em one of
paramount importance has been that these surveys have been attempted,
and partly effected, under color of legal authority from the State of
Georgia; that the surveyors are, therefore, not to be viewed in the
light of individual and solitary transgressors, but as the agents of a
sovereign State, acting in obedience to authority which they believed to
be binding upon them. Intimations had been given that should they meet
with interruption they would at all hazards be sustained by the military
force of the State, in which event, if the military force of the Union
should have been employed to enforce its violated law, a conflict _must_
have ensued, which would itself have inflicted a wound upon the Union
and have presented the aspect of one of these confederated States at war
with the rest. Anxious, above all, to avert this state of things, yet at
the same time impressed with the deepest conviction of my own duty to
take care that the laws shall be executed and the faith of the nation
preserved, I have used of the means intrusted to the Executive for that
purpose only those which without resorting to military force may
vindicate the sanctity of the law by the ordinary agency of the judicial
tribunals.

It ought not, however, to be disguised that the act of the legislature
of Georgia, under the construction given to it by the governor of that
State, and the surveys made or attempted by his authority beyond the
boundary secured by the treaty of Washington of April last to the Creek
Indians, are in direct violation of the supreme law of this land, set
forth in a treaty which has received all the sanctions provided by the
Constitution which we have been sworn to support and maintain.

Happily distributed as the sovereign powers of the people of this Union
have been between their General and State Governments, their history has
already too often presented collisions between these divided authorities
with regard to the extent of their respective powers. No instance,
however, has hitherto occurred in which this collision has been urged
into a conflict of actual force. No other case is known to have happened
in which the application of military force by the Government of the
Union has been prescribed for the enforcement of a law the violation of
which has within any single State been prescribed by a legislative act
of the State. In the present instance it is my duty to say that if the
legislative and executive authoritie