Coercion.
We regret to see such journals as the Philadelphia
Bulletin holding out coercion as the ultimate duty of the
President.
Such counsels as these are exceedingly ill-timed and injudicious.
The very moment that the little finger of coercion is raised by the
General Government against any Southern State, the funeral knell of the
Union is tolled.
We cannot understand this proclivity of the Republican press to cling to the idea of coercion.--What kind of Union would it be which is enforced by the bayonet?
What freeman would submit to it, or in what would the condition of a people thus subjected differ from that of the
Italian subject of
Austrian despotism?--The South has never luxuriated in those bloody force ideas which seem to run riot in Republican brains.
The South has seen half a dozen Northern States nullifying the laws, and
Massachusetts formally declaring herself, upon the annexation of
Texas, out of the
Union; but she has never invoked Federal bayonets to reduce her to submission.
Even in the last war with
England, a war undertaken chiefly on behalf of Northern commerce, the
South never called for the blood of the traitors who burned blue lights on the
New England coast, though each man of them was as guilty of treason as
Benedict Arnold.In what refreshing contrast to these merciless and nonsensical threats of coercion are such noble sentiments as the following from that noble gentleman,
Hon. C. L.
Vallandingham, a member of Congress from
Ohio, correcting some remarks attributed to him in the
Cincinnati Gaxetts. All honor to this true patriot, this genuine American, one of the olden time, one of a class in the
Northern States which, though in a minority, embraces nearly all the public virtues and honor of that section of the country:
‘
"And now let me add that I did say, not in Washing on, not at a dinner table, not in the presence of fire eaters,' but in the
city of New York, in public assembly of Northern men, and in a public speech at the Cooper Institute, on the 2d of November, 1860, that if any one or more of the States of this Union should at any time recede for reasons of the sufficiency and justice of which, before God and the great tribunal of History, they alone may judge, much as I should deplore it, I never would, as a Representative in the Congress of the United States, vote one dollar of money whereby one drop of American blood should be shed in a civil war. That sentiment, thus uttered in the presence of thousands of the merchants and solid men of the free and patriotic
city of New York, was received with vehement and long continued applause, the entire vast assemblage rising as one man and cheering for some minutes.
And I now deliberately repeat and reaffirm it, resolved.
though I stand alone, though all others yield and fall away, to make it gold to the last moment of any public life.--No menace, no public claimer, no taunts, nor sneers, nor foul detraction from any quarter, shall drive me from my firm purpose.--Ours is a government of opinion, not of force — a union of free will, not arms; and coercion is civil war, a war of sections, a war of States, waged by a race compounded and made up of all other races, full of intellect, of courage, of will unconquerable, and when set on fire by passion, the most belligerent and most ferocious on the globe — a civil war full of horrors, which no imagination can conceive, and no pen portray.
If
Abraham Lincoln is wise, looking truth and danger full in the face he will take counsel of the 'old men,' the moderates of this party, and advise peace, negotiation and concession; but if like the foolish son of the wise sing, he reject these wholesome counsels, and hearkens only to the madmen who threaten chastisement with scorpions, let him see to it, lest it be recorded at last that none remain to serve him 'save the house of
Judah only.' At least, if he will forget the secession of the Ten Tribes, will he not remember and learn a lesson of wisdom from-the secession of the thirteen colonies?"
’
