In the first place, the Federal Government, however great might be the physical force at its command, could at no time have done anything more than enforce the execution of its own laws and maintain the possession of its own property. To prevent the people of a State, by any menace of arms, from assembling in convention to consider anything whatever, would have been to act on the assumption that she was about to adopt an ordinance of secession, and on the farther assumption that such an act must be forestalled, lest it might have some kind of validity. The Executive of the United States was not bound, and was not at liberty, to act upon such assumptions. There were many ways in which a State convention could peacefully take into consideration the relations of its people to the Federal Union. They might lawfully appeal to the sobriety and good feeling of their sister States to redress any grievances of which they complained. There might be, we know that in point of fact there was, a strong Union party in most of the Southern States, and the President of the United States, in the month of October, 1860, would have been utterly inexcusable, if he had proclaimed to the country that he expected this party to be overborne, and had helped to diminish its members and weaken its power, by extraordinary garrisons placed in the Southern forts, in anticipation of their seizure by lawless individuals, when such an exhibition must inevitably lead the whole people of the South to believe that there was to be no solution of the sectional differences but by a trial of strength in a sectional civil war. Mr. Buchanan was far too wise and circumspect a statesman to put into the hands of the secessionists such a means of “firing the Southern heart,” before it was known what the result of the Presidential election would be. It was his plain and imperative duty not to assume, by any official act, at such a time, that there was to be a secession of any State or States.