The Underground Railroad in Connecticut

13. The Road in Full Swing

C H A P T E R 13 THE ROAD IX FULL SWING THE Compromiseof 1850 had been intended to allay the sectional conflict over the extension of slavery to the territories; and for a time, despite Northern opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law that was one of its provisions , it seemed to succeed in its purpose. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 remained in force; no territory north of latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes would come into the Union as a slave state, and by custom new states would be admitted in pairs, one slave and one free. North and South, at least in public, maintained an uneasy truce.1 It did not last long. Clay and Webster, architects of the 1850 settlement, both passed from the scene in 1852, and younger men came to the fore. One of them was Stephen A. Douglas, the five-foot-tall "Little Giant" who was a Democratic Senator from Illinois. He showed scant interest in the slavery question as such, but he was an ardent expansionist who envisioned America spreading inexorably across the continent. He was also devoted to the interests of his home state and its people, and he was eager that the transcontinental railroad, already being discussed, should spring from the Middle West rather than from New Orleans, thus crossing the still-unorgan- 176 The Underground Railroad in Connecticut ized upper Louisiana Territory rather than the state of Texas. As a step toward this end, Douglas in early 1854 introduced a measure to establish territorial government in the region. In its final form, the bill provided for two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, the one contiguous to slave-holding Missouri, the other to free Iowa. It also explicitly repealed the Missouri Compromise and provided that, in line with Douglas' favorite principle of "popular sovereignty," these territories should "be received into the Union with or without slavery, as their constitution may prescribe at the time of their admission." It wasexpected, though not stated, that Nebraska would eventually come in as a free state, while Kansas would enter as a slave state, and almost at once. In spite of desperate Free Soil opposition, the measure went through Congress by a sectional vote, and when President Pierce readily signed it on May 30, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was the law. It was, said Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, at once the worst and the best bill on which Congress had ever acted: the worst, because it wasa triumph for slavery; the best, because"it annuls all past compromises with slavery, and makes all future compromises impossible.Thus it puts freedom and slavery face to face, and bids them grapple. Who can doubt the result?" 2 One result was that, in Kansas, the fight between slavery and abolition began at once, in earnest, with deadly weapons. Missourian "border ruffians" flocked into the territory to stake out claims,while Free Soil "jayhawkers" with Sharps rifles rushed in from Northern states—among them that fierce old Ironside from Torrington, John Brown. While the battle lines formed in the West, opposition to the bill and support for the Free Soil settlers showed themselvesall over the East. In Connecticut, less than two months after the act THE ROAD IN FULL SWING 177 became law, Eli Thayer and his supporters applied to the General Assembly for a charter for the Connecticut Emigrant Aid Company, whose stated purpose was to enable emigrants from that state and the rest of New England to settle in Kansas and Nebraska. The charter never materialized, but Thayer's group was more successful in Massachusetts, where they secured passage of a measure creating the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, forerunner of the New England Emigrant Aid Company. Within a year, according to the so-called "Ministers' Memorials" that it circulated in July 1855 to nearly all New England clergymen, the Company had sent out "two or three thousand settlers" who had established six towns in Kansas. When Thayer visited Hartford on November 14 of the same year, he raised $5000 to support the work; the following day, addressing a large group of citizens in New Haven, he obtained $1600 more.3 By that time Free Soil sentiment was running high in the latter city. Under the leadership of Charles Lines, a Kansas Company of sixty members was organized to emigrate to the territory, and many meetings were held to raise money for them and to bid...