Betwixt his own predilections and the influence of these advisers Mr. Buchanan composed for the Thirty-sixth Congress a message which carried consternation among all Unionists.  It was of little consequence that he declared the present situation to be the “natural effect” of the “long-continued and intemperate interference” of the Northern people with slavery.  But it was of the most serious consequence that, while he condemned secession as unconstitutional, he also declared himself powerless to prevent it.  His duty “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed” he knew no other way to perform except by aiding federal officers in the performance of their duties.  But where, as in South Carolina, the federal officers had all resigned, so that none remained to be aided, what was he to do?  This was practically to take the position that half a dozen men, by resigning their offices, could make the preservation of the Union by its chief executive impossible![116] Besides this, Mr. Buchanan said that he had “no authority to decide what should be the relations between the Federal government and South Carolina.”  He afterward said that he desired to avoid a collision of arms “between this and any other government.”  He did not seem to reflect that he had no right to recognize a State of the Union as being an “other government,” in the sense in which he used the phrase, and that, by his very abstention from the measures necessary for maintaining unchanged that relationship which had hitherto existed, he became a party to the establishment of a new relationship, and that, too, of a character which he himself alleged-to be unconstitutional.  In truth, his chief purpose was to rid himself of any responsibility and to lay it all upon Congress.  Yet he was willing to advise Congress as to its powers and duties in the business which he shirked in favor of that body, saying that the power to coerce a seceding State had not been delegated to it, and adding the warning that “the Union can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war.”  So the nation learned that its ruler was of opinion that to resist the destruction of its nationality was both unlawful and inexpedient.

If the conclusions of the message aroused alarm and indignation, its logic excited ridicule.  Senator Hale gave a not unfair synopsis:  The President, he said, declares:  1.  That South Carolina has just cause for seceding. 2.  That she has no right to secede. 3.  That we have no right to prevent her from seceding; and that the power of the government is “a power to do nothing at all.”  Another wit said that Buchanan was willing to give up a part of the Constitution, and, if necessary, the whole, in order to preserve the remainder!  But while this message of Mr. Buchanan has been bitterly denounced, and with entire justice, from the hour of its transmission to the present day, yet a palliating consideration ought to be noted:  he had little reason to believe