Thayer, Eli

Born: 1819-06-11 Massachusetts

Died: 1899-04-15 Worcester, Massachusetts

Born in Mendon, Massachusetts, Eli Thayer graduated from Brown University in 1845. That same year, he married Caroline M. Capron, with whom he had seven children. They moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, where Thayer taught at a local school and served as its principal from 1847 to 1849. He supervised construction of a women's school, the Oread Collegiate Institute, in which he also lived. Thayer became a prominent education reformer and won election to the Massachusetts General Court in 1852 on the Free Soil ticket. He opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and proposed sponsoring Free-Soilers to relocate to the Kansas Territory even before the bill's passage. He founded the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which made him a leader in the Free Kansas movement as the crisis in the territory deepened. He was an early and prominent Republican, and won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1856, where he served until 1861. As a representative, he sponsored similar migration and colonization efforts to Central America and Virginia. He knew John Brown and may have supplied arms for his raid on Harpers Ferry. In 1860, Thayer attended the Republican national convention and supported Abraham Lincoln's presidential nomination and campaign. The following year, Thayer refused to support federal legislation preventing slavery's westward expansion and subsequently left the Republican Party. During the Civil War, he worked for the Treasury Department and later as a land agent for the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad Company in New York.

Louis S. Gerteis, "Thayer, Eli," American National Biography, ed. by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 21:488-89; Horace Andrews, Jr., "Kansas Crusade: Eli Thayer and the New England Emigrant Aid Company," New England Quarterly 35 (December 1962): 497-514.