Scott worked as a porter in a hotel in St. Louis, where he was a minor celebrity. His wife took in laundry. Dred Scott died of tuberculosis only 18 months after attaining freedom, on November 7, 1858. Harriet died on June 17, 1876. Perhaps the most immediate business consequence of the decision was to help trigger the Panic of 1857. The economist Charles Calomiris and the historian Larry Schweikart discovered that uncertainty about whether the entire West would suddenly become slave territory or engulfed in combat like "Bleeding Kansas" gripped the markets immediately. The east–west railroads collapsed immediately (although north–south lines were unaffected), causing, in turn, the near-collapse of several large banks and the runs that ensued. What followed the runs has been called the Panic of 1857. It differed sharply from the Panic of 1837 since the 1857 effects were almost exclusively confined to the North. Calomiris and Schweikart found that to have resulted from the South's superior system of branch banking, as opposed to the North's unit banking system, in which the transmission of the panic was minor because the diversification of the South's branch banking systems in which information moved reliably among the branch banks. However, northern unit banks were competitors and so seldom shared such vital information. The decision was hailed in southern slaveholding society as a proper interpretation of the US Constitution. According to Jefferson Davis, then a US Senator from Mississippi who later became the President of the Confederate States, the Dred Scott case was merely a question of "whether Cuffee should be kept in his normal condition or not." ("Cuffee" was a common slave name and was also used to refer to a black person since slavery was a racial caste.) Before "Dred Scott", Democratic Party politicians had sought repeal of the Missouri Compromise and were finally successful in 1854 with the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act. It allowed each newly-admitted state south of the 40th parallel to vote as to whether to be a slave state or free state. With "Dred Scott", Taney's Supreme Court permitted the unhindered expansion of slavery into all the territories. Thus, "Dred Scott" decision represented a culmination of what many at that time considered a push to expand slavery. Southerners, who had grown uncomfortable with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, argued that they had a constitutional right to bring slaves into the territories, regardless of any decision by a territorial legislature on the subject.