New England Emigrant Aid Company

By Matthew Reeves, University of Missouri-Kansas City

Samuel Clarke Pomeroy was a Massachusetts born educator, financial officer for the New England Emigrant Aid Company (NEEAC), mayor, and multi-term senator from Kansas (1861 to 1873). An ardent Free-Soil supporter, Pomeroy moved to Kansas in 1854 to further his work with the NEEAC.

By Claire Wolnisty, Angelo State University

Daniel R. Anthony was a man of strong abolitionist convictions who aggressively voiced his opinions as the postmaster, mayor, and dominant newspaper publisher in Leavenworth, Kansas. While Anthony’s contentious and radical nature isolated some of his contemporaries, he helped shape the territory of Kansas into a free state.

By Sarah Bell, University of Kansas

Julia Lovejoy and her family lived in Kansas Territory during the height of the “Bleeding Kansas” border tensions over the issue of slavery. She was a prolific writer and recorded the violent struggles between the Free-State and proslavery causes in letters she sent to Eastern newspapers. Her detailed descriptions of the events during this time provide important insight on the causes and consequences of the border wars.

By Claire Wolnisty, Angelo State University

Eli Thayer convinced New England businessmen to create the New England Emigrant Aid Company in response to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of May 25, 1854. The company encouraged settlers to move to Kansas and vote it a free state under the Act’s “popular sovereignty” provisions. As Reverend Edward Everett Hale, the company’s vice-president, concluded about Thayer’s role in the Kansas settlement effort, “This emigration at that time would have been impossible but for Eli Thayer.”

Wabaunsee, Kansas

Wabaunsee, Kansas was founded in 1855 by some 100 Free-Soil settlers associated with the New England Emigrant Aid Company and the Beecher family headed by the abolitionist Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, who smuggled guns to Kansas settlers in crates labeled "Beecher's Bibles."

By Deborah Keating, University of Missouri-Kansas City

Following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, Sara T.D. Robinson, and her husband, Charles, were two affiliates of the New England Emigrant Aid Company who accepted the challenge of settling in Kansas Territory to counter proslavery efforts and ensure that Kansas entered the Union as a free state. Sara brought her considerable talents as persuasive chronicler to the abolitionist fight and used her pen to document life in the new territory. Observant and articulate, she recorded her experience in Kansas: Its interior and Exterior Life, published in 1856.

By Jeremy Prichard, University of Kansas

The New England Emigrant Aid Company (NEEAC) formed in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. That bill declared that eligible voting residents in Kansas Territory would determine whether the future state would allow or prohibit slavery as a requisite for admission to the Union, creating what became known as popular sovereignty. Antislavery Northerners denounced the act because it essentially repealed the Compromise of 1820, which barred slavery in the lands attained from the Louisiana Purchase above the 36°30’ parallel, including the area that would become Kansas.

By Christopher Phillips, University of Cincinnati

Charles Robinson was raised by abolitionist parents, attended Amherst College, and then studied and practiced medicine. Later, Robinson was appointed a Kansas agent of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, became the extra-legal Free-State governor of Kansas Territory, and eventually the official governor of the state of Kansas in 1861.

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - New England Emigrant Aid Company