But New England "frenzied finance" was at work. The taste for public pap had grown by what it fed on. The "almighty dollar" idea in politics was sweeping the North. The _auri sacra fames_ had formed a league with a fanatical sectional party. The seed sowing was over; the harvest of financial politics had come. New England must have a higher tariff and votes from agricultural States meant more anti-tariff votes and the tariff advocates decreed that there should be no slave States carved out of the Territories. To secure this the Southern people with their property must be excluded from the occupancy of the Territorial soil. Frenzied finance triumphed, and in the election of Mr. Lincoln the North declared the national territory forbidden ground to the South. Free soil exclusion from their property was openly flaunted in the face of the slave States. What could the Southern States do under such an insulting ultimatum from the triumphant North? What did they do? Why, they simply fell back on their original right of State sovereignty and, as the North had already broken the Union, peaceably seceded from it. Then why not, as Greeley and Phillips and thousands of Northern patriots urged, why not let these States go? Frenzied Finance replied in the words of Mr. Lincoln, "If we let the South go, where will we get our revenues?" There it is. They were needed to furnish their cotton and their trade to support the North. It was the frenzied Pharoah of finance that refused to let tribute-paying, brick-making Israel go. Hence the war of subjugation. It is a grotesque and sad bit of history that while patriots like Crittenden, of Kentucky, Bayard, of Delaware, Black, of Pennsylvania and Seymour, of New York, were anxiously trying to avert war and save the old Union, while the whole world was watching with bated breath the storm gathering around Fort Sumter, the party of frenzied finance, now in control of Congress, defiantly discarded all propositions of peace compromise and concentrated all its mighty energies on the passage of its darling Morrill Tariff Bill. The Morrill tariff bill was enacted April 2, 1861. Fort Sumter fell April 14, 1861. There is the record of cold-blood-money worship. It was not Nero "fiddling while Rome was burning" but it was the legislators of the great American Republic fiddling on a scheme for the financial gain of private business while the glorious Union that we loved and our fathers loved was falling to pieces! The laborer's groans, the widow's sobs, the roar of cannon and the crash of States could not drown the mad New England cry for private subsidy from the public treasury. THE RIGHT OF SECESSION [In Southern Historical Papers, Volume 31, pages 87-88.]