Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/686



emigration from Europe, amounting to some 400,000 persons, there can be no difficulty in inducing some thirty or forty thousand to take the same direction."**

"Especially will it prove an advantage to Massachusetts, if she create the new state by her foresight, supply the necessities of its inhabitants, and open in the outset communications between their homes and her ports and factories."

"It determines in the right way the institutions of the unsettled territories, in less time than the discussion of them has required in congress."**

This movement is justified by those who originated and control the plan, upon the ground that the persons whom they sent to Kansas were free men, who, under the constitution and laws, had a perfect right to emigrate to Kansas or any other territory; that the act of emigration was entirely voluntary on their part; and when they arrived in the territory as actual settlers, they had as good a right as any other citizens to vote at the elections, and participate in the control of the government of the territory. This would undoubtedly be true in a case of ordinary emigration, such as has filled up our new states and territories, where each individual has gone, on his own account, to improve his condition and that of his family. But it is a very different thing where a state creates a vast moneyed corporation for the purpose of controlling the domestic institutions of a distinct political community fifteen hundred miles distant, and sends out the emigrants only as a means of accomplishing its paramount political objects. When a powerful corporation, with a capital of five millions of dollars invested in houses and lands, in merchandise and mills, in cannon and rifles, in powder and lead—in all the implements of art, agriculture, and war, and employing a corresponding number of men, all under the management and control of non-resident directors and stockholders, who are authorized by their charter to vote by proxy to the extent of fifty votes each, enters a distant and sparsely settled territory with the fixed purpose of wielding all its power to control the domestic institutions and political destinies of the territory, it becomes a question of fearful import, how far the operations of the company are compatible with the rights and liberties of the people. Whatever may be the extent or limit of congressional authority over the territories, it is clear that no individual state has the right to pass any law or authorize any act concerning or affecting the territories, which it might not enact in reference to any other state.

When the emigrants sent out by the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company, and their affiliated societies, passed through the state of Missouri in large numbers on their way to Kansas, the violence of their language, and the unmistakable indications of their determined hostility to the domestic institutions of that state, created apprehensions that the object of the company was to abolitionize Kansas as a means of prosecuting a relentless warfare upon the institution of slavery within the limits of Missouri. These apprehensions increased and spread with the progress of events, until they became the settled convictions of the people of that portion of the state most exposed to the danger by their proximity to the Kansas border. The natural consequence was, that immediate steps were taken by the people of the western counties of Missouri to stimulate, organize, and carry into effect a system of emigration