previous next

No arbiter to decide the question of secession.

Where could an arbiter be found? There was no method of invoking the Supreme Court; it had no jurisdiction to coerce a State or summon it to its bar. Nor could its decree be final. For it is a maxim of our jurisprudence uttered by Jefferson, and reiterated by Lincoln in his first inaugural address, that its decisions may be reconsidered and reversed and bind only the clients.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Abraham Lincoln (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: