safer for all, both in official and private stations, to conform to and
abide by all those acts which stand unrepealed, than to violate any of
them, trusting to find impunity in having them held to be
unconstitutional.

It is seventy-two years since the first inauguration of a President
under our National Constitution. During that period fifteen different
and greatly distinguished citizens have, in succession, administered
the executive branch of the government. They have conducted it through
many perils, and generally with great success. Yet, with all this
scope of precedent, I now enter upon the same task for the brief
constitutional term of four years under great and peculiar difficulty.

A disruption of the Federal Union, heretofore only menaced, is now
formidably attempted. 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. It is safe to assert that no government proper
ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination.
Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National
Constitution, and the Union will endure forever--it being impossible to
destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument
itself.

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. The Union is much older than the Constitution.
It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was
matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It
was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States
expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the
Articles of Confederation in 1778. And, finally, in 1787 one of the
declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was
"to form a more perfect Union." But if the destruction of the Union by
one or by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is
less perfect than before the Constitution, h