The lawfulness of the practice rests upon the exigencies of the public service; which require that the movements of the Government shall not be arrested by an accidental vacancy in one of the Departments; upon an act of Congress expressly and plainly giving and regulating the power, and upon long and uninterrupted usage of the Executive, which has never been challenged as illegal by Congress.

In all its various bearings, therefore, I commend the question to Congress as the only human tribunal under Providence possessing the power to meet the existing emergency.

It has rendered us prosperous in peace and triumphant in war.

My province is to execute and not to make the laws.

I possess no dispensing power.

My opinion remains unchanged that justice as well as sound policy requires us still to seek a peaceful solution of the questions at issue between the North and the South.

The national flag has floated in glory over every sea.

I therefore appeal through you to the people of the country to declare in their might that the Union must and shall be preserved by all constitutional means.

Entertaining this conviction, I refrained even from sending reenforcements to Major Anderson, who commanded the forts in Charleston Harbor, until an absolute necessity for doing so should make itself apparent.

Under its shadow American citizens have found protection and respect in all lands beneath the sun.

The Union is a sacred trust left by our Revolutionary fathers to their descendants, and never did any other people inherit so rich a legacy.

I certainly had no right to make aggressive war upon any State, and I am perfectly satisfied that the Constitution has wisely withheld that power even from Congress.

In view of this fact it was deemed preferable to instruct our new minister to negotiate a new treaty which should omit the objectionable second article and also the few words of the twenty-eighth article which had been stricken out by the Senate.

In answer to the resolution of the House of Representatives of the 9th of April last, requesting information concerning the African slave trade, I transmit a report from the Secretary of State and the documents by which it was accompanied.

I transmit, for the consideration of the Senate with a view to ratification, a convention for the adjustment of claims of citizens of the United States against the Government of the Republic of Costa Rica, signed by the plenipotentiaries of the contracting parties at San Jose on the 2d day of July last.

My prayer to God is that He would preserve the Constitution and the Union throughout all generations.

no nation in the tide of time has ever presented a spectacle of greater material prosperity than we have done until within a very recent period.

The immediate peril arises not so much from these causes as from the fact that the incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question throughout the North for the last quarter of a century has at length produced its malign influence on the slaves and inspired them with vague notions of freedom.