immense difficulties must be overcome. And, if natural conditions meant anything, Kansas and Nebraska, each so well adapted to wheat-raising and pasturage, were the gift of nature to a race of Northern farmers. Before the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill and when its fate was still in suspense, Thayer broached his plan before an indignation meeting called by his March. fellow-citizens; and, encouraged by their spontaneous applause, he drew up the charter of the "Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company," and carried it through the Massachusetts legislature. The original enterApril. prise was a wholesale and magnificent one, and Thayer meant to make it a paying one in the pecuniary sense, for he was not above declaring dividends upon the projects of philanthropy. With a capital fixed at $5,000,000, the company proposed to bring emigration to the West into an organized system; to plant freedom and the comforts and accessories of a free colony together; in the first place, to make of Kansas a free State, and then to sell out, and select and settle some other field, and so go on until every possible area of the Union became reclaimed by the genius of free labor. "It is much better," argued Thayer, "to go and do something for free labor than to stay at home and talk of manacles and auction. blocks and bloodhounds, while deploring the never-ending aggressions of slavery." * The public were sceptical about embarking in this project; and the more so because, as a money venture, there were plainly two sides to it. But several Massachusetts citizens of wealth and influence took a decided interest in it, among them John M. S. Williams, Charles Francis Adams, and Amos A. Lawrence. Edward Everett Hale, a young clergyman, was an earnest friend of this promising experiment, and a brave and sagacious man was found for managing agent in Charles Robinson, who had been schooled to experience among the argonauts of California. Horace Greeley, upon Thayer's personal solicita May-June. * Thayer's Kansas Crusade, c. 2. 1854. THAYER'S EMIGRANT AID SOCIETY. 325 1855 tion, gave freely the large influence of his name and newspaper to the new crusade. But no organization was ever effected under the broad original charter. Trustees managed the concern until the next year, when a second charter was obtained from the Massachusetts legislature, which broadened the opportunities to subscribe, but reduced the sphere of operations and the individual risks of those concerned in it. Of "The New England Emigrant Aid Society," John Carter Brown, of Providence, was President, and Eli Thayer the first VicePresident, and, in a long list of honorary directors, some of the most substantial names in the New-England States were represented. The company, as thus organized, devoted itself to the task, sufficiently arduous, of planting free-labor towns in Kansas; and, aided by contributions of about $140,000 in the course of three years' operations, it adjusted itself to the usual basis of a benefaction, without the hope of pecuniary return.* 1854. Meanwhile, under disheartening difficulties, the men who held up the hands of the original company had made good their challenge to slavery's propagators. In July the first company of emigrants from Massachusetts to Kansas passed by rail through the Empire State, drawing crowds to the way stations, attracting notice from the press, and inspiring the whole North to emulate their example. The fame or this colonial enterprise drew attention far and wide; its capital, reputed at what the original charter called for, gave an exaggerated estimate of its financial ability, and hundreds of wavering pioneers were stimulated to follow where a company supposed to be so rich and so powerful led the way. Along the whole route from Boston to Kansas these colonizing parties were swelled by accessions, and at the close of December, 1854, Kansas territory held a population of several thousand sons of freedom. The inspirational force of Thayer and his parent company led presently to the formation of hundreds of Kansas leagues and Kansas * Thayer's Kansas Crusade, cs. 3, 4; Spring's Kansas, c. 3. committees in our Northern States, all loyal to one another, all combined for a common purpose. This was, perhaps, the first attempt in the world's history to systematize and soften by beneficent aids the colonizing of a distant territory; and the secret of success in such an emigration was co-operative sympathy, or, as Charles Sumner afterwards pointed out, that instead of leaving a pioneer race to grope blindly, the fostering company went forward, "and planted capital in advance of population." * - Such is the jealousy with which even philanthropists are prone to regard the ameliorating schemes devised by others, that scarcely an anti-slavery man of the extreme type with which the country had grown so familiar could be found to say a good word for this Thayer experiment. Colonization to such theorists was "false in principle,” able to compass at best only "a transplanted Massachusetts." For years they continued to speak of free Kansas as a failure; its fate they insisted was sealed "the very moment the Missouri compromise was repealed.”† Far different forebodings filled the minds of those more practical politicians, the Missouri borderers, as they saw freedom's battalions arriving in turn, who pitched their tents towards the rich bottom lands, close to that tributary of the coiling water-course on the northeast, known as the Kansas River. They saw with dismay Hottentot huts and mud-plastered log-cabins marking the first site of anti-slavery towns in their rear; Lawrence, which was named in honor of the treasurer and moneyed benefactor of the "Emigrant Aid Company," being the earliest thus founded, and Osawatomie, with Topeka, following not much later. Atchison, the demagogue statesman, took the stump betimes to warn his fellow-citizens that Missouri institutions, as well as those of the territory, were in danger from these "philanthropic knaves." Stringfellow, 1854. *Speech in Senate, May 19, 1856. † See citations in Spring's Kansas, 29; Thayer's Kansas Crusade, 109. 1854. ATCHISON, STRINGFELLOW, AND REEDER. 327 his jackal and a rural pettifogger, hurried to the nation's capital early the next winter to arrange a counter-colonization for slavery's behest, and beat the Yankees at the unexpected game. This latter plan, Southern Congressmen most generously indorsed, but the working resources were beyond their power to furnish.* To colonization, in fact, the South, with the negro race on its back, moved incumbered like an armadillo, and for anything which resembled business rivalry that section was no competitor. To politics rather, with its crafts and chicanery, which the slave aristocracy quite thoroughly understood, was committed. the destiny of Kansas; and border ruffianism undertook to play out its hand with a strong confidence that the resources of the government would be used to help it sweep the board. October. The first territorial governor of Kansas, whom the President appointed soon after the passage of the Douglas bill, was Andrew H. Reeder, of Pennsylvania. He entered upon his official duties, sound to the core in Democratic principles, enthusiastic in the new faith of squatter sovereignty, loyal towards the administration, and withal an affable, ambling administrator, and a ready orator. Arriving at Fort Leavenworth in October, he declared himself opposed to the spirit of violence which was already astir in the territory; and with the laudable object of soothing the rival camps of freedom and slavery, besides informing himself, he began by a general tour of the settlements. The election of a territorial delegate to Congress presently brought into view the prearranged tactics of the Missouri borderers. Whitfield, a Tennessean, who held the office of Indian agent, was chosen by fraudulent ballots. Elections for the territorial legislature having been postponed until the following spring, a wider and more outrageous interference with the sovereignty of the genuine settlers was exhibited. Atchison and Stringfellow, the latter of whom had set up a newspaper, inflamed their Missouri neighbors to outvote. *Spring's Kansas, 27. November. and suppress these interlopers of the "Emigrant Aid Society," whose "five million fund" they imagined already raised, "to send out paupers and steal niggers." "Blue lodges," a secret pro-slavery order in Western Missouri, aided the mission work for the South and her institutions. On a memorable spring day, the 30th of March, a pictur1855. esque mob of these unwashed and greasily dressed March 30. lords of creation crossed into Kansas from their State, marched to the polls with guns, revolvers, and improvised weapons for assault, and deposited their ballots. with generous profusion for the pro-slavery candidates, wherever such ballots appeared needful. These scarecrow invaders had been carefully drilled; the free-State settlers (who had not thought of providing themselves yet with shooting implements) were not molested unless they showed fight; and judges of election who scrupled to receive their illegal votes, instead of meekly yielding, were the only ones they took the pains to displace. Hundreds of these "returning emigrants" marched back through the frontier city of Independence the next day, to the bray of brass bands, cheered by their Missouri compatriots, and regaled upon strong liquors. And, indeed, those popular sovereigns had done no half-way work; for, in a new territory, whose census, taken the month before, showed a population of 8,501, of whom 2,905 were qualified voters, 6,307 votes were plumped into the ballotboxes on this 30th of March, - nearly eighty per cent of them cast by the straddlers from Missouri. It is needless to say that pro-slavery candidates were almost everywhere elected.* April, May. Governor Reeder canvassed the returns and listened to the many protests. Free-State men, somewhat overawed, did not, in all instances, fight their local contests sharply; and their concert was rather to insist that this whole election should be cancelled, and a new one ordered under more vigilant precautions. Reeder braved fairly the pro-slavery gentry, whose threats were *Spring's Kansas, 45; Tribune Almanac. |