black immigration — a law remaining on the books (albeit not in actual effect) into the 20th century. 19th century On April 1, 1859, just two weeks after Oregon was admitted to the Union, the Republican Party held a convention in Salem at which it nominated David Logan as the party's choice for the state's first fully fledged Congressional representative. Logan would narrowly fall to defeat both in 1859 and again when nominated again for a full term in the election of 1860, but national political events would soon change the tide for the new political party. The Democratic Party found itself divided with the coming of the American Civil War between pro- and anti-Union elements. With the nation embroiled in war, pro-Union Democrats and Republicans put aside their differences at a fusion convention in April 1862, establishing themselves as the Union Party. This joint political organization would continue in Oregon through four elections under the Union Party banner, terminating only in 1868. As the united political organization for a preserved United States of America in contradistinction to defeatists and Confederate sympathizers, the Union Party and, after 1868, the rechristened Republican Party experienced dramatic political gains in Oregon, buoyed by the defection and disenfranchisement of the Democratic South. The party, as one historian noted, began to "grow like the plant that sprang up from the mustard seed." An alliance of Republicans and pro-Union Democrats in the Oregon State Legislature came together in 1860 to elect Edward Dickinson Baker as the first Republican U.S. Senator from Oregon. An era of Republican dominance in Oregon was begun. When the Civil War began in 1861, Baker raised his own militia, in which he served as commanding officer. On October 21, 1861, with Congress out of session, Colonel Baker and his men met Confederate forces on a hill called Ball's Bluff just outside Washington, D.C. Shortly after the battle started Baker was killed along with nearly 1,000 others. Despite the untimely death of Oregon's first Senator, E.D. Baker would hardly be the last. Over the next 30 years a steady stream of Republicans were sent to the U.S. Senate by the Oregon legislature, including Benjamin F. Harding (1862), George H. Williams (1864), Henry W. Corbett (1866), John H. Mitchell (1872, reappointed 1885, re-elected 1887 and 1891), Joseph N. Dolph (1882, re-elected 1889), and George W. McBride (1895). By the 1890s, the ideology of the