Some proposed that the territories should be able to decide for themselves whether they should be “free soil” territories or allow slavery. Northern reformers sent free soil settlers into Kansas; the South sent in slave holders. Before long there was bloodshed. Even in Washington, a Southern representative beat a Northern senator over the head with his cane.

It was then, with horrible timing, that the Supreme Court gave the South an unexpected present. In its Dred Scott decision, the court announced that Congress hadn’t the right to bar slavery from any territory, and that the Founding Fathers had never intended that black men should be citizens in the first place. Even Frank was shaken. Hetty was outraged.

Finally, to add fuel to the fire, John Brown had raided the armory at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia, in the foolish hope of starting a slave uprising. The thing was doomed to failure from the start, and Brown had been hanged by the State of Virginia. But in no time Hetty had informed Frank: “John Brown was a hero.”

“He was not a hero,” Frank had protested. “He was a madman. His attack at Harper’s Ferry was completely hare-brained. You also seem to forget that he and his sons had already murdered five men in cold blood, just for being pro-slavery.”

“You just say that.”

“Because it’s true.”

As 1860 began, relations between North and South had never been worse. And there was one other factor that, in Frank’s estimation, made the situation even more unstable.

Frank Master had lived long enough to realize that the great transatlantic economic system, like the weather, had great cycles of its own. From boom to bust, it went round in a circle, always finishing up bigger than it had before, but subject to crisis every few years, and with each crisis, merchants were destroyed, but if one was prudent, the bust could be as profitable as the boom.

For a while now, the transatlantic system had been going through stormy economic weather. But not everyone had suffered—his own business had even managed to prosper. The people who had been entirely unaffected, however, were the big Southern planters. Boom or bust, the world seemed to need more and more cotton. The big planters had never done better.

“Cotton is king,” they could say triumphantly. And so confident were they in the good fortune of the South that some voices could even be heard declaring: “If the Yankees elect a Republican to ruin us, then to hell with the Union. Let the South go it alone.”

Few in the North took it seriously, of course. “Those Southern braggarts are absurd,” Hetty remarked contemptuously. But Frank was not so sure.