left their seats at the capitol "to join their States." The President himself was fitly described by Henry Winter Davis as "standing paralyzed and stupefied amid the crash of the falling republic, still muttering, 'Not in my time; not in my time; after me the deluge.'" There were three ways of meeting these overt acts of high treason, namely: (1.) Submitting, either by sympathy and connivance, by frank surrender, or by an equally effective supineness. (2.) Meekly offering to rampant rebellion the bribe of fresh concessions to slavery. (3.) Treating armed secession as treason and its promoters as traitors, and dealing with it and them as such. The first method did not lack for supporters outside of the South. Thousands of Northern Democrats justified secession and promised the cotton States support. Their papers predicted that in case of war "it would be fought in the North,"[A] that "no Democrat would be found to raise an arm against his brethren of the South,"[16] and that "if troops should be raised in the North to march against the people of the South, a fire in the rear would be opened upon such troops which would either stop their march altogether or wonderfully accelerate it."[17] The Mayor of the great city of New York suggested in his annual message that that metropolis might well consider if the time did not seem to be at hand when it could profitably throw off allegiance to the United States and erect itself into "a free city." In public meetings and in party conventions like utterances were heard and applauded, all justifying the declaration of Lawrence M. Keitt in the city of Charleston that "there are a million of Democrats in the North who, when the Black Republicans attempt to march upon the South, will be found a wall of fire in their front." These sympathizers with rebellion were reinforced by the holders of anti-coercion theories, by commercial timidity, and--most unexpectedly--by some Republican sentiment in favor of permitting peaceful separation rather than facing civil war. This sentiment was fortunately short-lived and not cowardly in its origin, but it found an advocate in, and was given public expression by, the most influential Republican journalist of that period, Horace Greeley, and it did much to encourage rebel arrogance and to distract the national councils. But that was the most numerous class which comprised the men who proposed to meet actual civil war with servile tenders to traitors in arms of new guarantees for slavery and with humble petitions for their acceptance. With the meeting of Congress in December, 1860, these gentlemen became the conspicuous figures at Washington, and for three months labored industriously upon compromise schemes, every one of which was, in its essence, a proposition that Freedom should do homage to Slavery, and that the verdict of the people at the polls should be shamefully reversed to placate men who had deliberately plotted