L.C.P. Freer of Chicago wrote a scathing commentary of the Kansas Territory free state movement and its supporters to James Abbott, who had solicited subscriptions from him to fund the cause. Freer suggested that the founders of the Emigrant Aid Societies were hypocritical and the free state men were nothing but "cattle" forming only a "little whiff of opposition to the introduction of Slavery into Kanzas." Freer did not appear to be a proslavery supporter, but rather a tough critic who responded cynically to the idealism of the free state cause.