Pending the arraignment of the prisoners in the United States Court for treason, the affair was made the subject of extended popular discussion. Fiery Southern journals and orators reflected the views that had been early expressed by Governor Lowe to President Fillmore, for his own State of Maryland, that if slave owners could not without incurring the risk of death pursue their property North and reclaim it, Secession and Disunion were inevitable. Quite as fierce and fiery champions of Abolitionism retorted with equal fervor and contempt for a league with iniquity and a covenant with slavery, and for a “flaunting lie” that flung the banner of freedom over a human race in chains. The great mass of conservative citizens stood for both law and liberty; and heard with sympathetic ears Webster’s great and eloquent pleas for “Liberty and Union--one and inseparable.” Joshua R. Giddings, in a speech at Worcester, in the early part of November, before the trial, publicly rejoiced in the killing of Gorsuch and that the fugitives “stood up manfully in defense of their God-given rights and shot down the miscreants, who had come with the desperate purpose of taking them again to the land of slavery.” It is a notable coincidence that just at this time the _National Era_, an Abolition paper in Washington, D. C., edited by Gamaliel Bailey, was beginning to publish as a weekly serial the first and copyrighted edition of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Neither the authoress nor the general reading public then appreciated the power and interest of the work, nor until it appeared later in book form. The rashness of the Gorsuches in incurring danger and inviting death by venturing into an unfriendly country for an unpopular cause, was cited in mitigation of the indictment against a whole community for lawlessness. The blunders of the Deputy Marshal in giving his official errand the aspect of a warlike incursion was urged as a reasonable explanation for what was charged as popular indifference in the locality toward a dark crime. Withal lawyers and laymen found subject for protracted discussion in the vexed question as to whether it was “treason”; and what degree of opposition or what extent of resistance to law constituted this high crime of such infrequent occurrence. The cases of the Whiskey Insurrectionists in western Pennsylvania, and Aaron Burr’s trial at Richmond, Virginia, had almost faded from popular memory. But there were those in eastern Pennsylvania who recalled some of the echoes of the Fries treason case; and its analogies with the impending trial of nearly forty Lancaster County people were curiously scanned by legal pundits on the Court House benches and by local sages on the country store boxes.