US Presidency
1850

The constitutional duty of the President is plain and peremptory and the authority vested in him by law for its performance clear and ample. Texas is a State, authorized to maintain her own laws so far as they are not repugnant to the Constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States; to suppress insurrections against her authority, and to punish those who may commit treason against the State according to the forms provided by her own constitution and her own laws. But all this power is local and confined entirely within the limits of Texas herself. She can possibly confer no authority which can be lawfully exercised beyond her own boundaries. All this is plain, and hardly needs argument or elucidation.