ances alleged, without any new
measures having been made, we have seen, in the short course of one
month, a small proportion of the population of six States transcend the
bounds at a single leap at once of the State and the national
constitutions; usurp the extraordinary prerogative of repealing the
supreme law of the land; exclude the great mass of their fellow-
citizens from the protection of the Constitution; declare themselves
emancipated from the obligations which the Constitution pronounces to
be supreme over them and over their laws; arrogate to themselves all
the prerogatives of independent power; rescind the acts of cession of
the public property; occupy the public offices; seize the fortresses
of the United States confided to the faith of the people among whom
they were placed; embezzle the public arms concentrated there for the
defence of the United States; array thousands of men in arms against
the United States; and actually wage war on the Union by besieging
two of their fortresses and firing on a vessel bearing, under the flag
of the United States, reinforcements and provisions for one of them.
The very boundaries of right and wrong seem obliterated when we see a
Cabinet minister engaged for months in deliberately changing the
distribution of public arms to places in the hands of those about to
resist our public authority, so as to place within their grasp means
of waging war against the United States greater than they ever used
against a foreign foe; and another Cabinet minister, still holding his
commission under the authority of the United States, still a
confidential adviser of the President, and bound by his oath to
support the Constitution of the United States, himself a commissioner
from his own State to another of the United States for the purpose of
organizing and extending another part of the same great scheme of
rebellion; and the doom of the Republic seems sealed when the
President, surrounded by such ministers, permits, without rebuke, the
Government to be betrayed, neglects the solemn warning of the first
solider of the age, till almost every fort is a prey to domestic
treason, and accepts assurances of peace in his time at the expense of
leaving the national honor unguarded. His message gives aid and
comfort to the enemies of the Union, by avowing his inability to
maintain its integrity; and, paralyzed and stupefied, he stands amid
the crash of the falling Republic, still muttering, 'Not in