Constitutional or not, they were needed. There were regular expeditions to carry off free colored persons from the coasts of New York and New Jersey, many of them successful. The foreign slave-trade, with its ineffable atrocities, proved defiant of law and preternaturally tenacious of life. A lucrative but barbarous domestic trade had sprung up between the Atlantic States, Virginia and North Carolina especially, and those on the Gulf, for the supply of the southern market. Families were torn apart, gangs of the poor creatures driven thousands of miles in shackles or carried coastwise in the over-filled holds of vessels, to live or die--little matter which--under unknown skies and strange, heartless masters. The slave codes of the southern States grew severer every year, as did legislation against free colored people. Laws were passed rendering emancipation more difficult and less a blessing when obtained. The Mississippi and Alabama constitutions, 1817 and 1819 respectively, and all those in the South arising later, were shaped so as to place general emancipation beyond the power even of Legislatures. Congress was even thus early--so it seemed at the North--all too subservient to the slave-holders, partly through the operation of the three-fifths rule, partly from fear that opposition would bring disunion, partly in that ambitious legislators were eager for southern votes. As to the Senate, the South had taken care, Vermont, Kentucky and Tennessee having evened the score, all before 1800, to allow no new northern State to be admitted unless matched by a southern. In addition to all this, the North had a vast trade with the South, and northern capitalists held to an enormous amount mortgages on southern property of all sorts, so that large and influential classes North had a pecuniary interest in maintaining at the South both good nature and business prosperity. CHAPTER II. "IMMEDIATE ABOLITION" [1832]