Franklin Pierce

The withdrawal of that force from its proper duty of defending the country against foreign foes or the savages of the frontier to employ it for the suppression of domestic insurrection is, when the exigency occurs, a matter of the most…

Thus the Territory has been seemingly filled with extreme violence, when the whole amount of such acts has not been greater than what occasionally passes before us in single cities to the regret of all good citizens, but without being…

That was made the battlefield, not so much of opposing factions or interests within itself as of the conflicting passions of the whole people of the United States.

Of course these imputations on the intentions of Congress in this respect, conceived, as they were, in prejudice and disseminated in passion, are utterly destitute of any justification in the nature of things and contrary to all the…

The argument of those who advocate the enactment of new laws of restriction and condemn the repeal of old ones in effect avers that their particular views of government have no self-extending or self-sustaining power of their own, and will…

All the repeal did was to relieve the statute book of an objectionable enactment, unconstitutional in effect and injurious in terms to a large portion of the States.

The Constitution, supreme, as it is, over all the departments of the Government--legislative, executive, and judicial--is open to amendment by its very terms; and Congress or the States may, in their discretion, propose amendment to it…

And then both reason and right combine not merely to justify but to require its repeal.

An act of Congress, while it remains unrepealed, more especially if it be constitutionally valid in the judgment of those public functionaries whose duty it is to pronounce on that point, is undoubtedly binding on the conscience of each…

If it remains on the statute book unrepealed, it remains there only as a monument of error and a beacon of warning to the legislator and the statesman.

Any statute which proposes to do this is a mere nullity; it takes away no right, it confers none.

Congress can not change a law of domestic relation in the State of Maine; no more can it in the State of Missouri.

The several States of the Union are by force of the Constitution coequal in domestic legislative power.

In the progress of constitutional inquiry and reflection it had now at length come to be seen clearly that Congress does not possess constitutional power to impose restrictions of this character upon any present or future State of the…

Thus here also aggression was followed by reaction, and the attacks upon the Constitution at this point did but serve to raise up new barriers for its defense and security.

In order to nullify the then existing act of Congress concerning the extradition of fugitives from service, laws were enacted in many States forbidding their officers, under the severest penalties, to participate in the execution of any…

To promote this object, legislative enactments and other means were adopted to take away or defeat rights which the Constitution solemnly guaranteed.

In the long series of acts of indirect aggression, the first was the strenuous agitation by citizens of the Northern States, in Congress and out of it, of the question of Negro emancipation in the Southern States.

But they have entered into a path which leads nowhere unless it be to civil war and disunion, and which has no other possible outlet.

They would upon deliberation shrink with unaffected horror from any conscious act of disunion or civil war.

I confidently believe that the great body of those who inconsiderately took this fatal step are sincerely attached to the Constitution and the Union.

Thus in the progress of events we had reached that consummation, which the voice of the people has now so pointedly rebuked, of the attempt of a portion of the States, by a sectional organization and movement, to usurp the control of the…

Violent attack from the North finds its inevitable consequence in the growth of a spirit of angry defiance at the South.

A question which is one of the most difficult of all the problems of social institution, political economy, and statesmanship they treat with unreasoning intemperance of thought and language.

Our institutions, framed in the spirit of confidence in the intelligence and integrity of the people, do not forbid citizens, either individually or associated together, to attack by writing, speech, or any other methods short of physical…