DOCUMENTS
1. The New England Emigrant Aid Company and English Cotton Supply Associations: Letters of Frederick L. Olmsted, 1857
The following letters reveal an attempt made in 1857 by the New England Emigrant Aid Company to enlist the aid of English cotton manufacturers in colonizing free laborers upon new land in the southwest of the United States. The work of this society in assisting the establishment of free communities in Kansas is well known. In encouraging emigrants, furnishing them with advice and helping to defray their travelling expenses, and finally by supplying the new communities with the necessary outfit of capital in the form of sawmills, grist-mills, etc., the Emigrant Aid Company combated the further advance of slavery with an intelligent policy of practical opportunism. Its business-like methods and adherence to lawful means still stand out in marked contrast to the violent denunciations and revolutionary propaganda which characterized much of the anti-slavery movement.
To have enlisted the services of Frederick Law Olmsted is the best sort of proof that the leaders of the Emigrant Aid Company were really anxious to learn the truth about slavery, for by the publication of his Journey in the Seaboard Slave States in 1856 and the Journey through Texas in 1857 Mr. Olmsted had shown himself to be the best-informed and the most unprejudiced and thoughtful student of slave society in this country.
The plan which Mr. Olmsted submitted to the Cotton Supply Associations of Manchester and Liverpool was based upon two clear and important convictions: (1) that cotton could be successfully grown almost anywhere in the South by white labor, and (2) that free white labor could in the long run hold its ground against the slave-using planters in competition for the land.[1] The success of
- ↑ The first point was elaborated in Olmsted's Journey in the Back Country, pp. 337–355. The soundness of the contention has been amply demonstrated by the later history of Southern agriculture, especially in Texas.
On the second point there was ground for a difference of opinion. Would the new colonists be any more able to hold their land against the competition of the large planters using slave gangs than were the small farmers of the South Atlantic states who in earlier decades had been driven on to poorer soils and to the new Southwest? Much would undoubtedly have depended on the character
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