How New England built the Plains

Boston Globe

11 hours ago

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But something shifted quickly and irrevocably that night he wrote about in 1854. It began with a man named Anthony Burns.
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Burns had stowed away for weeks in the belly of a ship to escape enslavement in Virginia. By the time he stepped ashore in Boston, he had become both free and criminal — property that had, under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, escaped its rightful owner. When federal marshals arrested him on false pretenses, hoping to sneak him back into bondage before the public noticed, Boston erupted.
The courtroom became a spectacle. The public was barred. Burns's own lawyer was rendered powerless — forbidden to object, speak, or protect his client in any meaningful way. And in a final insult, a government agent tricked Burns into dictating a letter affirming his status as an enslaved person. The judge empathized with Burns but nonetheless ruled against him.
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Slavery, it turned out, didn't need Southern soil. It could be enforced right in the cradle of abolition, in close proximity to the Boston Common.
Amos A. Lawrence in 1880.
Wikimedia Commons
The city's Black residents, who had always known the fragility of their freedom, mobilized first. The pastor of the Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury demanded Burns's release. Protests filled the streets. Fearing an uprising, the federal government fortified the courthouse even before the trial had concluded. President Franklin Pierce ordered troops to secure the building. Soldiers lined the entrances, and chains were fastened across the courthouse doors.
What changed wasn't just policy. It was perception. The moral quarantine in which elite white New Englanders had sequestered themselves failed. Slavery had entered their bubble. Henry David Thoreau, speaking just weeks after Burns's trial, demanded that his fellow citizens choose moral clarity over legal comfort. 'Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?' he asked. 'Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made?'
Amos Lawrence and others like him — well-heeled, genteel, cloistered — took notice. Eventually they also took action, albeit moderated and carried out on their own terms.
Calls for a more direct confrontation with slavery were not only imaginable at the time — they were already echoing through New England's streets, pulpits, and newspapers. In the wake of Burns's arrest, some abolitionists demanded open defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act. Many had supported similar efforts just three years earlier, when Shadrach Minkins, who had fled enslavement in Norfolk, Va., was forcibly rescued from a Boston courthouse by Black activists and white allies. With the help of the Boston Vigilance Committee, Minkins escaped via the Underground Railroad and reached safety in Canada. Figures like Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison urged moral suasion and civil disobedience; others, including activists in Boston's Black community, proposed disrupting the legal process altogether. In this atmosphere of mounting urgency, even violence in the name of freedom was discussed.
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But rather than confronting slavery where it stood and calling for direct abolition or cutting off commercial interaction with the American South, Lawrence chose to abolish only the chances for slavery's expansion. He became treasurer of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, a joint-stock corporation chartered by the Massachusetts Legislature with one aim: to raise funds to send free-soil settlers west to Kansas, in order that they might outnumber pro-slavery forces and tip the future of the American West toward freedom.
A war New England hoped to fund, not fight
Boston didn't send revolutionaries out west. It sent Congregationalists. Missionaries. Schoolteachers. Families armed with shovels, hymnals, rifles, and righteous intent. The Emigrant Aid Company raised funds through an exhaustive network of some 3,000 churches, many of them Quaker or Congregationalist. 'For Religion,' their circulars promised. 'For Education. For Temperance.' They were advocating a version of abolition that didn't disturb Boston's own social order. It was freedom as export. Righteousness at a distance.
The ask was modest — $20 per settler, roughly $700 today. Enough to transport and equip a family to settle Kansas on behalf of abolition.
Donations flooded in. The Rev. Horace James from Worcester sent $23.37, boasting of his congregation, 'Never did fingers and thumbs move more nimbly in the performance of any good work.' To him that meant that 'verily there is hope for Kansas.' Others weren't so flush with cash. The Rev. W.C. Jackson from Lincoln, Mass., whose flock scraped together $15, reported, 'Your circular for the Emigrant Aid Society came rather inopportunely for us farmers.' Some ministers like Jonathan Lee from Salisbury, Conn., apologized for the frugality of their flock: 'From my scanty purse a single dollar must be accepted in testimony of my interest in the cause of truth and freedom,' because, Lee wrote, 'I am without pastoral charge or salary.' Others enclosed neat bundles of cash with effusive letters, grateful for a moral cause that could be joined without leaving home. Lawrence threw himself into the effort. He wrote President Pierce — his cousin by marriage — to chide him for failing to protect free-staters. He tracked weapons shipments. He personally funded churches, schools, and armories. He, along with many others, made Kansas a proxy battlefield, a place to perform conviction while sidestepping a harder reckoning with what could be done to stop slavery entirely.
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And Kansas, as it turned out, bled.
Missourians — armed and incensed — flooded across the border. Ballot boxes were stuffed. Pro-slavery militias burned pressrooms. In 1856, just as the violence crested, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered a searing speech comparing Kansas to a raped virgin and accusing Southern politicians of barbarism. In a more familiar scene, days later, a South Carolina congressman, Preston Brooks, stormed into the Senate chamber and beat Sumner unconscious with a metal-tipped cane.
This was the war New England had hoped to fund rather than fight. But the borders were dissolving. Eventually, the South seceded. And when Kansas did enter the Union as a free state in 1861, its fate had been sealed not by New England idealism but by the absence of Southern senators in Congress.
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When the Civil War gave way to a fractured Reconstruction, Kansas endured not as a solution crafted by New England elites but as a promise seized by Black Americans themselves. As Reconstruction's guarantees faltered, many formerly enslaved people fled the South for the Plains, becoming known as Exodusters. Others, like Edward McCabe, envisioned Kansas not just as a sanctuary but as a staging ground — a terrain on which to build something autonomous and Black. For McCabe, Kansas — and later, Oklahoma — offered a second chance.
Edward P. McCabe, circa 1883-1887.
Kansas State Historical Society via National Park Service
And the names live on. The college town of Lawrence, Kan., bears Amos A. Lawrence's name, a monument to abolitionism at arm's length. In Langston, Okla., the Black town McCabe helped found, street names like 'Massachusetts' signaled to Black settlers that they were heirs to a longer freedom struggle — one rooted in, but no longer dependent on, New England's conscience.
The limits of New England's good intentions
The West that New England built was funded by abolitionists who had converted not to revolution but to strategy. They filtered their moral convictions through propriety.
It's worth asking what their legacy means now.
We live in a moment when the very institutions Amos Lawrence once stood for — elite philanthropy, intellectual inquiry, and cautious reform — have come under fire. Harvard, a beacon of New England liberalism, finds itself besieged by accusations from both right and left. Elsewhere, DEI offices are shuttered. History curricula are rewritten. Librarians contend with what books to put on their shelves. Even here, in the bluest of blue states, there's talk of 'indoctrination,' 'wokeness,' and 'elites out of touch.' And here too, migrants are detained often without the norms and sorts of protections we assumed would be durable.
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In the 1850s, Lawrence and his cohort were shaken into action by a single courtroom scene on Court Street. But their response came with a caveat: They would confront injustice without addressing it at home.
Today, Court Street is quieter, humming more predictably with foot and car traffic — but the moral decisions we must make haven't gotten easier. Who we detain, whose histories we erase, which freedoms we underfund — all still happen in that old Boston bubble.
The difference now is that there's no Kansas to send our convictions to.