“How easy it would be,” the President said, “for the American people to settle the Slavery question forever, and to restore peace and harmony for this distracted country. They, and they alone, can do it. All that is necessary to accomplish the object, and all for which the Slave States have ever contended, is, to be let alone, and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way. As Sovereign States, they, and they alone, are responsible before God and the world for the Slavery existing among them. For this the people of the North are not more responsible, and have no more right to interfere, than with similar institutions in Russia or Brazil. Upon their good sense and patriotic forbearance I confess I greatly rely.”
Having said so much that might be pleasant for the ears of the people of the Slave-labor States, Mr. Buchanan proceeded to argue that the election of a President obnoxious to the inhabitants of one section of the Republic afforded no excuse for the offended ones to rebel. “Reason, justice, a regard for the Constitution,” he said, “all require that we shall wait for some overt and dangerous act on the part of the President elect before resorting to such a remedy.” He also argued, as Stephens had done before him, that the hands of the new President would be tied by a majority against him in Congress, and on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States. He then touched upon the provocations endured by the “Southern States” in connection with the subject of Slavery in the Territories, and the Fugitive Slave Law; and expressed a hope that the State Legislatures would repeal any unconstitutional and obnoxious enactments on their statute-books — in other words, their Personal Liberty Acts — so offensive to the people of the Slave-labor States and the plain commands of the Constitution; and that the President elect would feel it to be his duty, as Mr. Buchanan had done, to act vigorously in executing the Fugitive Slave Law “against the conflicting enactments of State Legislatures.” “The Southern States,” he said, “standing on the basis of the Constitution, have a right to demand this act of justice from the States of the North. Should it be refused,” he continued, as he warmed with zealous sympathy for the oppressed people of the Slave-labor States, “then the Constitution, to which all the States are parties, will have been willfully violated by one portion of them, in a provision essential to the domestic security and happiness of the remainder. In that event, the injured States, after having first used all peaceful and constitutional means to obtain redress, would be justified in revolutionary resistance to the Government of the Union.”
Let us look a moment at this Fugitive Slave Law and those Personal Liberty Laws, the non-execution of the one by the President, and the non-repeal of the others by the State Legislatures who enacted them, would, in
