President, to use the military force hereby directed to be called forth, the President shall forthwith, by proclamation, command such insurgents to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes within a reasonable time.”  By the act of March 3, 1807, it is provided “that in all cases of insurrection or obstruction to the laws, either of the United States or of any individual State or Territory where it is lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia for the purpose of suppressing such insurrection or of causing the laws to be duly executed, it shall be lawful for him to employ for the same purposes such part of the land or naval force of the United States as shall be judged necessary, having first observed all the prerequisites of the law in that respect.”

This is the first occasion, so far as the government of a State and its people are concerned, on which it has become necessary to consider of the propriety of exercising those high and most important of constitutional and legal functions.

By a careful consideration of the above-recited acts of Congress your excellency will not fail to see that no power is vested in the Executive of the United States to anticipate insurrectionary movements against the government of Rhode Island so as to sanction the interposition of the military authority, but that there must be an actual insurrection, manifested by lawless assemblages of the people or otherwise, to whom a proclamation may be addressed and who may be required to betake themselves to their respective abodes.  I have, however, to assure your excellency that should the time arrive—­and my fervent prayer is that it may never come—­when an insurrection shall exist against the government of Rhode Island, and a requisition shall be made upon the Executive of the United States to furnish that protection which is guaranteed to each State by the Constitution and laws, I shall not be found to shrink from the performance of a duty which, while it would be the most painful, is at the same time the most imperative.  I have also to say that in such a contingency the Executive could not look into real or supposed defects of the existing government in order to ascertain whether some other plan of government proposed for adoption was better suited to the wants and more in accordance with the wishes of any portion of her citizens.  To throw the Executive power of this Government into any such controversy would be to make the President the armed arbitrator between the people of the different States and their constituted authorities, and might lead to a usurped power dangerous alike to the stability of the State governments and the liberties of the people.  It will be my duty, on the contrary, to respect the requisitions of that government which has been recognized as the existing government of the State through all time past until I shall be advised in regular manner that it has been altered and abolished and another substituted in its