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TheEmigrant Aid Company was an organization
formed in 1854 to promote organized antislavery immigration to
the Kansas territory from the Northeast. Eli Thayer conceived
the plan as early as Feb., 1854, even before the Kansas-Nebraska
Act became law, and in April, Massachusetts chartered the
Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company. This organization, however,
proved defective and was soon superseded by the New England Emigrant
Aid Company. Many other Kansas aid societies were subsequently
formed throughout the North (e.g., the Kansas Emigrant Aid Society
of Northern Ohio and the New York Kansas League), but the New
England group was preeminent in the field and the name "Emigrant
Aid Company" is associated exclusively with it.
Amos A. Lawrence served as treasurer of the company,
which, despite its earnest soliciting of the support of clergymen
throughout New England, remained in bad financial condition until
Nov., 1855, when a notably successful campaign to raise money
was launched. For Thayer, who was vice president of the company,
the venture was not only philanthropic but profitable. As stock
subscription agent he received 10% of all the money he collected,
provided he gathered $20,000 or more. Thayer easily exceeded
that figure, for by May, 1856, the company had received over
$100,000.
The company sent out an aggregate of 1,240 settlers
under agents such as Charles Robinson, who founded Lawrence and
other towns in Kansas. Southerners, at first confident that Kansas
was safe for slavery, were moved to organize similar, though
proslavery, societies of their own. However, such ill-advised
actions by the proslavery societies as the sacking (May 21, 1856)
of the town of Lawrence only stimulated the Kansas aid movement
further.
Delegates from 12 states and Kansas convened at Buffalo,
N.Y., in July, 1856, and formed a National Kansas Committee.
Its goal of establishing Kansas aid committees in every state,
county, and town throughout the North was never realized. For
one thing the national committee was divided; one group, in which
Amos Lawrence was most conspicuous, advocated peaceful protest
against proslavery excesses in Kansas and financial help to the
free-staters, while the other, led by extreme abolitionists such
as Gerrit Smith and the Rev. Thomas W. Higginson, urged the creation
of state military forces to be used against Union troops in Kansas
if necessary. This group also proposed disunion at a convention
in Worcester in Jan., 1857.
Although the New England Emigrant Aid Company continued
in existence for some years, its real work was over and the whole
Kansas aid movement was virtually ended by 1857. Actually, the
company and its counterparts in other states had little to do
with making Kansas a free state (that was mainly accomplished
by settlers from the Western states), but the movement made
a deep impression on public opinion, North and South, and
it is claimed that the bitterness and hate it engendered helped
bring on the Civil War. |
