previous next
[130]

After an impartial review of all the circumstances, and a careful consideration of the danger of the crisis, the President determined to recommend to Congress to initiate such amendments to the Constitution as would recognize and place beyond dispute the rights of the Southern people, as these had been expounded by the Supreme Court. Whilst acknowledging that the cotton States were without justifiable cause for their threatened attempts to break up the Union, either by peaceful secession, as they claimed the right to do, or by forcible rebellion, he could not deny that they had suffered serious wrongs through many years from the Northern abolition party. To deny them such a security would be at war with the noblest feelings of patriotism, and inconsistent with the friendly sentiments which ought ever to be cherished between the people of sister States. We ought first to do our duty toward the cotton States; and if thereafter they should persist in attempting to dissolve the Union, they would expose themselves to universal condemnation. We should first ‘cast the beam out of our own eye,’ and then we might see clearly how to deal with our brothers' faults. Besides, such a course would have. confirmed the loyalty of the border slaveholding States. And above all, we were bound to make this concession, the strong to the weak, when the object was to restore the fraternal feelings which had presided at the formation of the Constitution, to reestablish the ancient harmony between the States, and to prevent civil war. Neither the Chicago platform, nor any other political platform, ought to have stood in the way of such a healing measure. The President, therefore, appealed to Congress to propose and recommend

to the legislatures of the several States the remedy for existing evils which the Constitution has itself provided for its own preservation. This has been tried at different critical periods of our history, and always with eminent success. It is to be found in the fifth article providing for its own amendment. Under this article amendments have been proposed by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, and have been “ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States,” and have consequently become parts of the Constitution. To this process the country is indebted for the clause prohibiting Congress from passing any

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 Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: