Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/685

 being the true intent and meaning of this act not to Legislate slavery into any state or territory, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the constitution of the United States."

Immediately after the passage of the act, combinations were entered into in some portions of the Union to control the political destinies, and form and regulate the domestic institutions, of those territories and future states, through the machinery of emigrant aid societies. In order to give consistency and efficiency to the movement, and surround it with the color of legal authority, an act of incorporation was procured from the legislature of the state of Massachusetts, in which it was provided, in the first section, that twenty persons therein named, and their "associates, successors, and assigns, are hereby made a corporation, by the name of the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company, for the purpose of assisting emigrants to settle in the west." The second section limited the capital stock of the company to five millions of dollars, and authorized the whole to be invested in real and personal estate, with the proviso that "the said corporation shall not hold real estate in this commonwealth, (Massachusetts) to an amount exceeding twenty thousand dollars." Although the act of incorporation does not distinctly declare that the company was formed for the purpose of controlling the domestic institutions of the territory of Kansas, and forcing it into the Union with a prohibition of slavery in her constitution, regardless of the rights and wishes of the people as guarantied by the constitution of the United States, and secured by their organic law, yet tho whole history of the movement, the circumstances in which it had its origin, and the professions and avowals of all engaged in it, render it certain and undeniable that such was its object.

To remove all doubt upon this point, your committee present a few extracts from a pamphlet published by the company:

"For the purpose of answering numerous communications concerning the plan of operations of the Emigrant Aid Company, and the resources of Kansas territory, which it is proposed now to settle, the secretary of the company has deemed it expedient to publish the following definite information in regard to this particular:**

"For these purposes it is recommended, 1st. That the trustees contract immediately with some one of the competing lines of travel for the conveyance of 20,000 persons from Massachusetts to that place in the west which the trustees shall select for their first settlement."*****

"It is recommended that the company's agents locate and take up for the company's benefit, the sections of land in which the boarding-houses and mills are located, and no others. And further, whenever the territory shall be organized as a free state, the trustees shall dispose of all its interests there, replace by the sales the money laid out, declare a dividend to the stockholders, and that they then select a new field, and make similar arrangements for the settlement and organization of another free state of this Union."*****

"With the advantages attained by such a system of effort, the territory selected as the scene of operations would, it is believed, be filled up with free inhabitants."**

"There is reason to suppose several thousand men of New England origin propose to emigrate under the auspices of some such arrangement, this very summer. Of the whole