James Blaine: “It changed the political history of the United States.”

All these provisions are made to protect the States, not to authorize an attack by one part of the country upon another; to preserve the peace, and not to plunge them into civil war.

You can use force only to repel an assault on the public property and aid the Courts in the performance of their duty.

If this view of the subject be correct, as I think it is, then the Union must utterly perish at the moment when Congress shall arm one part of the people against another for any purpose beyond that of merely protecting the General…

If it be true that war cannot be declared, nor a system of general hostilities carried on by the Central Government against a State, then it seems to follow that an attempt to do so would be ipso facto an expulsion of such State from the…