exigency of the occasion shall so require, for the purpose of
suppressing such combinations. 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. If Texas
militia, therefore, march into any one of the other States or into any
Territory of the United States, there to execute or enforce any law of
Texas, they become at that moment trespassers; they are no longer
under the protection of any lawful authority, and are to be regarded
merely as intruders; and if within such State or Territory they
obstruct any law of the United States, either by power of arms or mere
power of numbers, constituting such a combination as is too powerful
to be suppressed by the civil authority, the President of the United
States has no option left to him, but is bound to obey the solemn
injunction of the Constitution and exercise the high powers vested in
him by that instrument and by the acts of Congress.

Or if any civil posse, armed or unarmed, enter into any Territory of
the United States, under the protection of the laws thereof, with