Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Philanthropy And The New England Emigrant Aid Company, 1854-1900, Courtney Elizabeth Buchkoski

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This project examines the New England Emigrant Aid Company colonization of Kansas in 1854 as a solution to the growing debate over popular sovereignty and slave labor. It uses the Company as a lens to reinterpret the intellectual history of philanthropy, tracing its roots from Puritan ideas of charity to the capitalistic giving of the nineteenth century.

It argues that the Company’s vision was simultaneously capitalistic and moralistic, for it served both as an imposition of “proper” society upon the West and South, but also had the potential to benefit the donors financially and politically. Using a settler colonial framework, …

Public Opinion Is More Than Law Popular Sovereignty And Vigilantism In The Nebraska Territory, Sean M. Kammer

Great Plains Quarterly

While debating Senator Stephen A. Douglas in the fall of 1858, Abraham Lincoln declared the principle of popular sovereignty, as applied to the Kansas Territory, to be "nothing but a living, creeping lie from the time of its introduction till today."¹ While Lincoln conceded the right of majorities to rule and to shape policy, he maintained that there were moral limits to this right-a line beyond which democratic majorities could not govern. This view contrasted sharply with that of Douglas, who argued that the ultimate source of authority was the will of the people, and that this authority was …