Standing as it does, it affirms a proposition which would effectually repeal all constitutional and all legal obligations.  The Constitution declares, that every public officer, in the State governments as well as in the general government, shall take an oath to support the Constitution of the United States.  This is all.  Would it not have cast an air of ridicule on the whole provision, if the Constitution had gone on to add the words, “as he understands it”?  What could come nearer to a solemn farce, than to bind a man by oath, and still leave him to be his own interpreter of his own obligation?  Sir, those who are to execute the laws have no more a license to construe them for themselves, than those whose only duty is to obey them.  Public officers are bound to support the Constitution; private citizens are bound to obey it; and there is no more indulgence granted to the public officer to support the Constitution only as he understands it, than to a private citizen to obey it only as he understands it, and what is true of the Constitution, in this respect, is equally true of any law.  Laws are to be executed, and to be obeyed, not as individuals may interpret them, but according to public, authoritative interpretation and adjudication.  The sentiment of the message would abrogate the obligation of the whole criminal code.  If every man is to judge of the Constitution and the laws for himself, if he is to obey and support them only as he may say he understands them, a revolution, I think, would take place in the administration of justice; and discussions about the law of treason, murder, and arson should be addressed, not to the judicial bench, but to those who might stand charged with such offences.  The object of discussion should be, if we run out this notion to its natural extent, to enlighten the culprit himself how he ought to understand the law.

Mr. President, how is it possible that a sentiment so wild, and so dangerous, so encouraging to all who feel a desire to oppose the laws, and to impair the Constitution, should have been uttered by the President of the United States at this eventful and critical moment?  Are we not threatened with dissolution of the Union?  Are we not told that the laws of the government shall be openly and directly resisted?  Is not the whole country looking, with the utmost anxiety, to what may be the result of these threatened courses?  And at this very moment, so full of peril to the state, the chief magistrate puts forth opinions and sentiments as truly subversive of all government, as absolutely in conflict with the authority of the Constitution, as the wildest theories of nullification.  Mr. President, I have very little regard for the law, or the logic, of nullification.  But there is not an individual in its ranks, capable of putting two ideas together, who, if you will grant him the principles of the veto message, cannot defend all that nullification has ever threatened.