is yet in your power to disappoint them. There is yet
time to show that the descendants of the Pinckneys, the Sumpters, the
Rutledges, and of the thousand other names which adorn the pages of your
Revolutionary history will not abandon that Union to support which so
many of them fought and bled and died. I adjure you, as you honor their
memory, as you love the cause of freedom, to which they dedicated their
lives, as you prize the peace of your country, the lives of its best
citizens, and your own fair fame, to retrace your steps. Snatch from the
archives of your State the disorganizing edict of its convention; bid
its members to reassemble and promulgate the decided expressions of your
will to remain in the path which alone can conduct you to safety,
prosperity, and honor. Tell them that compared to disunion all other
evils are light, because that brings with it an accumulation of all.
Declare that you will never take the field unless the star-spangled
banner of your country shall float over you; that you will not be
stigmatized when dead, and dishonored and scorned while you live, as the
authors of the first attack on the Constitution of your country. Its
destroyers you can not be. You may disturb its peace, you may interrupt
the course of its prosperity, you may cloud its reputation for
stability; but its tranquillity will be restored, its prosperity will
return, and the stain upon its national character will be transferred
and remain an eternal blot on the memory of those who caused the
disorder.

Fellow-citizens of the United States, the threat of unhallowed disunion,
the names of those once respected by whom it is uttered, the array of
military force to support it, denote the approach of a crisis in our
affairs on which the continuance of our unexampled prosperity, our
political existence, and perhaps that of all free governments may
depend. The conjuncture demanded a free, a full, and explicit
enunciation, not only of my intentions, but of my principles of action;
and as the claim was asserted of a right by a State to annul the laws of
the Union, and even to secede from it at pleasure, a frank exposition of
my opinions in relation to the origin and form of our Government and the
construction I give to the instrument by which it was created seemed to
be proper. Having the fullest confidence in the justness of the legal
and constitutional opinion of my duties which has been expressed, I rely
with equal confidence o