A Company Founded to Win a Vote by Founding Towns

Bleeding Kansas was not a spontaneous demographic drift, on the free state side it was substantially organized and financed. Eli Thayer founded the New England Emigrant Aid Company in 1854, explicitly to recruit and subsidize free state settlers, many of them Congregationalist by conviction, and send them into Kansas Territory before the popular sovereignty vote on slavery could be settled by whoever arrived first. Lawrence, the company's flagship settlement, was named for its treasurer Amos Lawrence and built from the start as a base for antislavery organizing rather than growing organically the way most frontier towns did, and its Congregationalist churches functioned as much as political meeting halls as houses of worship through the violent years that followed. Proslavery Missourians who crossed the border to vote illegally and later to raid free state towns treated Lawrence's religious and political identity as inseparable, and they were not wrong to.

Mennonite immigrants from Russia brought Turkey Red winter wheat and a plain communal faith to central Kansas in the 1870s, a very different religious settlement pattern from the deliberately partisan one that founded Lawrence two decades earlier, and Topeka's Westboro Baptist Church, an independent congregation condemned by nearly every other Baptist body in the country, is a recent and unrelated outlier. Evangelical Protestant identification leads Kansas today at twenty seven percent of adults, per Pew's 2023-24 study.