"
During the ten years that intervened between the date of this speech and
the message of Mr. Buchanan cited above, the progress of sectional
discord and the tendency of the stronger section to unconstitutional
aggression had been fearfully rapid. With very rare exceptions, there
were none in 1850 who claimed the right of the Federal Government to
apply coercion to a State. In 1860 men had grown to be familiar with
threats of driving the South into submission to any act that the
Government, in the hands of a Northern majority, might see fit to
perform. During the canvass of that year, demonstrations had been made
by _quasi_-military organizations in various parts of the North, which
looked unmistakably to purposes widely different from those enunciated
in the preamble to the Constitution, and to the employment of means not
authorized by the powers which the States had delegated to the Federal
Government.
Well-informed men still remembered that, in the Convention which framed
the Constitution, a proposition was made to authorize the employment of
force against a delinquent State, on which Mr. Madison remarked that
"the use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of
war than an infliction of punishment, and would probably be considered
by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which
it might have been bound." The Convention expressly refused to confer
the power proposed, and the clause was lost.
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