Worcester, Massachusetts, the site of the first two National Woman’s Rights Conventions in 1850 and 1851, was also home to the Oread Collegiate Institute, one of the places women’s suffrage pioneers met to plan those historic gatherings. Founded by Eli Thayer with the assistance of Lydia Maria Child, two presidents of Brown University, and a number of other influential supporters, it was among the oldest women’s colleges in the United States. Its mission was to ensure that “women have the same opportunity of study and intellectual development” as men.
In 1854, Thayer was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives representing Worcester. He had watched with dismay as the Kansas-Nebraska bill, with its threat to open up these U.S. territories to slavery, proceeded inexorably toward passage in Washington. He realized that once the bill was law, people in the North would want “nothing so much as to make Kansas a free State, but they were in the dark about the modus operandi.” He set his mind to the problem, and developed a plan. Thayer called it “organized emigration,” by which he meant encouraging enough “supporters of free labor and opponents of slave labor” to settle in Kansas and vote in the plebiscites that would determine its future.
Under Thayer’s plan, the emigrants would receive free or heavily subsidized railroad and stagecoach transportation, provisions, and lodging en route. More than that, his proposed Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society would pay for capital improvements in their new home, such as saw mills, grist mills, power plants, manufacturing equipment, and printing presses. All of this would be funded by private capital. Everywhere in the territories where this up-front investment was made, Thayer believed, there would inevitably follow “a whole township behind it, including a school, a church, and a newspaper.” In this way Kansas could quickly be populated with, he estimated, “20,000 persons from Massachusetts.”
Under Thayer’s plan, emigrants would receive free or heavily subsidized railroad and stagecoach transportation, provisions, and lodging en route. In this way Kansas could quickly be populated with, he estimated, “20,000 persons from Massachusetts.”
Thayer brought his proposal to the Massachusetts legislature in April, more than a month before the Kansas-Nebraska Act was signed into law. On May 4, 1854, the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company received its charter of incorporation from the Commonwealth. It provided for an initial capitalization of up to $170 million in today’s currency, the first seven million of which was to be to be raised from private donors and expended in 1854. Gerrit Smith, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s cousin and one of the nation’s wealthiest men, would eventually contribute.
“The rumor of such an expense served the great purpose of freedom better than the expenditure could have done,” one of the original directors recounted, which was fortunate because nowhere near the proposed capitalization was ever raised, let alone spent. In the summer of 1854, only six small groups of settlers headed for Kansas, numbering about 450 people.
It was, nonetheless, a noteworthy beginning. Susan B. Anthony’s brother Daniel Read Anthony would be in the very first group of twenty-nine settlers.
But by the time they left the Eastern Seaboard, the proslavery forces were already well ahead of them. Five hours before sunrise on May 26, 1854, the Senate passed the final House version of the Kansas-Nebraska bill. Oblivious to the disaster they had wrought, partisans celebrated with a 100-gun salute from Capitol Hill, while the weary Senators attempted to slip through the inebriated crowds and make a beeline for their beds. When President Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act four days later, the race was on.
The law provided that only “free white males” could vote in territorial elections. But at the moment the law was signed, there were almost no white residents in the Kansas and Nebraska territories because they had not yet been opened to settlement. Instantly things changed; within days, hundreds of people crossed the border from the slave state of Missouri into Kansas and staked out their areas of land. Several of the new Kansas landowners then convened to adopt rump local ordinances, among which were these resolutions:
That we recognize the institution of Slavery as already existing in this Territory, and advise slaveholders to introduce their property [sic] as early as possible.
It was a few weeks later in June when, prompted by publicity in the New York Daily Tribune, an antislavery meeting in Rochester convened to generate support for Thayer’s emigrant aid mission to Kansas. It is likely that Susan Anthony’s brother Daniel attended, because he received a personal invitation from Eli Thayer to join the very first mission in July. As Daniel later recounted:
Eli Thayer, of Massachusetts, wrote to me at Rochester, N.Y., requesting me to join the emigrant aid party then about starting from the East to settle in the territory of Kansas. I promptly accepted the invitation and joined the party at Rochester on its way to the land of the border ruffians.
The first party of the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company headed out from Boston on July 17, with Eli Thayer in the vanguard. Rochester was the first stop along their route, where Daniel Read Anthony joined them. On their way the adventurers sang “The Emigrant Aid Song,” with lyrics provided to the group as a bon voyage gift from John Greenleaf Whittier. They set the poet’s composition to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne”:
The Pilgrims crossed the sea
To make the West, and they the East,
The homestead of the free!
On freedom’s Southern line
And plant beside the cotton tree
The rugged Northern pine.
With Anthony now on board, Thayer bid his pioneers farewell at Buffalo. It would be a further two weeks before the little convoy arrived in Kansas. Much faster than they could reach their destination, news traveled to Missouri’s slaveholders that New England emigrants were headed their way. The slaveholders in western Missouri did not take well to the prospect of East Coast abolitionists as neighbors, and they became even more alarmed when they heard the exaggerated report that Thayer’s organization envisioned spending millions of dollars to send tens of thousands of antislavery settlers into Kansas. The slave men had their own multimillions to protect. According to estimates at the time, their investment in human “property” in Missouri alone was more than one and one-half billion dollars, measured in today’s currency.
Though the party of settlers inching towards Kansas was in fact tiny, the news that hordes of abolitionists were coming immediately prompted Missouri’s slaveholders to take more aggressive action. Jackson County, which encompassed St. Louis, adopted a resolution pledging to “remove any and all emigrants” crossing into Kansas “who go there under the auspices of the Northern Emigrant Aid Societies.” The Squatter Sovereign, a proslavery organ established that summer in the newly founded town of Atchison on the Kansas side of the Missouri River, put the threats more bluntly. Missourians will, the paper announced, “lynch and hang, tar and feather and drown, every white-livered abolitionist who dares to pollute our soil.”
According to estimates at the time, the slaveholders’ investment in human “property” in Missouri alone was more than one and one-half billion dollars, measured in today’s currency.
This is what awaited Daniel Anthony at his destination. He anticipated as much. “I came,” he said, “because, under the teachings of Garrison, Sumner, Gerrit Smith, and Thad. Stevens, I had been brought up to detest the methods by which the political slave power of the country was seeking to rob this free government of its birth-right of free territory.”
Once they arrived in Kansas, Anthony’s party set to work scouting out locations suitable for settlement. In short order the group selected a site in the Kaw River valley to become the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society’s first town, which they named after the Society’s treasurer and benefactor, Boston textile manufacturer Amos Lawrence. Anthony chose a quarter section of land there for himself, near a spring on a rocky hill that overlooked the future town from an elevation of a thousand feet. It would later be christened Mount Oread, in honor of Thayer’s women’s college. In a matter of months, the township of Lawrence was formally established.
Within two years, Lawrence, Kansas would become infamous across the American continent. The cannon fire and the battle cries of marauders that soon resounded there would be heard a thousand miles away, and reverberate a thousand times more loudly, in the already embattled halls of Congress.
— Christopher Cox
