Municipal elections throughout the North during the ensuing winter showed a great falling-off in Republican strength.

There was, indeed, in every free State what might, in the political nomenclature of the day, be termed an utter demoralization of the Republican party.
The Southern States were going farther than the people had believed was possible.

The wolf which had been so long used to scare, seemed at last to have come.

Disunion, which had been so much threatened and so little executed, seemed now to the vision of the multitude an accomplished fact,--a fact which inspired a large majority of the Northern people with a sentiment of terror, and imparted to their political faith an appearance of weakness and irresolution.
Meetings to save the Union upon the basis of surrender of principle were held throughout the free States, while a word of manly resistance to the aggressive disposition of the South, or in re-affirmation of principles so long contended for, met no popular response.

Even in Boston, Wendell Phillips needed the protection of the police in returning to his home after one of his eloquent and defiant harangues, and George William Curtis was advised by the Republican mayor of Philadelphia that his appearance as a lecturer in that city would be extremely unwise.