Excerpt from Report of the Committee on Federal Relations: With the Report of the Peace Commissioners Appointed to Wait on Presidents Lincoln and Davis

The Message of His Excellency, the Governor, demands the consideration of the Legislature, from two points of view - first, in regard to the state of public affairs which it discloses; and, secondly, as to the remedy which it suggests to the people of the State for the perilous contingencies which surround them.

So far as we can ascertain the views of the Governor, from the brief presentation of them, which the haste of our meeting had, as he states, permitted him to make, it appears that he regards the circumstances which have transpired since the attack upon the Massachusetts regiment, in Baltimore, on the 19th of April, as constituting all the facts to which it is necessary your attention should be drawn. Your Committee, of course, recognize the pro priety of avoiding at this moment all unnecessary recurrence to discussions which have already been far overstepped by the rapid progress of events; but they find it, at the same time, quite im possible to do justice to the questions before them, without a frank and explicit reference to at least a portion of the public events which had preceded and were so closely connected with the occurrences alluded to.

The President of the United States, by his Proclamation of the 15th of April, had called upon a portion of the States to place at his disposal a body of militia, to the number of seventy-five thou sand men. The Proclamation was directed against the people of the newly'formed Southern Confederacy, and its purposes and policy were obvious, although its terms were technically shaped in conformity with the Act of Congress of 1795. It recited, with formal precision, in the language of the Act, that the laws of the United States were opposed, and the execution thereof was obstructed, in the seven seceded States, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial pro ceedings, or by the powers vested in the Marshals, and it called forth the militia of the other States, in the further language of the statute, to suppress such combinations, and to cause the laws to be duly executed. In pursuance of another section of the law, it then commanded the insurgents to disperse and retire peace ably to their respective abodes within twenty days. If there is any proposition clear beyond dispute, it must be, that ifthe occa sion which authorises the President to call out the militia, under the Act of 1795, existed at all, it was declared, by the explicit terms of the Proclamation, to exist only in the States of the Southern Confederacy, which were therein enumerated. It is equally indisputable, as matter of law, that the militia, if called out lawfully at all, were lawfully empowered to execute the laws and suppress unlawful combinations in the seven States named, and in none other. Such a conclusion of law is not only obvious and unavoidable, as matter of construction, but equally to be in sisted upon as matter of principle and self-protection on the part of the people; for the exercise of the military power, in a free government, is never to be permitted, except within the limits and under the severest restrictions and checks of the law. If a President of the United States, under the fraudulent pr'etence of suppressing unlawful combinations in Louisiana and Florida, could be permitted to call out troops, to be used for any purpose in Maryland or Virginia, no soil of any State would be free from invasion, and no right of the citizen anywhere would be secure against overthrow.

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