t otherwise cure during the period of 1793 to 1801. Rather
than submit to the burdensome embargo and the more burdensome second war
with England, most New England men of property seem to have preferred
the dissolution of a union which was formed for commercial purposes; and
we have seen how Webster urged resistance to the national tariff in 1820
even to the point of advising secession. The rightful means of local
self-defense was a break-up of the confederacy, until in 1830 Jackson,
speaking for the West, and Webster, speaking for the rising industrial
group of the Northeast, announced that the Union was indissoluble and
that an attempt to sever it would be accounted treason. A sense of
nationality had come into existence, and a permanent, "sacred" union of
all the States was the corollary of that belief.

Still, when the South, with its resolute program of expansion and the
vigorous national control which characterized the Democratic
Administrations from Polk to Buchanan, made slavery a cardinal tenet of
its faith, legislatures and courts of the East refused to regard either
the Constitution or the federal law as paramount and abiding. Secession
was a common word among the constituents of New England Senators after
1840, and even Northwestern States threatened disruption of the Union as
late as 1859 if the national policy should continue to run counter to
their interests. There was, however, a strong undercurrent of devotion
to the idea of nationality in both North and South[12] in 1860, and when
South Carolina proceeded with her long-contemplated scheme of secession
early in November of that year, Jefferson Davis, who had formerly talked
freely of that "last remedy" of minority interests, advised against the
movement; and everywhere North and South men of great wealth, as well as
the poorer people, who must always bear the heaviest burdens of war,
deprecated and warned against the application of a remedy which all
sections had at one time or another declared right and lawful. As men
came nearer to the application of their "rightful" remedy, the older and
cooler heads urged the leaders of South Carolina not to withdraw from
the national confederation. Republicans like Seward and Weed and
Lincoln exerted themselves to the utmost to dissuade the Southern
radicals; all the influence of the Bell and Everett party was cast into
the same side of the scales; and Congress, when it assembled in
December, 1860, was pressed from e