On May 30, 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act was signed, which opened the two territories to white settlement primarily so that a railroad could be built across the vast plains to the Rockies. Though the area was reserved for the Indians, the treaty was disregarded with the coming of the steam engine. Little did those long ago legislators realize the chain of events they had set in motion that would end in the Civil War and usher in an era of violence that would plague the plains for the rest of the century.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act also repealed the Missouri Compromise and reopened the issue of extending slavery north, allowing the two territories to decide the matter for themselves. As a result, settlement of the state was spurred, not so much by westward expansion, as by the determination of both pro-slavery and abolisionist factions to achieve a majority population in the territory.

With congressional power in the grip of the Southerners, the federal government placed the volatile issue of slavery into the hands of those settling the new territories. Abolitionists, especially strong in New England, were pitted against Southerners, who realized that if Kansas became a free state; their strength in the congress would be eroded.  To the South, this tip in congressional power was a threat to their political, economic and cultural existence.

Soon, New England abolitionists began organizing emigrant aid societies to encourage like-minded citizens to settle in the new territory. One of the men who joined the New England Emigrant Society and settled in Kansas for several years was Horace Tabor, before he moved on to Leadville, Colorado to later become known as the famous "Silver King.”

Pro-slavery interests in and throughout the South took counteraction. Towns were established by each faction - Lawrence and Topeka by the free-staters and Leavenworth and Atchison by the proslavery settlers.

On August 1, 1854, Twenty-nine northern emigrants, mostly from Massachusetts and Vermont, were the first to arrive in Lawrence, Kansas, named for Amos A. Lawrence, a promoter of the Emigrant Aid Society.  A second party of 200 men, women and children arrived in September.

Soon all the tasks required to organize a new territory for statehood would become secondary to the single issue of slavery.

On October 16, 1854, the first anti-slavery newspaper was established to voice the sentiments of the New England Emigrant Society. The newspaper called the Kansas Pioneer, further enraged the pro-slavery supporters.