WASHINGTON, _May 3, 1854_.
_To the Senate of the United States_:
The bill entitled "An act making a grant of public lands to the several
States for the benefit of indigent insane persons," which was presented
to me on the 27th ultimo, has been maturely considered, and is returned
to the Senate, the House in which it originated, with a statement of the
objections which have required me to withhold from it my approval.
In the performance of this duty, prescribed by the Constitution, I have
been compelled to resist the deep sympathies of my own heart in favor
of the humane purpose sought to be accomplished and to overcome the
reluctance with which I dissent from the conclusions of the two Houses
of Congress, and present my own opinions in opposition to the action of
a coordinate branch of the Government which possesses so fully my
confidence and respect.
If in presenting my objections to this bill I should say more than
strictly belongs to the measure or is required for the discharge of my
official obligation, let it be attributed to a sincere desire to justify
my act before those whose good opinion I so highly value and to that
earnestness which springs from my deliberate conviction that a strict
adherence to the terms and purposes of the federal compact offers the
best, if not the only, security for the preservation of our blessed
inheritance of representative liberty.
The bill provides in substance:
First. That 10,000,000 acres of land be granted to the several States,
to be apportioned among them in the compound ratio of the geographical
area and representation of said States in the House of Representatives.
Second. That wherever there are public lands in a State subject to sale
at the regular price of private entry, the proportion of said 10,000,000
acres falling to such State shall be selected from such lands within it,
and that to the States in which there are no such public lands land
scrip shall be issued to the amount of their distributive shares,
respectively, said scrip not to be entered by said States, but to be
sold by them and subject to entry by their assignees: _Provided_, That
none of it shall be sold at less than $1 per acre, under penalty of
forfeiture of the same to the United States.
Third. That the expenses of the management and superintendence of said
lands and of the moneys received therefrom shall be paid by the States
to which they may belong out of the treasury of said States.
Fourth. That the gross proceeds of the sales of such lands or land scrip
so granted shall be invested by the several States in safe stocks, to
constitute a perpetual fund, the principal of which shall remain forever
undiminished, and the interest to be appropriated to the maintenance of
the indigent insane within the several States.
Fifth. That annual returns of lands or scrip sold shall be made by the
States to the Secretary of the Interior, and the whole grant be subject
to certain conditions and limitations prescribed in the bill, to be
assented to by legislative acts of said States.
This bill therefore proposes that the Federal Government shall make
provision to the amount of the value of 10,000,000 acres of land for an
eleemosynary object within the several States, to be administered by the
political authority of the same; and it presents at the threshold the
question whether any such act on the part of the Federal Government
is warranted and sanctioned by the Constitution, the provisions and
principles of which are to be protected and sustained as a first and
paramount duty.
It can not be questioned that if Congress has power to make provision
for the indigent insane without the limits of this District it has the
same power to provide for the indigent who are not insane, and thus
to transfer to the Federal Government the charge of all the poor in
all the States. It has the same power to provide hospitals and other
local establishments for the care and cure of every species of human
infirmity, and thus to assume all that duty of either public
philanthropy or public necessity to the dependent, the orphan, the
sick, or the needy which is now discharged by the States themselves
or by corporate institutions or private endowments existing under the
legislation of the States. The whole field of public beneficence is
thrown open to the care and culture of the Federal Government. Generous
impulses no longer encounter the limitations and control of our
imperious fundamental law; for however worthy may be the present object
in itself, it is only one of a class. It is not exclusively worthy of
benevolent regard. Whatever considerations dictate sympathy for this
particular object apply in like manner, if not in the same degree, to
idiocy, to physical disease, to extreme destitution. If Congress may
and ought to provide for any one of these objects, it may and ought to
provide for them all. And if it be done in this case, what answer shall
be given when Congress shall be called upon, as it doubtless will be, to
pursue a similar course of legislation in the others? It will obviously
be vain to reply that the object is worthy, but that the application has
taken a wrong direction. The power will have been deliberately assumed,
the general obligation will by this act have been acknowledged, and the
question of means and expediency will alone be left for consideration.
The decision upon the principle in any one case determines it for the
whole class. The question presented, therefore, clearly is upon the
constitutionality and propriety of the Federal Government assuming
to enter into a novel and vast field of legislation, namely, that of
providing for the care and support of all those among the people of the
United States who by any form of calamity become fit objects of public
philanthropy.
I readily and, I trust, feelingly acknowledge the duty incumbent on us
all as men and citizens, and as among the highest and holiest of our
duties, to provide for those who, in the mysterious order of Providence,
are subject to want and to disease of body or mind; but I can not find
any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the
great almoner of public charity throughout the United States. To do so
would, in my judgment, be contrary to the letter and spirit of the
Constitution and subversive of the whole theory upon which the Union of
these States is founded. And if it were admissible to contemplate the
exercise of this power for any object whatever, I can not avoid the
belief that it would in the end be prejudicial rather than beneficial in
the noble offices of charity to have the charge of them transferred from
the States to the Federal Government. Are we not too prone to forget
that the Federal Union is the creature of the States, not they of
the Federal Union? We were the inhabitants of colonies distinct in
local government one from the other before the Revolution. By that
Revolution the colonies each became an independent State. They achieved
that independence and secured its recognition by the agency of a
consulting body, which, from being an assembly of the ministers of
distinct sovereignties instructed to agree to no form of government
which did not leave the domestic concerns of each State to itself, was
appropriately denominated a Congress. When, having tried the experiment
of the Confederation, they resolved to change that for the present
Federal Union, and thus to confer on the Federal Government more ample
authority, they scrupulously measured such of the functions of their
cherished sovereignty as they chose to delegate to the General
Government. With this aim and to this end the fathers of the Republic
framed the Constitution, in and by which the independent and sovereign
States united themselves for certain specified objects and purposes, and
for those only, leaving all powers not therein set forth as conferred on
one or another of the three great departments--the legislative, the
executive, and the judicial--indubitably with the States. And when the
people of the several States had in their State conventions, and thus
alone, given effect and force to the Constitution, not content that any
doubt should in future arise as to the scope and character of this act,
they ingrafted thereon the explicit declaration that "the powers not
delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by
it to the States are reserved to the States respectively or to the
people." Can it be controverted that the great mass of the business
of Government--that involved in the social relations, the internal
arrangements of the body politic, the mental and moral culture of men,
the development of local resources of wealth, the punishment of crimes
in general, the preservation of order, the relief of the needy or
otherwise unfortunate members of society--did in practice remain with
the States; that none of these objects of local concern are by the
Constitution expressly or impliedly prohibited to the States, and that
none of them are by any express language of the Constitution transferred
to the United States? Can it be claimed that any of these functions
of local administration and legislation are vested in the Federal
Government by any implication? I have never found anything in the
Constitution which is susceptible of such a construction. No one of
the enumerated powers touches the subject or has even a remote analogy
to it. The powers conferred upon the United States have reference to
federal relations, or to the means of accomplishing or executing things
of federal relation. So also of the same character are the powers taken
away from the States by enumeration. In either case the powers granted
and the powers restricted were so granted or so restricted only where
it was requisite for the maintenance of peace and harmony between the
States or for the purpose of protecting their common interests and
defending their common sovereignty against aggression from abroad or
insurrection at home.
I shall not discuss at length the question of power sometimes claimed
for the General Government under the clause of the eighth section of the
Constitution, which gives Congress the power "to lay and collect taxes,
duties, imposts, and excises, to pay debts and provide for the common
defense and general welfare of the United States," because if it has not
already been settled upon sound reason and authority it never will be.
I take the received and just construction of that article, as if written
to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises _in order_ to pay
the debts and _in order_ to provide for the common defense and general
welfare. It is not a substantive general power to provide for the
welfare of the United States, but is a limitation on the grant of power
to raise money by taxes, duties, and imposts. If it were otherwise, all
the rest of the Constitution, consisting of carefully enumerated and
cautiously guarded grants of specific powers, would have been useless,
if not delusive. It would be impossible in that view to escape from the
conclusion that these were inserted only to mislead for the present,
and, instead of enlightening and defining the pathway of the future,
to involve its action in the mazes of doubtful construction. Such a
conclusion the character of the men who framed that sacred instrument
will never permit us to form. Indeed, to suppose it susceptible of any
other construction would be to consign all the rights of the States and
of the people of the States to the mere discretion of Congress, and thus
to clothe the Federal Government with authority to control the sovereign
States, by which they would have been dwarfed into provinces or
departments and all sovereignty vested in an absolute consolidated
central power, against which the spirit of liberty has so often and
in so many countries struggled in vain. In my judgment you can not by
tributes to humanity make any adequate compensation for the wrong you
would inflict by removing the sources of power and political action from
those who are to be thereby affected. If the time shall ever arrive
when, for an object appealing, however strongly, to our sympathies,
the dignity of the States shall bow to the dictation of Congress by
conforming their legislation thereto, when the power and majesty and
honor of those who created shall become subordinate to the thing of
their creation, I but feebly utter my apprehensions when I express
my firm conviction that we shall see "the beginning of the end."
Fortunately, we are not left in doubt as to the purpose of the
Constitution any more than as to its express language, for although the
history of its formation, as recorded in the Madison Papers, shows that
the Federal Government in its present form emerged from the conflict of
opposing influences which have continued to divide statesmen from that
day to this, yet the rule of clearly defined powers and of strict
construction presided over the actual conclusion and subsequent adoption
of the Constitution. President Madison, in the Federalist, says:
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution are few and defined.
Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and
indefinite. ... Its [the General Government's] jurisdiction extends to
certain enumerated objects only, and leaves to the several States a
residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects.
In the same spirit President Jefferson invokes "the support of
the State governments in all their rights as the most competent
administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks
against anti-republican tendencies;" and President Jackson said that our
true strength and wisdom are not promoted by invasions of the rights and
powers of the several States, but that, on the contrary, they consist
"not in binding the States more closely to the center, but in leaving
each more unobstructed in its proper orbit."
The framers of the Constitution, in refusing to confer on the Federal
Government any jurisdiction over these purely local objects, in my
judgment manifested a wise forecast and broad comprehension of the true
interests of these objects themselves. It is clear that public charities
within the States can be efficiently administered only by their
authority. The bill before me concedes this, for it does not commit the
funds it provides to the administration of any other authority.
I can not but repeat what I have before expressed, that if the several
States, many of which have already laid the foundation of munificent
establishments of local beneficence, and nearly all of which are
proceeding to establish them, shall be led to suppose, as, should this
bill become a law, they will be, that Congress is to make provision for
such objects, the fountains of charity will be dried up at home, and the
several States, instead of bestowing their own means on the social wants
of their own people, may themselves, through the strong temptation which
appeals to states as to individuals, become humble suppliants for the
bounty of the Federal Government, reversing their true relations to
this Union.
Having stated my views of the limitation of the powers conferred by
the eighth section of the first article of the Constitution, I deem it
proper to call attention to the third section of the fourth article
and to the provisions of the sixth article bearing directly upon
the question under consideration, which, instead of aiding the claim
to power exercised in this case, tend, it is believed, strongly to
illustrate and explain positions which, even without such support,
I can not regard as questionable. The third section of the fourth
article of the Constitution is in the following terms:
The Congress shall have power to _dispose_ of and make all needful rules
and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging
to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so
construed as to prejudice any claims of the United States or of any
particular State.