Peaceful abolitionists and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 – Miami County Republic

The founders of Osawatomie were peaceful abolitionists who sought to ensure that Kansas would enter the Union as a free state by simply obeying the dictates of the law.

In the case of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, they sought to ensure that so many abolitionist settlers emigrated to Kansas Territory that they would be able to out vote the proslavery advocates and ensure that Kansas would enter the Union as a free state.

Kansas Territory was only the first western territory that their plan was to be tried in, for they planned to replicate this strategy and tactic in every territory of the West.

Why? The abolitionists who made up the New England Emigrant Aid Society and other abolitionist organizations understood that southern agriculture was based on the plantation system, which exhausted soil after a time, and planters simply moved west to find more fertile fields.

Southern plantation farmers had reached Missouri and the Mississippi, and on into Texas, and the abolitionist plan was to block the expansion of slavery where it stood, utilizing the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854s clause of Popular Sovereignty, or a vote of the citizens of new territories to determine the status of slavery in the new territories.

The abolitionists planned to flood the new territories of the West with abolitionist and free-soil settlers who would vote to make each territory of the West enter the Union as a free state and build a wall of free states in which slavery would not be legal.

The effect of erecting this legal wall against slavery would ensure that the southern plantation style of agriculture would become unprofitable, and the economic reason for owning slaves, to work on plantations, would become moot, and southerners would end slavery on their own as the profit would be lost in owning slaves.

This plan was actually quite legal, and the peaceful abolitionists forbade any violence against proslavery advocates save violence done in strict self-defense. The peaceful abolitionists were determined to be the law-abiding citizens in the political fray over slavery in Kansas Territory and in other territories of the West. They believed that they had an effective, moderate peaceful means of ensuring the abolition of slavery in the United States.

The New England Emigrant Aid Society was one of the abolitionist organizations that set out to implement this peaceful plan to abolish slavery and sent agents to Kansas Territory to establish abolitionist communities in Kansas Territory.

The first community that the New England Emigrant Aid Society founded in Kansas Territory was Lawrence. The second was Grasshopper Falls, now Valley Falls, and the third was Osawatomie.

The peaceful abolitionists carved these communities out of the Kansas wilderness to facilitate Kansas Territories entrance into the union as a free state in a peaceful manner, but alas, when proslavery extremists and extremist abolitionists settled in Kansas Territory, they had no intention of being peaceful, and any hope of a peaceful resolution of the slavery issue in Kansas and the nation was dashed during the Bleeding Kansas era of United States History.

Grady Atwater is site administrator of the John Brown Museum and State Historic Site.

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Peaceful abolitionists and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 - Miami County Republic