Cannelton Reporter, January 31, 1861

Who dares to do right just now is a brave man. We have had too much partisan idolatry for the good of the country. He who sees the right, and hesitates to act until he consults a party leader, or because it is in conflict with partisan platforms, is simply a craven and a coward; he is a pitiable serf, unutterably beneath a freeman—dead to patriotic emotions, blind to the condition of his country, and deaf to her urgent calls upon him as her son. Has it come to this, that to be true to our country we are to favor civil war? is a man no longer a patriot unless he blinks the errors of his own section of the country, and expends all his breath in denouncing the people of another section? Is coercion the only term to be used to entitle a Northern man to the respect and confidence of Northern men? Are we to fling out the starry folds of our national banner and march with it to bloody strife against our Southern brethren; is the march of freedom to be tracked in blood and desolation; are the institutions of this country to be upheld by bayonets; is the salutation of brothers to be drowned in the belching thunder of cannon and the clash of arms; are we to forget God, gospel, religion and humanity, and make the Union one great human slaughter-pen? If not, in God's name we ask, why the Senate of Indiana passes a series of resolutions which are cowardly in that they are calculated to bring this state of things about, while there is unmistakably an effort to conceal the mad design; they are malicious and cowardly; no brave man voted for them, or can sustain them. They place Indiana in a false position. Indiana will not contribute her power to subdue the South. It is a bald and infamous libel upon her sons for the Legislature to so enact, inferentially or otherwise. We may question the right of secession; we may believe Southern States have acted prematurely, but we won[']t go to war with them. Our past, our present, and our future forbids it. But the Senate resolutions are not only an infamous slander upon Indiana, but they were uncalled for. Compromise is what we want just now. Any act which tends to lessen the chances for compromise is a parricidal blow aimed at the Union and at peace—and such we regard the Senate resolutions. That Republicans should vote for them is strange enough, but that a Democrat should do so is passing strange. Indiana is panting for an opportunity to tell the Union, North and South, that she is in favor of the Crittenden compromise. In Perry County we honestly believe that ninety out of every hundred voters would vote for them. An honorable settlement of the difficulties is what they want; not war or coercion, or anything that is calculated to bring it about. If the mad fanatics can press us into a war, it is us of the border who will have to give and receive the blows; it is our trade and commerce that is to be ruined; it is our towns that are to be sacked and pillaged; our wives and children who are to starve and suffer; our fields which are to yield briars, and our blood that is to purple the Ohio and its tributaries. We tell the Senate that we of Perry County are not the enemies of Kentucky. You may write strings of coercion resolutions upon all the foolscap of the nation, and pass them too, and we will be friends still. Before the election we believed if the Republicans were successful that troubles would come, and we boldly proclaimed it.—They have come; and now we do not intend, by any word of ours, to express the slightest sympathy with the party which hopes to escape the just odium of its principles by such resolutions as were passed in the Indiana Senate. We are determined that the Republican party shall have the full benefit of their record from the Chicago platform to the day of the final fall of the "divided house."—Let the ghost of a once great and powerful, peaceful and happy country stalk before them. Let their President, Governors, Senators, orators, and the rank and file of the party, look at it and contemplate the ruin they have wrought, until they shall be made to feel their loss, and be ready to make such compromises as are demanded by the constitution and by the equal rights of white men.