The tone of the minority at the time showed a similar belief that Massachusetts favored disunion. During all the proceedings of the State legislatures and the convention, the loyal press and citizens never ceased to point out the dangerous, treasonable, and absurd results to be expected from the course pursued. In the Massachusetts Senate John Holmes of Maine attacked the convention and its doings in a speech that gave him wide reputation.[431] Threats of civil war were freely uttered and defied. Among the least violent of Federalists was James Lloyd, recently United States senator from Massachusetts; and to him as a man of known patriotism John Randolph addressed a letter, Dec. 15, 1814, remonstrating against the Hartford Convention that day to meet. Lloyd replied in a letter also published, advising Randolph and the Virginians to coerce Madison into retirement, and to place Rufus King in the Presidency as the alternative to a fatal issue.[432] The assertion of such an alternative showed how desperate the situation was believed by the moderate Federalists to be. A long letter of a similar kind was written, Nov. 26, 1814, by Jonathan Mason to Wilson Cary Nicholas.[433] The opinion of the men among whom Mason lived was expressly declared by Mason to the effect that “Great Britain will not treat with Mr. Madison. He must retire, or the country and the Union are at an end.... This is plain language, but in my soul I believe it true. We shall not be destroyed to-day or to-morrow, but it will come; and the end of these measures [of the Administration] will be disunion and disgrace.” In the Republican party the belief was universal that the Hartford Convention could lead only to a New England Confederation; and the belief was not confined to partisans. An anecdote that George Ticknor delighted in telling, illustrated the emotion that then agitated men far beyond the passing and fitful excitements of party politics. Ticknor, a young Federalist twenty-three years old, wished for letters of introduction to Virginia, and asked them from John Adams, then a man of eighty, whose support of the war made him an object of antipathy to the party he had led.