Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company

The New England Emigrant Aid Company (originally the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company) was a transportation company in Boston, Massachusetts, created to transport immigrants to the Kansas Territory to shift the balance of power so that Kansas would enter the United States as a free state, rather than a slave state. Created by Eli Thayer in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed the population of Kansas Territory to choose whether slavery would be legal, the Company is noted less for its direct impact than for the psychological impact it had on proslavery and antislavery elements. Thayer's prediction that the Company would eventually be able to send 20,000 immigrants a year never came to fruition, but it spurred Border Ruffians from nearby Missouri, where slavery was legal, to move to Kansas to ensure its admission to the Union as a slave state. That, in turn, further galvanized Free-Staters and enemies of Slave Power.

Thayer's intention was to capitalize on antislavery sentiment in the Northern United States and to send settlers to Kansas to purchase land and build houses, shops, and mills. They could then sell the land at a significant profit and send the proceeds back to Thayer and his investors. At the behest of several investors, who found the notion of profiting from the antislavery cause distasteful, the Company's model was shifted to that of a benevolent society, and it was renamed the New England Emigrant Aid Company in 1855. While the Company achieved neither a profit nor a significant impact on the population of Kansas, it played an important role in the events that would later be termed Bleeding Kansas.

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