And, while I do not choose now to specify particular acts of Congress as
proper to be enforced, I do suggest that it will be much safer for all,
both in official and private stations, to conform to and abide by all
those acts which stand unrepealed, than to violate any of them, trusting
to find impunity in having them held to be unconstitutional.

It is seventy-two years since the first inauguration of a President
under our national Constitution. During that period fifteen different
and greatly distinguished citizens have, in succession, administered the
executive branch of the Government. They have conducted it through many
perils, and generally with great success. Yet, with all this scope of
precedent, I now enter upon the same task for the brief constitutional
term of four years under great and peculiar difficulty. A disruption of
the Federal Union, heretofore only menaced, is now formidably attempted.

I hold that, in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution,
the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not
expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe
to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic
law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express
provisions of our national Constitution, and the Union will endure
forever--it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not
provided for in the instrument itself.

Again, if the United States be not a government proper, but an association
of States in the nature of contract merely, can it as a contract be
peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One party to
a contract may violate it--break it, so to speak; but does it not require
all to lawfully rescind it?

Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that in
legal contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of
the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was
formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured
and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further
matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted
and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation
in 1778. And, finally, in 1787 one of the declared objects for ordaining
and establishing the Constitution was "to form a more perfect Union."

But if the destruction of the Union by