Very likely these enactments, inspired by an earnest spirit of liberty, went in many cases too far, and tended to produce conflicts between National and State authority.

That was a question to be determined finally and exclusively by the Federal Judiciary.
Unfortunately Mr.Buchanan carried his argument beyond that point, coupling it with a declaration and an admission fatal to the perpetuity of the Union.

After reciting the statutes which he regarded as objectionable and hostile to the constitutional rights of the South, and after urging their unconditional repeal upon the North, the President said: "The Southern States, standing on the basis of the Constitution, have a right to demand this act of justice from the States of the North.

Should it be refused, then the Constitution, to which all the States are parties, will have been willfully violated by one portion of them in a provision essential to the domestic security and happiness of the remainder.
In that event, the injured States, after having used all peaceful and constitutional means to obtain redress, would be justified in revolutionary resistance to the government of the Union." By this declaration the President justified, and in effect advised, an appeal from the constitutional tribunals of the country to a popular judgment in the aggrieved States, and recognized the right of those States, upon such popular judgment, to destroy the Constitution and Union.

The "constitutional means" of redress were the courts of the country, and to these the President must have referred in the paragraph quoted.