With public sentiment excited, and the Missouri compromise repealed, eager partisans prepared in the spring of 1854 to colonize the new territories in the interests of slavery and freedom. On the slavery side, Senator Atchison, of Missouri, was to be reckoned as one of the leaders. Young men of the South were urged to move, with their slaves and their possessions, into the new territories, and thus secure these for their cherished institution. If votes should fail them in the future, the Missouri border was not far removed, and colonization of voters might be counted upon. Missouri, directly adjacent to Kansas, and a slave state, naturally took the lead in this matter of preventing the erection of a free state on her western boundary. The northern states had been stirred by the act as deeply as the South. In New England the bill was not yet passed when leaders of the abolition movement prepared to act under it. One Eli Thayer, of Worcester, urged during the spring that friends of freedom could do no better work than aid in the colonization of Kansas. He secured from his own state, in April, a charter for a Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, through which he proposed to aid suitable men to move into the debatable land. Churches and schools were to be provided for them. A stern New England abolition spirit was to be fostered by them. And they were not to be left without the usual border means of defence. Amos A. Lawrence, of Boston, a wealthy philanthropist, made Thayer's scheme financially possible. Dr. Charles Robinson was their choice for leader of emigration and local representative in Kansas. The resulting settlement of Kansas was stimulated little by the ordinary westward impulse but greatly by political ambition and sectional rivalry. As late as October, 1853, there had been almost no whites in the Indian Country. Early in 1854 they began to come in, in increasing numbers. The Emigrant Aid Society sent its parties at once, before the ink was dry on the treaties of cession and before land offices had been opened. The approach was by the Missouri River steamers to Kansas City and Westport, near the bend of the river, where was the gateway into Kansas. The Delaware cession, north of the Kansas River, was not yet open to legal occupation, but the Shawnee lands had been ceded completely and would soon be ready. So the New England companies worked their way on foot, or in hired wagons, up the right bank of the Kansas, hunting for eligible sites. About thirty miles west of the Missouri line and the old Shawnee mission they picked their spot late in July. The town of Lawrence grew out of their cluster of tents and cabins.