The _Herald_ was equally insistent that Lincoln should promise concessions; “he should at once give to the world the programme of the policy he will pursue as President, and that policy should be one of conciliation,” it said on Nov. 9. But a special correspondent of the _Post_, interviewing Lincoln in Springfield on Nov. 14, and finding him reading the history of the nullification movement, obtained an assurance that he would make no such sign of weakness. “I know,” he quoted Lincoln as saying, “the justness of my intentions, and the utter groundlessness of the pretended fears of the men who are filling the country with their clamor. If I go into the Presidency, they will find me as I am on record--nothing less, nothing more. My declarations have been made to the world without reservation. They have been repeated; and now, self-respect demands of me and the party that has elected me, that when threatened I should be silent.” The correspondent assured Lincoln’s Eastern friends that nature had endowed him “with that sagacity, honesty, and firmness which made Old Hickory’s the most eminently successful and honorable Administration known to the public.” When South Carolina carried her threat of secession into execution on Dec. 20, every New York newspaper had already indicated its attitude toward that act. Bryant had done so Nov. 12, in an editorial called “Peaceable Secession an Absurdity.” No government could have a day of assured existence, he wrote, if it tolerated the doctrine of peaceable secession, for it could have no credit or future. “No, if a State secedes it is in rebellion, and the seceders are traitors. Those who are charged with the executive branch of the government are recreant to their oaths if they fail to use all lawful means to put down such rebellion.” The next day he added that “We look to Abraham Lincoln to restore American unity, and make it perpetual.” No one expected Buchanan to do anything, and not a week passed without Bryant or Bigelow calling him a traitor. This insistence that the seceding States be coerced into returning was shared by the _World_, which was on the point of absorbing Webb’s _Courier and Enquirer_, and by the _Times_.