Pursuant to these recommendations, Congress passed, March 2, 1833, the "force bill," or "bloody bill," as it was called; and the section which made it infamous in the unprotected States was as follows: "Sec. 5. And be it further enacted, that whenever the President of the United States shall be officially informed by the authorities of any State, or by a judge of any Circuit or District Court of the United States in the State, that within the limits of such State any law or laws of the United States, or the execution thereof, or of any process from the courts of the United States is obstructed by the employment of military force, or by any other unlawful means too great to be overcome by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings or by the power vested in the marshals by existing laws, it shall be lawful for him, the President of the United States, forthwith to issue his proclamation declaring such fact or information, and requiring all such military or other force forthwith to disperse; and if, at any time after issuing such proclamation, any such opposition or obstruction shall be made in the manner or by the means aforesaid, the President shall be and hereby is authorized promptly to employ such means to suppress the same, and to cause said laws or process to be duly executed, as are authorized and provided in the cases therein mentioned by the Act of the 28th of February, 1795, entitled: 'An act to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, repel invasions, and repeal the act now in force for that purpose'; and also, by the Act of the 3d of March, 1807, entitled: 'An act authorizing the employment of the land and naval forces of the United States in cases of insurrection.'" Section 1 of the force bill authorized the President to call out the army, navy, and militia to aid in collecting the _customs_--a power which the Act of 1795 could not be construed to give. It was also provided in the act that the operation of said sections 5 and 1 should "continue until the next session of Congress, and no longer." Thus careful was Congress to limit the duration of the great powers delegated to the President, as it had usually done in other instances in which it had authorized the employment of military force. The Act of March 3, 1807, referred to in the force bill, simply gave the President authority to use the land and naval forces of the United States to assist in the execution of the laws whenever it should be lawful for him to call out the militia for the same purpose. The Act of 1795, referred to by Jackson, which he did not pretend he had a right to use against the nullifiers of the tariff act, unless it should be revived by Congress, and which he proposed should be revived, modified, and adapted to meet the emergency confronting him, in the same way Congress had formerly adapted and modified the Act of 1792 by the Act of 1795, to meet the emergency of the latter year, was the very act Lincoln used to cover his assumption of power to make war on the South without the authority of Congress! He had this precedent before him, in which the warrior Jackson, swift in defense of the nation's honor against her foreign foes, was slow to dye his hands in his brothers' blood. He had before him the act in which Congress had revived the provisions of the Act of 1795, and expressly limited the duration of that revival to the time intervening before its next session; and he was lawyer enough to know, though not learned in his profession, that the substantial reenactment and enlargement of the old act, and its repeal, or limitation to a definite period, was, after the expiration of that period, a practical repeal of both--especially when it may be seen that the one was to take the place the other took in its day. See _Tynen_ vs. _The United States_, 11 Wallace U. S. Reports, page 88; _Pana_ vs. _Bowles_, 107 U. S. Reports, page 529, and cases cited therein; _Norris_ vs. _Crocker_, 13 Howard, page 429.
Tourism Digest
Lives of Distinguished North Carolinians — Part 22
2026-11-15 05:17:37 · The Daily Ledger
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