As one State after another passed out of the Union, therefore, a half dozen newspapers, the _Herald_, _Daily News_, _Journal of Commerce_, _Day Book_, _Staats Zeitung_, and _Courrier des États Unis_ were taking an attitude friendly to the South; one, the _Tribune_, simply wrung its hands; and the _Evening Post_, _Times_, and _World_ alone urged severe measures. Jefferson Davis, wrote the _Evening Post_, “knows that secession is a forcible rupture of an established government; he knows that it must, if persisted in, lead to war.” “If our Southern brethren think they can better themselves by going out,” declared Bennett’s _Herald_ on Jan. 17, “in heaven’s name let them go in peace. We cannot keep them by force.”
During January nearly all eyes were fastened upon the various plans for keeping the Union intact by arranging a compromise, and preposterous some of these plans were. The Crittenden Compromise, which proposed making the Missouri line of 36′ 30″ the constitutional boundary between slavery and freedom in the Territories, was brusquely condemned by the _Evening Post_. “In every respect the ... scheme is objectionable, and no Republican who understands the principles of his party, or who is faithful to what he believes the fundamental objects of the Federal Constitution, can assent to it for one moment,” the journal said on Jan. 26. The Republican Party had been established and had just won its great victory upon the principle that slavery should not be extended into any Territory whatever; how could it give it up without committing suicide? In the same issue the _Evening Post_ said that the violent acts of the South, the seizure of forts and arsenals, the drilling of men to prevent arrests, “are treasonable acts, and amount to levying war upon the United States,” while it called Senator Toombs “a blustering and cowardly traitor.” The _Tribune_, which believed that secession was a mere threatening gesture, and that Northern firmness might overawe the rebels and bring them back into the Union, was also against the Crittenden plan. “No compromise, then! No delusive and deluding concessions! No surrender of principle!” exclaimed Greeley on Jan. 18. The next day the _Tribune_ evinced its failure to grasp the situation by remarking that if Major Anderson at Fort Sumter had fired on the rebels when the _Star of the West_ was turned back from his relief, “treason would have been stayed. That act alone would have saved Virginia from plunging into the fatal gulf of rebellion.”