e same, or without such advice and consent to compel
me to transfer to any person the records, books, papers, and public
property in my custody as Secretary.

But inasmuch as the General Commanding the armies of the United States
has been appointed _ad interim_, and has notified me that he has
accepted the appointment, I have no alternative but to submit, under
protest, to superior force.

It will not escape attention that in his note of August 5 Mr. Stanton
stated that he had been constrained to continue in the office, even
before he was requested to resign, by considerations of a high public
character. In this note of August 12 a new and different sense of public
duty compels him to deny the President's right to suspend him from
office without the consent of the Senate. This last is the public duty
of resisting an act contrary to law, and he charges the President with
violation of the law in ordering his suspension.

Mr. Stanton refers generally to the Constitution and laws of the "United
States," and says that a sense of public duty "under" these compels him
to deny the right of the President to suspend him from office. As to his
sense of duty under the Constitution, that will be considered in the
sequel. As to his sense of duty under "the laws of the United States,"
he certainly can not refer to the law which creates the War Department,
for that expressly confers upon the President the unlimited right to
remove the head of the Department. The only other law bearing upon
the question is the tenure-of-office act, passed by Congress over the
Presidential veto March 2, 1867. This is the law which, under a sense
of public duty, Mr. Stanton volunteers to defend.

There is no provision in this law which compels any officer coming
within its provisions to remain in office. It forbids removals--not
resignations. Mr. Stanton was perfectly free to resign at any moment,
either upon his own motion or in compliance with a request or an order.
It was a matter of choice or of taste. There was nothing compulsory in
the nature of legal obligation. Nor does he put his action upon that
imperative ground. He says he acts under a "sense of public duty," not
of legal obligation, compelling him to hold on and leaving him no
choice. The public duty which is upon him arises from the respect which
he owes to the Constitution and the laws, violated in his own case.
He is therefore compelled by this sense of public duty to vind