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The Speech that Settled Kansas: Eli Thayer's Rousing Lecture

The Movement in 1854

The founding of New England Emigration Aid Company in 1854, was a direct response to the Kansas Nebraska Act. The company organized assisted emigration to Kansas from Rhode Island and the state of New York. The objective of the “organized self-sacrificing emigration”[1] as Thayer liked to call it his plans for Kansas, was to bring the ideological battle over slavery from the senate to the prairies. Thayer’s declared mission was “to dispute with Slavery every square foot of land exposed to its control. A hand-to-hand conflict was to decide between the system of free labor and the system of slave labor.”[2] Thayer stressed and called for direct action, and to the solution to the problem of slavery independent from a political decision.

[1] Johnson, Oliver. The abolitionists vindicated in a review of Eli Thayer's paper on the New England Emigrant Aid Company. Worcester, Massachusetts, Published by Franklin P. Rice, 1887, p. 9.

[2] Thayer, Eli. New England Emigrant Aid Company and its Influence, Through the Kansas Contest, Upon National History. Worcester, Massachusetts, Published by Franklin P. Rice, 1887, p. 5.

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1. Scopes of others might be named but
2. time and space will not allow further detail.
3. Suffice is to say, that but for the efforts,
4. so patriotic & unselfish, of the clergymen
5. of the few states the work of saving
6. Kansas would have been much harder
7. & perhaps a failure- even as it was
8. It was very difficult in the beginning
9. of the movement in 1854 to convince
10. any body that there was any chance
11. whatever of making a free state adjoining
12. & beyond the slave state of missouri.
13. It is proof of this that I was more
14. than three months raising our first
15. Colony of twenty four men who founded
16. Lawrence. After this feeble beginning
17. the work prospered, & the West, seeing
18. faith & hope shown by the East, began
19. to send in her tribute of patriotic men.
20. Then most of all we were helped by
21. the outrages of border ruffians. They in-
22. vaded Kansas & elected the officers & gov in
23. the territory. They sacked Lawrence.
24. They destroyed lives & property. All this
25. made our final triumph absolutely
26. sure. We of the North are a long suffering
27. people when the suffering comes by law
28. we stand a Dred Scott Decision on a
29. Fugitive Slave Bill. But we are a very