My public life is before the country, and it is my pride never to have evaded an important political question. The course of Democracy is always straight ahead, and public men who determine to pursue it never involve themselves in labyrinths, except when they turn to the right or the left from the plain forward path. Madison’s Report and Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions are the safest and surest guides to conduct a Democratic administration of the Federal Government. It is the true mission of Democracy to resist centralism and the absorption of unconstitutional powers by the President and Congress. The sovereignty of the States and a devotion to their reserved rights can alone preserve and perpetuate our happy system of Government. The exercise of doubtful and constructive powers on the part of Congress has produced all the dangerous and exciting questions which have imperilled the Union. The Federal Government, even confined within its strict constitutional limits, must necessarily acquire more and more influence through the increased and increasing expenditure of public money, and hence the greater necessity for public economy and watchful vigilance. Our Constitution, when it proceeded from the hands of its framers, was a simple system; and the more free from complexity it remains, the more powerfully, satisfactorily and beneficially will it operate within its legitimate sphere.
It is centralization alone which has prevented the French people from establishing a permanent republican government, and entailed upon them so many misfortunes. Had the provinces of France been converted into separate territorial provinces, like our State governments, Paris would then no longer have been France, and a revolution at the capital would not have destroyed the Federative Republic.
Had the principles I have enumerated been observed by the Federal Government and by the people of the several States, we should have avoided the alarming questions which have arisen out of the institution of domestic slavery. The people of each State would then, to employ a homely but expressive phrase, have attended to their own business and not have interfered in the domestic concerns of their sister States. But on this important subject I have so fully presented my views in the enclosed letter to the great meeting in Philadelphia, held in November, 1850, that it would be useless to repeat them, even if time would permit.
From your friend, very respectfully,
James Buchanan.
[TO THE CENTRAL SOUTHERN RIGHTS ASSOCIATION OF VIRGINIA.]
Wheatland, near Lancaster, April 10, 1851.
My Dear Sir:—
I have received your kind letter of the 2d inst., with the resolutions adopted by the Central Southern Rights Association of Virginia, inviting me to address the Association at such time as may suit my convenience, and to counsel with them “in regard to the best means to be adopted in the present alarming crisis, for the maintenance of the Constitution and the Union of these States in their original purity.”
I should esteem it both a high honor and a great privilege to comply with this request, and therefore regret to say, that engagements, which I need not specify, render it impossible for me to visit Richmond during the present, or probably the next month.