Studies in American History 
385 
for that reason went to the scene of conflict, great numbers 
of possible colonists who wanted homes instead of trouble 
were certainly kept away by the reports of violence and strife 
that reached them.^ 
The principal reason why most of the westward moving 
pioneers did not go to Kansas was simply the pull of com- 
peting frontier areas, more easily accessible to most of the 
colonists and offering more attractive possibilities. The real 
difficulty was that, in the early period of her history, Kansas 
had not enough economic prizes to offer — the agricultural 
and commercial opportunities were too few. She had not the 
gold of California to offer; nor could she furnish the fine 
chances for success that the slaveholders and non-slaveholders 
of the older southern states could find in Arkansas and Texas ; 
nor the excellent openings which the surplus population of 
the older northern states could find in northern Illinois, 
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa ; nor the more certain returns 
that lured capitalists, tradesmen, laborers, and tillers of the 
soil from both sections and Europe to Missouri. 
In the famous “Appeal of the Independent Democrats” 
of January, 1854, it was emphatically set forth that the pend- 
ing Nebraska measure was “part and parcel of an atrocious 
plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region immigrants 
from the Old World, and free laborers from our own states 
and convert it into a dreary region of despotism inhabited by 
masters and slaves”. Tho this sentiment met with a wide 
and vigorous response, the prophecy was unsound, as the 
events of the next few years were to demonstrate. The 
Kansas-Nebraska Bill became a law on May 30, 1854, but, even 
before its passage, a group of antislavery men of Massachu- 
setts believed that they had found a way to win a victory 
under its terms.® Since the question was to be decided by the 
people, the only thing necessary to bring about a triumph was 
to induce enough people with free-state principles to migrate 
to Kansas to swamp the competing proslavery element. To 
make this conception effective the New England Emigrant 
Aid Company was organized and other similar societies ap- 
peared in the East. This emigrant aid movement inaugu- 
Wabash Courier (Terre Haute, Ind.), September 1, 1855, quoting from the St. 
Louis Intelligencer; G. Douglas Brewerton, The War in Kansas (New York, 1856), 259. 
® Edward Everett Hale, Kansas and Nebraska (Boston and New York, 1854), 219; 
Charles Robinson, The Kansas Conflict (Lawrence, Kan., 1898), 23. 
