Source: President James Buchanan, fourth annual message to Congress (December 3, 1860) "All for which the slave States have ever contended, is to be let alone and permitted to
manage their domestic institutions in their own way. As sovereign States, they, and they
alone, are responsible before God and the world for the slavery existing among them.
"The Southern States, standing on the basis of the Constitution, have a right to demand this act
of justice from the States of the North. Should it be refused, then the Constitution, to which all the
States are parties, will have been willfully violated by one portion of them in a provision essential
to the domestic security and happiness of the remainder. In that event the injured States, after
having first used all peaceful and constitutional means to obtain redress, would be justified in
revolutionary resistance to the Government of the Union"