Studies in American History 
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ourians to settle in Kansas in numbers sufficient to count. At 
least 300,000 people came to Missouri between 1850 and 1860 
to locate in St. Louis or to find homes in the towns and on 
the available agricultural lands.^® The state was too imma- 
ture, before the Civil War, to send forth many colonists to any 
frontier area, no matter how intense might be her interest in its 
settlement. The flow of Missourians into Kansas was about 
normal for the stage of development which Missouri herself 
had reached. Lafayette County, the county with the great- 
est number of slaves, a committee of whose citizens drafted 
an impassioned appeal to the other southern states to come 
to the aid of Missouri in her efforts to save Kansas for the 
South, increased in population by almost 7,000 between 1850 
and 1860. The increase in this county alone was equal to 
about 60 per cent of Missouri’s total contribution to Kansas. 
The obvious conclusion is, that, even in a Missouri district 
where the people were extremely anxious concerning the out- 
come in Kansas, they were too favorably situated, in most 
cases, to migrate to that Territory. It is interesting to reflect 
on the outcome of the Kansas struggle, had Missouri reached 
the stage of development by 1850 at which she had arrived 
in 1860. Possibly the result would not have been different, 
owing to the complexity of Missouri’s population. One thing 
is certain, however, that Missouri could have furnished, under 
the supposed conditions, a greater portion of the colonists than 
any other state. As it was, she could only keep up with a 
state so remote as Ohio, whose part in the peopling of 
Kansas Territory was but an incident in the enormous move- 
ment of her surplus population to new frontier areas. 
It would have been strange indeed had the important facts 
revealed by a comparison of the census figures of 1850 with 
those of 1860 escaped the notice of reflecting observers of 
the period of the Kansas struggle. It is true that the agita- 
tion of the slavery question and the passions aroused by the 
multiplied reports concerning the atrocities and violence at- 
See nativity tables in the Census volumes for 1850 and 1860. The total number 
of free persons born elsewhere and living in Missouri in 1850 was 317,018 ; in 1860, 
the number was 591,835, an increase of 274,817. The number coming- into the state 
to settle was greater than this as a portion of those counted in 1850 had died while 
others had left the state before 1860. The estimate that 300,000 colonists, exclusive of 
the slaves brought in, came to Missouri between 1850 and 1860 is probably a safe one. 
20 The population of Lafayette County in 1850 was 13,690 ; in 1860, it was 20,098, 
For the appeal, “To the People of the South”, sent out from this county, see DeBotv’s 
Eevieiu, XX, 635-637 (1855). 
