First Inaugural Address and Message to the Special Session of the 37th Congress (1861)

Summary

Abraham Lincoln was elected as the sixteenth President of the United States of America, and was the first President avowedly opposed to legalized slavery. Lincoln was elected on November 6, 1860, and inaugurated the following March 4th. In between these dates, seven states of the American Union that legalized slavery announced their secession, to create the Confederate States of America. It fell to Lincoln to declare such secession unconstitutional, and when the Confederates attacked the U.S. Army garrison at Ft. Sumter in South Carolina, Lincoln called a special session of Congress on July 4, 1861, to lay out his reasons for acting against the Confederacy, not as a rival nation, but as an insurgency which the United States would suppress.

Selected by

Allen C. Guelzo

Director, Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship, James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Princeton University

Darrell A.H. Miller

Melvin G. Shimm Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law

Document Excerpt

Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861:

I hold, that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments.… Again, if the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade, by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it -- break it, so to speak; but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?

Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that, in legal contemplation, the Union is perpetual, confirmed by the history of the Union itself.… It follows from these views that no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union, that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void; and that acts of violence, within any State or States, against the authority of the United States, are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances….

Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy. A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks, and limitations, and always changing easily, with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it, does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism.

Message to Special Session, July 4, 1861:

[T]he assault upon, and reduction of, Fort Sumter was, in no sense, a matter of self-defence on the part of the assailants. They well knew that the garrison in the Fort could, by no possibility, commit aggression upon them. …In this act, discarding all else, they have forced upon the country, the distinct issue: “Immediate dissolution, or blood.”

And 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 a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people – can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes. It presents the question, whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration, according to organic law, in any case, can always, upon the pretences made in this case, or on any other pretences, or arbitrarily, without any pretence, break up their Government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask: “Is there, in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness?” “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?” So viewing the issue, no choice was left but to call out the war power of the Government; and so to resist force, employed for its destruction, by force, for its preservation.