Evansville Daily Journal

Then and Now.
The Evansville Times, in the attempt to excuse the traitors who wrote the correspondence which was found in Dan. Voorhees's law office together with a quantity of the constitution and ritual of the "Sons of Liberty," produces extracts from the New York Tribune and this paper, printed in 1860 and 1861, and alludes to sentiments uttered by Salmon P. Chase and Robert Dale Owen, the Indiana State Journal and the Chicago Tribune, to show that those persons and papers, in the latter portion of 1860 and the early portion of 1861, were opposed to coercing the Southern States to keep them in the Union.
The Times does not consider that "circumstances alter cases," and that a view which might be excusable before the rebels lifted their arms to strike down the Government became after that time unpatriotic and destructive of liberty.
We are blamed for opposing the use of forcible means for the purpose of preventing the secession of South Carolina. This shows the extreme anxiety of the moderate Republicans, of whom we were one, to avoid a war. It shows that war, the last resort of nations, was to be waged only when kindness failed to induce the malcontents to desist from their threatened rebellion.
The extreme aversion on the part of a great many Republicans to the use of forcible means to compel South Carolina to remain in the Union, which was then felt, proves that the charge by the Copperheads that the Republicans provoked the war is false. So far from it being true that the Republicans provoked the South to make war, the conservative portion of the party-nine tenths-entertained an extreme aversion to the use of force to resist South Carolina secession previous to the firing on Fort Sumter.
When that mad act was accomplished the whole aspect of the question was changed. It was not whether South Carolina was worth an internecine and destructive war between kindred and friends: but whether traitors who had shed American blood, outraged the majesty of the laws, and violated the sacred flag of the Republic, should be punished. However men might have differed previous to that dire event, there was no difference of opinion amongst loyal men afterward on their duty in the premises. That duty was to assist the Government in vindicating the law, compelling obedience to it, punishing its violators, and maintaining the integrity of the Union.
Opposition to coercion against South Carolina's threatened secession, before the capture of Fort Sumter, was one thing, about which persons differed. An appeal to arms by a people who were in effect unanimously in favor of war, to punish the traitors who battered down the American flag and disgraced the American name, was quite another thing The Times cannot excuse its present treasonable sympathies for the rebels by pleading in extenuation, an unwillingness on our part to see the Nation plunged in a bloody war for the sake of the pestilent State of South Carolina before it forcibly rebelled against the authority of the Government, and shed American blood.