Frederick Law Olmsted, travel writer and landscape architect, wrote from New York City to Edward Everett Hale, a member of the New England Emigrant Aid Company's Executive Committee. Olmsted commented that he had heard rumors that the more zealous anti-slavery supporters in Kansas were targeting west Texas as the focus of future free soil activity. Olmsted, in an expression of free-soil and free labor ideology, expressed his support for such a plan. He declared that surrounding the slave states with free territory would lead to the ultimate decline of slavery.
Kansas Memory
Kansas Historical Society
Frederick Law Olmsted to Edward Everett Hale - p. 2