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 every possible angle to arrange some compromise which would satisfy the angry element in the lower South. Even Republicans of the more radical type offered to do anything, except assent to the further expansion of slavery in the Territories, in order to prevent the formation of a Southern Confederacy and the expected paralysis of business. [Footnote 12: Perhaps we may use these terms now to describe the two great sections of the country as the Civil War approached.]