as were at the time
intended to be given.

I have been strengthened, too, in the propriety of this course by the
conviction that all efforts to go beyond this tend only to produce
dissatisfaction and distrust, to excite jealousies, and to provoke
resistance. Instead of adding strength to the Federal Government, even
when successful they must ever prove a source of incurable weakness by
alienating a portion of those whose adhesion is indispensable to the
great aggregate of united strength and whose voluntary attachment is
in my estimation far more essential to the efficiency of a government
strong in the best of all possible strength--the confidence and
attachment of all those who make up its constituent elements.

Thus believing, it has been my purpose to secure to the whole people and
to every member of the Confederacy, by general, salutary, and equal laws
alone, the benefit of those republican institutions which it was the end
and aim of the Constitution to establish, and the impartial influence
of which is in my judgment indispensable to their preservation. I can
not bring myself to believe that the lasting happiness of the people,
the prosperity of the States, or the permanency of their Union can be
maintained by giving preference or priority to any class of citizens
in the distribution of benefits or privileges, or by the adoption
of measures which enrich one portion of the Union at the expense of
another; nor can I see in the interference of the Federal Government
with the local legislation and reserved rights of the States a remedy
for present or a security against future dangers.

The first, and assuredly not the least, important step toward relieving
the country from the condition into which it had been plunged by
excesses in trade, banking, and credits of all kinds was to place the
business transactions of the Government itself on a solid basis, giving
and receiving in all cases value for value, and neither countenancing
nor encouraging in others that delusive system of credits from which it
has been found so difficult to escape, and which has left nothing behind
it but the wrecks that mark its fatal career.

That the financial affairs of the Government are now and have been
during the whole period of these wide-spreading difficulties conducted
with a strict and invariable regard to this great fundamental principle,
and that by the assumption and maintenance of the stand thus taken on
the very threshold of