ADDRESS TO THE LEGISLATURE OF INDIANA, AT INDIANAPOLIS,

FEBRUARY 12, 1861

Fellow-citizens of the state of Indiana:—­I am here to thank you much for this magnificent welcome, and still more for the generous support given by your State to that political cause which I think is the true and just cause of the whole country and the whole world.

Solomon says there is “a time to keep silence,” and when men wrangle by the mouth with no certainty that they mean the same thing while using the same word, it perhaps were as well if they would keep silence.

The words “coercion” and “invasion” are much used in these days, and often with some temper and hot blood.  Let us make sure, if we can, the meaning of those who use them.  Let us get the exact definitions of these words, not from dictionaries, but from the men themselves, who certainly deprecate the things they would represent by the use of the words.

What, then, is coercion?  What is invasion?  Would the marching of an army into South Carolina, without the consent of her people, and with hostile intent toward them, be invasion?  I certainly think it would, and it would be coercion also, if the South Carolinians were forced to submit.  But if the United States should merely hold and retake its own forts and other property, and collect the duties on foreign importations, or even withhold the mails from places where they were habitually violated, would any or all of these things be invasion or coercion?  Do our professed lovers of the Union, who spitefully resolve that they will resist coercion and invasion, understand that such things as these, on the part of the United States, would be coercion or invasion of a State?  If so, their idea of means to preserve the object of their great affection would seem to be exceedingly thin and airy.  If sick, the little pills of the homoeopathist would be much too large for it to swallow.  In their view, the Union, as a family relation, would seem to be no regular marriage, but rather a sort of “free-love” arrangement, to be maintained on passional attraction.

By the way, in what consists the special sacredness of a State?  I speak not of the position assigned to a State in the Union by the Constitution, for that is a bond we all recognize.  That position, however, a State cannot carry out of the Union with it.  I speak of that assumed primary right of a State to rule all which is less than itself, and to ruin all which is larger than itself.  If a State and a county, in a given case, should be equal in number of inhabitants, in what, as a matter of principle, is the State better than the county?  Would an exchange of name be an exchange of rights?  Upon what principle, upon what rightful principle, may a State, being no more than one fiftieth part of the nation in soil and population, break up the nation, and then coerce a proportionably large subdivision of itself in the most arbitrary way?  What mysterious right to play tyrant is conferred on a district of country, with its people, by merely calling it a State?  Fellow-citizens, I am not asserting anything.  I am merely asking questions for you to consider.  And now allow me to bid you farewell.