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portion of the national legislation, a system of long standing and affecting great interests in the community, is to be rescinded and abolished.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 people of a single State to absolve themselves at will and without the consent of the other States from their most solemn obligations, and hazard the liberties and happiness of the millions composing this Union, can not be acknowledged.  Such authority is believed to be utterly repugnant both to the principles upon which the General Government is constituted and to the objects which it is expressly formed to attain.