ance. Unusual excitement had attended the selection of
delegates. The new administration became aggressive. No secret was
made of its purpose to crush Thurlow Weed; and when the convention
assembled, Hugh Maxwell, collector of the port of New York, and John
Young, sub-treasurer, were there to control it. A test vote for
temporary chairman disclosed sixty-eight Radicals and forty-one
Conservatives present, but in the interest of harmony Francis Granger
became the permanent president.

Granger was a man of honour and a man of intellect, whose qualities of
fairness and fitness for public life have already been described. When
he entered Harrison's Cabinet in 1841, as postmaster-general, the
South classed him as an Abolitionist; when he left Congress in 1843,
in the fulness of his intellectual strength, his home at Canandaigua
became the centre of an admiring group of Whigs who preferred the lead
of Clay and the conservative policy of Webster. He now appeared as an
ally of President Fillmore. It was natural, perhaps, that in
appointing a committee on resolutions, Granger should give advantage
of numbers to his own faction, but the Radicals were amazed at the
questionable action of his committee. It delayed its report upon the
pretext of not being ready, and then, late in the evening, in the
absence of many delegates, presented what purported to be a unanimous
expression, in which Seward was left practically without mention. As
the delegates listened in profound silence the majority became
painfully aware that something was wanting, and, before action upon it
could be taken, they forced an adjournment by a vote of fifty-six to
fifty-one.

The next morning the Radicals exhibited a desire for less harmony and
more justice. By a vote of seventy-three to forty-six the original
resolutions were recommitted to an enlarged committee, and after
nominating Washington Hunt for governor and George J. Cornwell for
lieutenant-governor, substitute resolutions were adopted by a vote of
seventy-four to forty-two. One difference between the original and the
substitute centred in the organisation of new territories. The
majority opposed any surrender or waiver of the exclusion of slavery
in any act establishing a regular civil organisation; the minority
thought that, since it was impossible to secure the Wilmot Proviso, an
insistence upon which would prevent any territorial organisation, it
would be better to organise them without it, relyi