Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/337

Rh nevertheless. When any considerable section of our Union shall deliberately resolve to go out we shall resist all coercive measures designed to keep it in. We hope never to live in a Republic where one section is pinned to the other by bayonets."

"If the Cotton States, unitedly and earnestly, wish to withdraw peacefully from the Union," he said again, "we think they should and would be allowed to go. Any attempt to compel them by force to remain would be contrary to the principles enunciated in the immortal Declaration of Independence, contrary to the fundamental ideas on which human liberty is based."

Giving strength to this wrong counsel, the Mayor of New York City, Fernando Wood, proposed to make New York a free city. An important meeting, at which were present John A. Dix, William B. Astor, Charles O'Connor and others, was held for the purpose of seeing that the South was "treated fairly"—further evidence of what slender support the new president was receiving from the city which had had so much to do with his nomination and election, and with the issues that elected him.

The newspapers of New York then had,—what they now have not,—an influence throughout the country; an influence which they lost gradually, as the great western cities began to develop after the war. None of them was very helpful to Lincoln between his election and his inauguration; in fact, one day after the fall of Fort Sumter, the Sun prodded the Herald on its friendliness for the South, and declared that if its publisher had not hung out an American flag there would not have been another issue of the paper. The Herald was also charged with having had in its office a full set of Confederate colors,