t be permitted to
decide what these constitutional purposes are.

The period which constitutes the due time in which the terms proposed in
the address are to be accepted would seem to present scarcely less
difficulty than the terms themselves. Though the revenue laws are
already declared to be void in South Carolina, as well as the bonds
taken under them and the judicial proceedings for carrying them into
effect, yet as the full action and operation of the ordinance are to be
suspended until the 1st of February the interval may be assumed as the
time within which it is expected that the most complicated portion of
the national legislation, a system of long standing and affecting great
interests in the community, is to be rescinded and abolished. If this be
required, it is clear that a compliance is impossible.

In the uncertainty, then, that exists as to the duration of the
ordinance and of the enactments for enforcing it, it becomes imperiously
the duty of the Executive of the United States, acting with a proper
regard to all the great interests committed to his care, to treat those
acts as absolute and unlimited. They are so as far as his agency is
concerned. He can not either embrace or lead to the performance of the
conditions. He has already discharged the only part in his power by the
recommendation in his annual message. The rest is with Congress and the
people, and until they have acted his duty will require him to look to
the existing state of things and act under them according to his high
obligations.

By these various proceedings, therefore, the State of South Carolina has
forced the General Government, unavoidably, to decide the new and
dangerous alternative of permitting a State to obstruct the execution of
the laws within its limits or seeing it attempt to execute a threat of
withdrawing from the Union. That portion of the people at present
exercising the authority of the State solemnly assert their right to do
either and as solemnly announce their determination to do one or the
other.

In my opinion, both purposes are to be regarded as revolutionary in
their character and tendency, and subversive of the supremacy of the
laws and of the integrity of the Union. The result of each is the same,
since a State in which, by an usurpation of power, the constitutional
authority of the Federal Government is openly defied and set aside wants
only the form to be independent of the Union.

The right of the peop