Decades later, Burnett publicly described the Exclusion Law as intended to prevent disenfranchised black people from being exposed to politically empowered white people, which he wrote "reminds them of their inferiority", and suggested that their presence was "injurious to the dominant class itself, as such a degraded and practically defenseless condition offers so many temptations to tyrannical abuse". In his History of Oregon, William H. Gray described the law as "inhuman"; Burnett argued that Gray misrepresented the law.
