To repeat, in his annual message to Congress, Buchanan stated that "the responsibility and true position of the Executive," bound by solemn oath before God and the country, was "to take care that the laws be faithfully executed."
No human power could absolve the president from this obligation. Buchanan claimed, however, that events over which he had no control "rendered impracticable" the performance of his executive duty.
He referred to executive duty under the Militia Act of 1795, which apparently provided a statutory basis for presidential action in circumstances such as existed in South Carolina. Buchanan argued that the act was effectively nullified by the termination in South Carolina of "the whole machinery of the Federal Government" necessary for law enforcement.
Addressing the broader interpretive problem of the nature of the Union implicated in the action of the South Carolina Convention, Buchanan denied executive responsibility for resolving the constitutional crisis.
He declared: “The Executive has no authority to decide what shall be the relations between the Federal Government and South Carolina. He possesses no power to change the relations heretofore existing between them, much less to acknowledge the independence of that State.”
11/20/1860 President Buchanan’s then Attorney General J. S. Black issued his opinion on this date to support the President. He wrote that neither the President nor Congress had the authority to conduct aggressive armed conflict. He wrote,
“If Congress shall break up the present Union by unconstitutionally putting strife and enmity and armed hostility between different sections of the country, instead of the domestic tranquility which the Constitution was meant to insure, will not all the States be absolved from their Federal obligations?
Despite the perceived effrontery of the secession, Buchanan respected the perpetuation of Constitutional law.
Abraham Lincoln did not allow this respect to supercede his selfish ambitions.
Of course, during Buchanan’s term, Confederate forces in Charleston fired on a ship flying the United States flag and did nothing about it. To my knowledge, firing on an unarmed ship on a peaceful mission is an act of war.
When the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, they committed an act of war. Lincoln did not call for 75,000 volunteers because the Southern States had seceded, he did so because they launched an armed rebellion against the United States.
Earlier he wrote:
"If one of the States should declare her independence, your action cannot depend upon the rightfulness of the cause upon which such declaration is based. Whether the retirement of a State from the Union be the exercise of a right reserved in the Constitution or a revolutionary movement, it is certain that you have not in either case the authority to recognize her independence or to absolve her from Federal obligations. Congress or the other States in convention assembled must take such measures as may be necessary and proper. In such an event, I see no course for you but to go straight onward in the path you have hitherto trodden, that is, execute the laws to the extent of the defensive means placed in your hands, and act generally upon the assumption that the present constitutional relations between the States and the Federal Government continue to exist until a new order of things shall be established, either by law or force."