Before the constitution had been defeated, strong influence had been used to prepare the way for a second convention should the work of the first fall to the ground. The territorial press constantly agitated for a special legislative session, and petitions bearing many signatures requested immediate action. It was much desired that a constitution might be drawn in time to permit Wisconsin to take part in the presidential campaign of 1848. Accordingly on September 27, 1847 Governor Dodge issued a call for an extra session of the legislature which took place October 18-27. Its sole business was to arrange for a new constitutional convention, and the only difficulty was the apportionment of members. A strong desire was evinced for a small convention and the number of delegates was finally fixed at sixty-nine and the date for assembling on the fifteenth of December. These measures met with general approval, nominations were quickly made, and the election of delegates occurred on November 29. A few of the nominating conventions instructed their delegates; other candidates were closely questioned on the subjects of banking, married women's rights, and exemptions. Few of the first convention members were nominated a second time. choice resulted in a larger proportion of Whigs than were elected to the first convention, twenty-three of that party being chosen to forty-six Democrats. The convention organized with the election of Morgan L. Martin, chairman, and Thomas McHugh, secretary. The constitution was introduced by a bill of rights, which had been omitted from the earlier one. The fundamental law was drawn up on general principles and the disputed features of the earlier constitution were omitted. The elective judiciary was retained; exemptions and married women's property rights were left to legislation; a harmless banking privilege was incorporated.

The

The convention finished its labors on February 2, and the popular election was set for March 13. The Liberty party was the only opposition element in the territory. All

the press advocated the adoption of the new constitution. One of the members of the first convention attempted to secure from the legislature the right for the people to vote for the first constitution as well as for the second; but he was unsuccessful. The Germans and Norwegians voted in favor of the new instrument. The election on March 14 gave 16,417 votes in favor of the constitution and 6,174 against it. On April 8 the governor issued a proclamation declaring the result, and on May 29, 1848 Congress formally admitted Wisconsin to the Union.

LOUISE PHELPS KELLOGG.

WISCONSIN-A CONSTITUTION OF DEMOCRACY2

The political revolution of 1828 opened a period of twelve years in which the Mississippi Valley, speaking through the Jacksonian organization, controlled the destinies of the United States. The movement saw itself as a revolt of the people against autocracy and aristocracy; it was in fact an uprising of the frontier against the older communities. In the long run, as in every such revolt, it reached conclusions which it sought to perpetuate in the form of constitutional law. Its democratic aspirations were mingled, almost beyond disentanglement, with the zeal of a new community for easy wealth, and with the resentment of a debtor frontier against the agencies of capital and law. But it left upon American constitutional law an impress that lasted for two generations.

The constitutional contributions of Jacksonian democracy are not to be measured by changes in the constitution of the United States. That document had received its basic interpretation before the deaths of James Madison and John Marshall, in the middle thirties. Although many Democrats and many southerners professed themselves to believe that the supreme court and the federal government were overriding the state and the citizen, Jacksonian democracy had little quarrel with the theory of nationalism. The frontier was the home of the Democrats; it had been the field of the activities of the nation. It accepted the legal doctrines of nationalism in the forties and fifties, and confined its own constitutional development to a readjustment of its local institutions. The propositions for amendment to the federal constitution were most numerous in matters of detail cov

'Originally published in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review II, 3-24, with the title "A Constitution of Democracy-Wisconsin, 1847."

ering the appointment, removal, and pay of public servants, and none on these or other topics was ratified between 1804 and 1865.3

In the state constitutions of the Mississippi Valley between the panics of 1837 and 1857 are to be found the evidences of the reactions of Jacksonian democracy on government. Before 1837 the party was too young, and life was too rosy in its promise, for introspection and amendment. After 1857 a new party readjustment had come to the nation, and the old issues were transformed. But between these panics, and connected with them, is a period of interpretation and theory, in which the "ultraism of the age" was seeking to perpetuate itself in the Mississippi Valley, and indeed throughout the nation. Every state from Kentucky north made its attempt at constitutional revision. Wisconsin, still a territory, made a constitution in 1846, and another, under which it became a state, in 1847. Iowa, likewise a territory, also rejected its first constitution of 1844. to accept its second, of 1846. Missouri had made a new fundamental law in 1845, but rejected it at the polls. Illinois adopted a new constitution which it framed in 1847, as did Kentucky in 1849, Michigan in 1850, and Ohio and Indiana in 1850-51.

Not only were the constitutions of the Mississippi Valley revised to meet the experiences of the new democracy, but the revisions wore well. Says McMaster: "That the financial, the industrial, the economic conditions through which the people were passing, that their changed ideas of the duties of the state, their juster conception of the social and political rights of man, their struggles for a better life, should find expression in their constitutions of government, as well as in the statute books was inevitable."'5 Confidence in the people was basic in these constitutions. "The major

'H. V. Ames, Proposed Amendments to the Constitution of the United States (American Historical Association, Annual Report, 1896), 20, 325, 366. Charleston [S. C.] Courier, August 18, 1845.

J. B. McMaster, History of the People of the United States (New York, 1884-1913), 7, 162.

ity of the people always do right, they cannot be deceived," wrote one of the Democrats, exultant in his election to a minor office."

The states were establishing in this period, throughout the Union, a durable type of local government. Of the eight new constitutions adopted between 1829 and 1838, the average life was thirty-two years. There were twenty constitutions adopted in the United States between 1838 and 1859; of these six had an average life of only eighteen and twothirds years because of the changes occasioned by the Civil War; and four were renewed in an average of twenty-seven and one-half years from other causes. The remaining ten constitutions of this period outlasted the century, and eight of them were yet in force in 1915: Rhode Island, 1842; New Jersey, 1844; Wisconsin, 1847; Indiana, 1851; Iowa, 1857; Minnesota, 1857; Oregon, 1857; and Kansas, 1859. Two, Michigan, 1850, and Ohio, 1851, lasted more than half a century before they were replaced. All the upper Mississippi Valley states framed constitutions and expressed in permament form the democratic ideals of the Democratic party.

The most permanent of these western Jacksonian constitutions was that of Wisconsin, under which the territory became a state in 1848. In 1914 it was still in force, and in that year a decisive expression of opinion was given by the people against any considerable modification of it. It shows in its provisions the forces that were at large in the second quarter of the nineteenth century in the Democratic party and Democratic society. It is longer than constitutions of earlier periods, longer even than the average of its own period, and illustrates the prevailing tendency to write

J. G. Davis, Rockville, Indiana, April 3, 1833, to G. Cornelius, Pittsburg, Kentucky; manuscript letter in the possession of J. G. D. Mack.

'J. A. Woodburn, "Constitution Making in Indiana,” in Indiana Magazine of History, 10:237-255 (September, 1914).

Emlin McClain, "The Constitutional Convention and the Issues Before It," in B. F. Shambaugh, Fiftieth Anniversary of the Constitution of Iowa (1907), 164.

• Ten "progressive" amendments were defeated by heavy popular majorities, in November, 1914.