The South in seceding made no threat, and contemplated no attempt to invade a Northern State in pursuit of slaves, but simply sought to sever all connection with the States and people who were so determined to ignore her rights, and who nullified their own plighted terms of union. She did not secede in the interest of slavery nor for the purpose of war. The Southern States seceded to take care of the fragments of a broken Union. Slavery, it is true, was the occasion of the rupture. Peaceable secession on the one hand and coercion on the other was the issue of the war. Emancipation was adopted as a war measure two years later by the Northern administration and finally consummated in 1865 as a punitive measure to further crush the conquered South. Such was the public opinion at the time of the fall of Fort Sumter that not a regiment could have been raised at the North to invade Virginia if it had been distinctly called out for the purpose of setting the negroes free. Fanatics by the thousands made a demigod of the murderous John Brown, but it was not fanatics who were in control at Washington. It was the politicians, not working from humanitarian sentiment, true or false, but impelled by a determination to cripple the South and break up her controlling influence in national politics,--a preeminence which had existed from the first days of the government. The politicians shrewdly employed the anti-slavery excitement to gain power for themselves and especially to aggravate the South into secession, and then, smothering every whisper of war for the freedom of the negroes, they raised the rallying cry of "Save the Union" and marshalled the Northern hosts for subjugation. President Davis justly said to a self-constituted umpire visiting him in Richmond, "We are not fighting for slavery; we are fighting for independence. The war will go on unless you acknowledge our right to self-government." FRENZIED FINANCE AND THE WAR OF 1861 [By J. L. Underwood.]