The destruction of colored people's houses became for a time an every-day occurrence in many northern cities. For some years the condition of the free blacks and their friends was hardly better north than south. Schools for colored children were violently opposed even in New England. One kept by Miss Prudence Crandall, at Canterbury, Conn., was, after its opponents had for months sought in every manner to close it, destroyed by fire. The lady herself was imprisoned, and such schools were by law forbidden in the State. A colored school at Canaan, N. H., was voted a nuisance by a meeting of the town; the building was then dragged from its foundations and ruined. Many who aided in these deeds belonged to what were regarded the most respectable classes of society. [1839-1840] Owing to the vagaries and unpatriotism of the Garrisonians, there was from 1840 schism in the abolition ranks. Garrison and his closest sympathizers were very radical on other questions besides that concerning the sin of slavery. They declared the Constitution "a league with death and a covenant with hell" because it recognized slavery. They would neither vote nor hold office under it. They upbraided the churches as full of the devil's allies. They also advocated community of property, women's rights, and some of them free love. Others, as Birney, Whittier, and Gerrit Smith, refused to believe so ill of the Constitution or of the churches, and wished to rush the slavery question right into the political arena. The division, far from hindering, greatly set forward the abolitionist cause. Perhaps neither abolition society, as such, had, after the schism of 1840, quite the influence which the old exerted at first, but by this time a very general public opinion maintained anti-slavery propagandism, pushing it henceforth more powerfully than ever, as well as, through broader modes of utterance and action, more successfully. Whittier, Lowell, Longfellow, each enlisted his muse in the crusade. Wendell Phillips's tongue was a flaming sword. Clergymen, politicians, and other people entirely conservative in most things, felt free to join the new society of political Abolitionists. In 1839 the Governor of Virginia made a requisition on Governor Seward of New York, to send to Virginia three sailors charged with having aided a slave out of bondage. Seward declined, on the ground that by New York law the sailors were guilty of no crime, as that law knew nothing of property in man. He accompanied his refusal with a discussion of slavery and slave law quite in the abolitionist vein. To a like call from Georgia, Seward responded in the same way, and his example was followed by other northern governors. The Liberty Party took the field in 1840, Birney and Earle for candidates, who polled nearly 7,000 votes. Four years later Birney and Morris received 62,300.