Diary of George Templeton Strong: from New York Times article
"Yet old Buchanan leaves Anderson and his party unsupported, with orders to defend the fort as best he may. When the calamities that seem at hand are upon us, Buchanan will hardly be able to live at the North. He will have to emigrate below the Potomac and become a "poor white" dirt-eater of the pine-barrens. Perhaps the South will tolerate the presence of a Northerner who has made himself infamous and become a fugitive and an exile by knuckling to Southern dictation. But perhaps it won't. It may hang Mr. Buchanan and tar and feather him and expel him from Southern soil as being a mere proselyte of the Gate, not a thorough-going Southerner.
Today's feeling is that secession is inevitable; that Virginia and Kentucky and the other Border States must follow their sisterhood on the Gulf, and that civil war is at hand. The prospect of conciliation by any Congressional action seems fading away.
Were we only united and unanimous here in the North, I should welcome the prospect of vigorous war on Southern treason. But we are discordant, corrupt, deeply diseased, unable to govern ourselves, and in most unfit condition for a war on others."
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