Topic > Summary of Samuel Clarke Pomeroy: The Story of…

On July 27, 1854, Samuel Clarke Pomeroy sat down in his seat and began to write a letter. Filled with opportunity, the United States in 1854 allowed people to take advantage of what was newly available and make something great out of it. Pomeroy has this in mind with the new Kansas-Nebraska Act passed earlier this year, creating two new territories in the Midwest region of the United States, in an effort to open the land to agriculture to those who had an interest in it . With land use kept in mind, Pomeroy wrote to Edward Everett Hale describing his new interest when it came to land in the Kansas area in particular. He described the land as well suited to the resources it had. It was founded by Northern abolitionist Eli Thayer of Worcester before the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. With this new group he had created, he had a few main goals he wanted to achieve. Overall, he wanted to make moving west easy and convenient for those who wanted to go there with reduced transportation costs and temporary accommodations. This was done in a very specific way, as detailed in the “Report of the Committee of the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society with the Act of Incorporation.” by Charles Robinson who says: “The Emigrant Aid Society will relieve him of all these embarrassments, by sending emigrants in companies and establishing them in considerable numbers. They will locate them wherever they want upon arrival in their new home and receive their titles from the government.” This continued further with the company promoting newspaper production in Kansas as “an index of the love of liberty and good morals, which it is hoped will characterize the state now being formed.” Kansas was considered the best state to do all of this because of the new opportunity it offered and the case of having to do it all. As stated in a newspaper reporting on the idea of ​​the New England Emigrant Aid Company, "But in Thayer's eyes, Kansas offered the ideal opportunity for lovers. With their impact and actions in Kansas, they gave abolitionists a push forward in their march to end slavery in the United States once and for all, not just in some states Eli Thayer and his company were indeed a great cause of the current state of slavery, giving a push forward to abolitionists and without his efforts, it could be argued that the way slavery and the Civil War progressed from there could have actually changed. In his novel A History of the Kansas Crusade, Its Friends and Its Foes, he says: “L The work of saving Kansas was done before the eyes of the whole world. We said we would do it and that we would stop the creation of slave states. We also established our methods; we went forward just as we promised, using the methods proposed and achieving the desired results, without the help of politicians and despite the active hostility of abolitionists." Thayer and his company truly believed that slavery should be outlawed and did everything they could to make that happen, truly achieving the impact they initially had