NEW ENGLAND EMIGRANT AID COMPANY. Founded by Eli Thayer, of Worcester, Massachusetts, and seeking to assist Northern emigrants to settle in the West, mainly in the Kansas territory, the New England Emigrant Aid Company was incorporated as the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company on 26 April 1854; it changed its name in February 1855. Thayer and his supporters were alarmed that the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which overturned a territorial ban on slavery imposed by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, would close off economic opportunities to non-slaveholding laborers and immigrants. The Company was both a philanthropic undertaking and a money-making operation. It solicited investors and negotiated discounted transportation, provided conductors, and financed construction of hotels, schools, churches, and mills. Its expenditures totaled approximately $192,000. Company-backed settlers who went to Kansas, some three thousand in all, founded Lawrence, named for Amos A. Lawrence, the Massachusetts anti-slavery captain of industry and largest financial backer of the Company; Topeka; Manhattan; and Osawatomie, a town made famous when the zealot John Brown fought proslavery forces in its vicinity. The Company involved itself in the Kansas free-state movement by dispatching antislavery political advice and covertly supplying settlers with hundreds of the deadly Sharps breechloading rifle as well as cannons and a howitzer. When these operations were discovered they outraged proslavery forces, as well as the Democratic administration of Franklin Pierce. In the fight to determine whether Kansas would enter the Union slave or free, proslavery Missourians pointed to the Company's covert operations to justify their fraudulent voting. On the other hand, the rising Republican Party used the controversy surrounding the Company to build momentum. By 1857 settlement in Kansas by free labor migrants had grown to the thousands and the Company's efforts subsided. In 1861 the Company's assets, valued at $100,000, were liquidated to pay debts. During and after the Civil War the Company funded token efforts to establish colonies in Oregon and Florida. BIBLIOGRAPHYJohnson, Samuel A. Battle Cry of Freedom: The New England Emigrant Aid Company in the Kansas Crusade. 1954. Reprint, Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1977. Timothy M.Roberts Hudsons Bay Company , Hudson's Bay Company, corporation chartered (1670) by Charles II of England for the purpose of trade and settlement in the Hudson Bay region of North… Trading Companies , TRADING COMPANIES played an important part in colonial American settlement. Six incorporated British companies established settlements: the Virginia… Susquehanna Company , SUSQUEHANNA COMPANY SUSQUEHANNA COMPANY. SeeWyoming Valley, Settlement of . Company , com·pa·ny / ˈkəmpənē/ • n. (pl. -nies) 1. a commercial business. 2. the fact or condition of being with another or others, esp. in a way that provide… Johnson Publishing Company Inc , Johnson Publishing Company, Inc. 820 S. Michigan Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60605 U.S.A. Fax: (312) 322-0179 Web site: http://www.ebony.… Ingersoll-rand Company , Ingersoll-Rand Company 200 Chestnut Ridge Road Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey 07675 U.S.A. (201) 573-0123 Fax: (201) 573-3319 Public Company Incorporated… The New England Emigrant Aid Company[n 1] (originally the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company[4]) was a transportation company founded in Boston, Massachusetts[5] by activist Eli Thayer in the wake of the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which allowed the population of Kansas Territory to choose whether slavery would be legal. The Company's ultimate purpose was to transport anti-slavery immigrants into the Kansas Territory. The Company believed that if enough anti-slavery immigrants settled en masse in the newly-opened territory, they would be able to shift the balance of political power in the territory, which in turn would lead to Kansas becoming a free state (rather than a slave state) when it eventually joined the United States.[6][page needed] The New England Emigrant Aid Company is noted less for its direct impact than for the psychological impact it had on pro-slavery and anti-slavery elements. Thayer's prediction that the Company would eventually be able to send 20,000 immigrants a year never came to fruition, but it spurred Border Ruffians from nearby Missouri, where slavery was legal, to move to Kansas to ensure its admission to the Union as a slave state. That, in turn, further galvanized Free-Staters and enemies of Slave Power.
Thayer's intention was to capitalize on anti-slavery sentiment in the Northern United States and to send settlers to Kansas to purchase land and build houses, shops, and mills. They could then sell the land at a significant profit and send the proceeds back to Thayer and his investors. At the behest of several investors, who found the notion of profiting from the anti-slavery cause distasteful, the company's model was shifted to that of a benevolent society, and it was renamed the New England Emigrant Aid Company in 1855. While the company achieved neither a profit nor a significant impact on the population of Kansas, it played an important role in the events that would later be termed Bleeding Kansas. The Company was formed in the midst of the sectional crisis that preceded the American Civil War. To the Northern United States, the concept of popular sovereignty, which stated that the population of each new U.S. state should be allowed to decide if it allowed slavery, was an attempt by Southerners to gain power. When the Kansas–Nebraska Act threatened to extend popular sovereignty into the new Kansas Territory, Eli Thayer, a second-term Congressman from Massachusetts, hatched the idea of an Emigrant Aid Company in the winter of 1853–1854. His primary partners in the venture were Alexander H. Bullock and Edward Everett Hale, and together, they set Thayer's plans in motion on March 5, 1854.[7] Thayer announced the Company at a rally against the impending passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act in Worcester on March 11. Shortly thereafter, the Company's charter was approved by the Massachusetts Legislature for up to $5,000,000 in capital.[8][9] Officially, the Company was a profit-making venture, and how the settlers voted was of no consequence to the company. For example, the company secretary, Thomas Webb released a pamphlet in 1855 stating that although the settlers sent to the territories would not be required to vote for one side or the other, they were expected to support the free-state movement.[8] A number of abolitionists questioned the profit motive behind the company, and even many of Thayer's potential investors balked at the notion "that people might say we were influenced by pecuniary considerations in our patriotic work." Although Thayer personally disagreed with such hesitations, in 1855 the Company reorganized as a benevolent society and changed its name to the New England Emigrant Aid Company.[10] The success of the endeavor prompted other aid assistance companies to form back East, in New York and Ohio, with new companies such as the Worcester County Emigrant Aid Society.[11][12] The company was directly responsible for creating the Kansas towns of Lawrence and Manhattan, and it played a key role in founding Topeka and Osawatomie. Lawrence was named after the Company secretary, Amos Adams Lawrence.[13] Multiple politicians were found in the emigrants who left for Kansas, such as Daniel Read Anthony, Charles L. Robinson, Samuel C. Pomeroy, and Martin F. Conway, who would later be Kansas's first US Representative. The exact number of people who left for Kansas is unknown. James Rawley puts the numbers somewhere around 2000, about a third of whom returned home,[14] but the Kansas Historical Society puts the number at around 900 for those who left for Kansas in 1855 alone.[13] The Company's mission was ultimately successful, and Kansas entered the United States as a free state in 1861.
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