No power to coerce a State is delegated to the President or Congress, though individual delinquents may, if expedient, be punished through the federal courts. To coerce a State by force would, as Mr. Madison declared, be an act of war. Mr. Buchanan will never do it.
Next post: New Orleans Bee, Dec 24, 1860 →
Printed the same day: New Orleans Bee →
The post above is condensed. From the original, word for word
"While maintaining, what is undeniable, that no power to coerce a State is delegated by the constitution to either the President or to Congress, it has as strenuously asserted that individual delinquents may, if expedient, be reached and punished by the strong arm of the central government, through its federal courts. The attempt to coerce a State by military force would, as declared by Mr. Madison, be an act of war—a virtual recognition of its separate independence, and tantamount to a dissolution of the Union. Such an act of folly will never be committed by Mr. Buchanan."
Between the posts · the narrator, not the paper
South Carolina is out, but the forts in Charleston harbor still fly the United States flag. The question moving north is what a government may do about a state that has left — and whether it may do anything at all.
The Herald (Bennett), the North's largest Democratic daily, states the coercion doctrine that governed the paralyzed final weeks of the Buchanan administration: the Constitution grants no power to force a State back, and the attempt would be war. Two days later a Pennsylvania Republican paper reprinted a Baltimore letter telling Buchanan that abandoning the Charleston forts made him one of the rebels (se-017). Via the AHA "Sixteen Months."