"Having said to them in the inaugural address, 'You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors,' he took pains not only to keep this declaration good, but also to keep the case so free from the power of ingenious sophistry that the world should not be able to misunderstand it. By the affair at Fort Sumter, with its surrounding circumstances, that point was reached. Then and thereby the assailants of the government began the conflict of arms, without a gun in sight or in expectancy to return their fire, save only the few in the fort sent to that harbor years before for their own protection, and still ready to give that protection in whatever was lawful.... This issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. 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." With his singular felicity of statement, he analyzed and refuted the sophism that secession was lawful and constitutional. "This sophism derives much, perhaps the whole, of its currency from the assumption that there is some omnipotent and sacred supremacy pertaining to a State--to each State of our Federal Union. Our States have neither more nor less power than that reserved to them in the Union by the Constitution--no one of them ever having been a State out of the Union.... The States have their status in the Union, and they have no other legal status. If they break from this, they can only do so against law and by revolution. The Union, and not themselves separately, procured their independence and their liberty. By conquest or purchase the Union gave each of them whatever of independence or liberty it has. The Union is older than any of the States, and, in fact, it created them as States. Originally some dependent colonies made the Union, and, in turn, the Union threw off their old dependence for them, and made them States, such as they are. Not one of them ever had a State constitution independent of the Union." A noteworthy point in the message is President Lincoln's expression of his abiding confidence in the intelligence and virtue of the people of the United States.