There is no provision in this law which compels any officer coming within its provisions to remain in office.  It forbids removals—­not resignations.  Mr. Stanton was perfectly free to resign at any moment, either upon his own motion or in compliance with a request or an order.  It was a matter of choice or of taste.  There was nothing compulsory in the nature of legal obligation.  Nor does he put his action upon that imperative ground.  He says he acts under a “sense of public duty,” not of legal obligation, compelling him to hold on and leaving him no choice.  The public duty which is upon him arises from the respect which he owes to the Constitution and the laws, violated in his own case.  He is therefore compelled by this sense of public duty to vindicate violated law and to stand as its champion.

This was not the first occasion in which Mr. Stanton, in discharge of a public duty, was called upon to consider the provisions of that law.  That tenure-of-office law did not pass without notice.  Like other acts, it was sent to the President for approval.  As is my custom, I submitted its consideration to my Cabinet for their advice upon the question whether I should approve it or not.  It was a grave question of constitutional law, in which I would, of course, rely most upon the opinion of the Attorney-General and of Mr. Stanton, who had once been Attorney-General.

Every member of my Cabinet advised me that the proposed law was unconstitutional.  All spoke without doubt or reservation, but Mr. Stanton’s condemnation of the law was the most elaborate and emphatic.  He referred to the constitutional provisions, the debates in Congress, especially to the speech of Mr. Buchanan when a Senator, to the decisions of the Supreme Court, and to the usage from the beginning of the Government through every successive Administration, all concurring to establish the right of removal as vested by the Constitution in the President.  To all these he added the weight of his own deliberate judgment, and advised me that it was my duty to defend the power of the President from usurpation and to veto the law.

I do not know when a sense of public duty is more imperative upon a head of Department than upon such an occasion as this.  He acts then under the gravest obligations of law, for when he is called upon by the President for advice it is the Constitution which speaks to him.  All his other duties are left by the Constitution to be regulated by statute, but this duty was deemed so momentous that it is imposed by the Constitution itself.

After all this I was not prepared for the ground taken by Mr. Stanton in his note of August 12.  I was not prepared to find him compelled by a new and indefinite sense of public duty, under “the Constitution,” to assume the vindication of a law which, under the solemn obligations of public duty imposed by the Constitution itself, he advised me was a violation of that Constitution.  I make great allowance for a change of opinion, but such a change as this hardly falls within the limits of greatest indulgence.