Under these doctrines the Government of the United States was shorn of all power to preserve its own existence, and the Union might crumble and fall while its constituted authorities stood paralyzed and impotent.
This construction was all that the extremists of the South desired.
With so much conceded, they had every thing in their own hands.
They could march out of the Union at their own will and caprice, without resistance from the National Government, and they could come back upon such conditions as, with the President's aid, they might extort from an alarmed and weakening North.

Assured by the language of the President that they could with impunity defy the constitutional authority of the government, the Secessionists were immeasurably encouraged.

The Southern men had for three generations been cherishing the belief that they were as a class superior to Northern men, and they were more than ever confirmed in this pleasing illusion when they saw a Northern President, with the power of the nation in his hands, deliberately affirming that he could exercise no authority over or against them.
Men who, under the wholesome restraint of executive power, would have refrained from taking aggressive steps against the National Government, were by Mr.Buchanan's action forced into a position of hostility.

Men in the South, who were disposed to avoid extreme measures, were by taunt and reproach driven into the ranks of Secession.

They were made to believe, after the President's message, that the South would be ruined if she did not assert a position which the National authority confessed it had no right and no means to contest.