection. Among them: Sections 16 and 36 in every township were granted to the state for the use of schools; seventy-two sections were reserved for a state university; ten sections were granted for state public buildings; and five percent of the net proceeds of federal land sales within the state were directed to internal improvements. Oregon’s acceptance, on June 3, 1859, transformed the federal offer into a bilateral compact. The 11 Stat. 383 citation is canonical.
Why the Library cites it
Oregon’s 1859 Act is the founding document of the state on which the Library’s active affiliate litigation rests, and it is the canonical example of the doubled-section grant — Sections 16 and 36 in every township rather than just Section 16 — that defined post-1850 admissions. The Library cites the Act at the doctrinal floor of every argument the substrate makes about Oregon. Who Steals from Children’s claim that Oregon’s present school-trust practice has drifted from the federal compact the state accepted at admission turns on the granting language “for the use of schools” in this statute. The Eighth Anchor’s argument that the doubled-section grant was the federal government’s mid-century concession to the more arid Western land base draws on Oregon as the first example of the practice.
A representative provision
Section 4, First, granted “sections numbered sixteen and thirty-six in every township of public lands in said State, and where either of said sections, or any part thereof, has been sold or otherwise been disposed of, other lands equivalent thereto, and as contiguous as may be, shall be granted to said State for the use of schools.” The granting language is the operative text the substrate returns to. The propositions are framed throughout as offers conditional on the state’s irrevocable acceptance, the bilateral structure first deployed in Ohio’s 1802 Act and matured by 1859 into a working federal-admission machinery.
Where to find it
Library of Congress, Statutes at Large, 11 Stat. 383 — https://www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/35th-congress.php. The govinfo.gov fallback hosts the same materials. The Library hosts Section 4 (the school grant) excerpted in full at the entry page; the rest of the Act links out.
