After an appeal to the courts, and a decision upon the questions presented, it would have been the plain duty of the parties to accept the decision as authoritative and final.

By the advice of the President, the States of the South were to accept the decision obtained by constitutional means, in case it was favorable to them, and to disregard it, and to destroy both the Constitution and the Union, if it should prove to be adverse to the popular opinion in those States.
It is not improbable that the President's language conveyed more than his real meaning.

He may have intended to affirm that if the free States should refuse to repeal their obnoxious statutes after a final decision against their constitutionality, then the slave States would be justified in revolutionary resistance.

But he had no right to make such an argument or suggest such an hypothesis, for never in the history of the Federal Government had the decision of the Supreme judicial tribunal been disobeyed or disregarded by any State or by any individual.

The right of "revolutionary resistance" was not so foreign to the conception of the American citizen as to require suggestion and enforcement from Mr.Buchanan.
His argument in support of the right at that crisis was prejudicial to the Union, and afforded a standing-ground for many Southern men who were beginning to feel that the doctrine of Secession was illogical, unsafe, untenable.