Glittler

Gov Ellis Message to NC Assembly (5/1/1861) After a Government had been organized, one of the earliest, as it was undoubtedly one of the most important and delicate duties devolving on Congress, was to furnish the President with the powers necessary to enable him to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed," and to pass such laws as might be necessary to "provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrection and repel invasion." Accordingly we find that as early as 1793 a law was passed for the purpose. It having been found defective it was suspended by the act of 28th February, 1795, which, without addition or amendment, has remained the law on the subject down to the present time; enacted by a Congress, which, to a large extent, was composed of the individuals who had assisted in framing the Constitution, it is the best interpreter of the general language used in that instrument; and from the day of its passage down to the 4th of March, of the present year, no President has ever construed it as giving him power to use military force except as a posse comitatus, or otherwise in aid of civil process. Ours being a government of law, and not a military despotism, no other construction could be placed upon that act. When, in 1833, the State of South Carolina forbade the execution of the tariff law within her limits, the act of 1795 was in force precisely as it is to-day; but President Jackson knowing that the act only authorized the use of the military force in aid of civil process, and that there would be no courts in South Carolina to issue process, called upon Congress for additional powers, and that body enacted what has been familiarly known as the "Force Bill." That act was, in my opinion, violative of the Constitution; but no attempt was ever made to exercise the powers conferred by it, and it expired by its own limitation, in 1835. The political friends of the present administration, well knowing that there was no law on the statute book under which the President could use military force in the States, from which the Federal Judges, Marshals and other civil officers had been expelled, urged Congress, at its last session, to enact laws conferring on him such authority. The journals of that body will show that bills for the purpose were pressed with the utmost pertinacity, and also that they were not enacted into laws. He usurped the coveted powers which Congress had refused to confer on him, and whilst Commissioners from the Confederate States were at the seat of Government, urging a peaceful settlement of all questions in dispute, and striving to avert from the country the calamities of civil war—whilst the people were being deluded by daily protestations from the President of his firm purpose to preserve the peace, and we were in momentary expectation of hearing that Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor, had been evacuated, a secret expedition was fitted out and stealthily dispatched to commence the war, by an attempt to throw reinforcements into that fortification. To high criminality in involving the country in civil war was added base perfidy in exciting hopes and expectations to be dashed at the moment of fruition.