Having no implied engagements to ratify, no rewards to bestow, no
resentments to remember, and no personal wishes to consult in
selections for official station, I shall fulfill this difficult and
delicate trust, admitting no motive as worthy either of my character or
position which does not contemplate an efficient discharge of duty and
the best interests of my country. I acknowledge my obligations to the
masses of my countrymen, and to them alone. Higher objects than
personal aggrandizement gave direction and energy to their exertions in
the late canvass, and they shall not be disappointed. They require at
my hands diligence, integrity, and capacity wherever there are duties
to be performed. Without these qualities in their public servants, more
stringent laws for the prevention or punishment of fraud, negligence,
and peculation will be vain. With them they will be unnecessary.

But these are not the only points to which you look for vigilant
watchfulness. The dangers of a concentration of all power in the
general government of a confederacy so vast as ours are too obvious to
be disregarded. You have a right, therefore, to expect your agents in
every department to regard strictly the limits imposed upon them by the
Constitution of the United States. The great scheme of our
constitutional liberty rests upon a proper distribution of power
between the State and Federal authorities, and experience has shown
that the harmony and happiness of our people must depend upon a just
discrimination between the separate rights and responsibilities of the
States and your common rights and obligations under the General
Government; and here, in my opinion, are the considerations which
should form the true basis of future concord in regard to the questions
which have most seriously disturbed public tranquillity. If the Federal
Government will confine itself to the exercise of powers clearly
granted by the Constitution, it can hardly happen that its action upon