Columnists on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line skewered Lincoln, though the secessionist press tended to sneer rather than laugh. “Everybody here is disgusted at his cowardly and undignified entry,” reported the Charleston Mercury’s man in Washington. He accused Lincoln of exhibiting “the most wretched cowardice.” The proslavery New York Herald likened Lincoln’s arrival to that of a “thief in the night.”
