it is peculiarly fit for us to recognize the hand of God in this terrible visitation.

Whereas it is fit and becoming in all people at all times to acknowledge and revere the supreme government of God.

to bow in humble submission to His chastisements, to confess and deplore their sins and transgressions in the full conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

that the inestimable boon of civil and religious liberty, earned under His guidance and blessing by the labors and sufferings of our fathers, may be restored in all its original excellence.

to humble ourselves before Him and to pray for His mercy.

Public safety requires strict enforcement of this article.

It was my intention, as shown by my letter of June 20, 1861, to appoint Hon. James H. Lane, of Kansas, a brigadier-general of United States Volunteers, in anticipation of the act of Congress since passed for raising such volunteers;

The sophism itself is that any State of the Union may consistently with the national Constitution, and therefore lawfully and peacefully, withdraw from the Union without the consent of the Union or of any other State.

It forces us to ask: "Is there, in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness?" "Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?

A right result at this time, will be worth more to the world than ten times the men and ten times the money.

So viewing the issue, no choice was left but to call out the war power of the government, and so to resist force employed for its destruction by force for its preservation.

It presents to the whole family of man the question whether a constitutional republic or democracy--a government of the people by the same people--can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes.

In this act, discarding all else, they have forced upon the country the distinct issue, "immediate dissolution or blood.

In a word, the people will save their government, if the government itself will do its part only indifferently well.

Whatever concerns the whole world should be confided to the whole--to the General Government; while whatever concerns only the State should be left exclusively to the State.

Such will be a great lesson of peace; teaching men that what they cannot take by an election, neither can they take by a war; teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war.

It is worthy of note that while in this, the government's hour of trial, large numbers of those in the army and navy who have been favoured with the offices have resigned and proved false to the hand which had pampered them, not one common…

Why this deliberate pressing out of view the rights of men and the authority of the people?

They have adopted a temporary national constitution, in the preamble of which, unlike our good old one signed by Washington, they omit "We, the people," and substitute "We, the deputies of the sovereign and independent States." Why?

Our adversaries have adopted some declarations of independence in which, unlike the good old one penned by Jefferson, they omit the words, "all men are created equal." Why?

Whoever in any section proposes to abandon such a government, would do well to consider in deference to what principle it is that he does it; what better he is likely to get in its stead; whether the substitute will give, or be intended to…

The Union, and not themselves separately, procured their independence and their liberty.

If they break from this, they can only do so against law and by revolution.

The States have their status in the Union, and they have no other legal status.

Would it be far wrong to define it "a political community without a political superior?" Tested by this, no one of our States, except Texas, ever was a sovereignty.