New England Emigrant Aid Company - Creation

Creation

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 whether it was a free or slave state, was seen as an attempt by Southerners to gain power. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act threatened to extend popular sovereignty into the newly created Kansas Territory, Eli Thayer, a second-term Congressman from Massachusetts, hatched the idea of an Emigrant Aid Company in the winter of 1853-4. 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. 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.

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, but they were expected to support the free-state movement. 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 named to the New England Emigrant Aid Company.