While the middle passage before 1808 was a veritable inferno, it was afterwards characterized by a barbarity which should have sickened the soul of all humanity, yet the voice and sentiment of humane, law-abiding Americans were not strong enough to make this traffic impossible. Cyrus King in a speech on the Missouri Question, in 1819, described the shameless situation: “It well might be supposed that the slave trade would in practice be extinguished; that virtuous men would by their abhorrence stay its polluted march and the wicked would be overawed by its potent punishment, but unfortunately the case is far otherwise. We have but melancholy proofs from unquestionable sources that it is still carried on with all the implacable ferocity--and insatiable rapacity--of former times. Avarice has grown more subtile in its evasions; and watches and seizes its prey with an appetite quickened rather than suppressed by its guilty vigils. American citizens are steeped up to their very mouths (I scarcely use too bold a figure) in this stream of iniquity? They throng the coasts of Africa under the stained flags of Spain and Portugal, sometimes selling abroad their ‘cargoes of despair,’ and sometimes bringing them into some of our Southern ports, and there, under the forms of law, defeating the purpose of the law itself, and legalizing their inhuman but profitable adventures.” Those so unfortunate as to have been brought into any of the Southern States were by the Constitution “subject to any regulations, not contravening the provisions of the act, which the legislatures of the several states or territories at any time hereafter may make, for disposing of any such negro, mulatto, or person of color.” As some extenuation for those Southern States, let it be asked, What was to be done with these unfortunate Africans? Barbarians all--often of the lowest type--and sometimes cannibals--could they be given freedom? The attention of thinking men was early directed to the status of the free black; how to place him to his own best advantage that his position as a citizen would not be equivocal; and to avoid arousing by his idle example or designing machinations, discord, dissatisfaction, and even mutiny among the slaves. In 1803, a colonization plan was discussed in the Virginia Assembly; this led to a correspondence on the subject between Madison, who was then Governor, and President Jefferson. Out of this was born in 1816, what soon became a very active organization, the American Colonization Society. After negotiations, lands were secured on the west coast of Africa at Cape Mesurada. There the society established a colony to which such free blacks as desired might be conveyed, and which was also to receive the Africans taken from slavers, or those found to have been smuggled into the country by traders. During all the years of the society’s activities the unfortunates reached by their clemency were small in proportion to