e others stood
between the two, desiring the abolition of a freehold qualification,
yet opposing universal suffrage and wishing to place some restrictions
on the right to vote. Erastus Root and Samuel Young ably represented
the second class; Ambrose Spencer and the Federalists were intensely
loyal to a freehold qualification; and Van Buren, backed probably by a
majority of the convention, presented the compromise view.

Preliminary to the great debate, a lively skirmish occurred over the
limitation of suffrage to the white voter. Strangely enough, this
proposition was sustained by Erastus Root, the ardent champion of
universal suffrage and the abolition of slavery; and it was opposed
with equal warmth by Peter A. Jay and the Federalists, who advocated a
freehold qualification. Van Buren did not speak, but he voted for the
resolution, to eliminate the word "white," which was carried by a
close vote--sixty-three to fifty-nine. Then it was proposed that
coloured voters should be freeholders. Again the advocates of
universal suffrage favoured the proposition, and the friends of a
freehold qualification opposed it; but this time the convention
decided against the negro, thirty-three to seventy-one. New York was
slow to give equal suffrage to the blacks. Nearly three-fourths of the
voters of the State withheld it in 1846; and, six years after
President Lincoln's emancipation proclamation, when the black soldier
had served his country throughout the Civil War with a fidelity and
courage that awoke the strongest emotions of a patriotic people, it
was again refused.

The debate, however, which aroused the greatest interest, and in which
members of the convention most generally participated, sprang from
Ambrose Spencer's proposition limiting to freeholders the right to
vote for senators. It must have occurred to the Chief Justice that the
convention was against him, because its committee had unanimously
agreed to abolish the freehold qualification; and, further, because
the convention, by its action on the negro question, had demonstrated
its purpose to wipe out all property distinctions among white voters;
yet Spencer, at this eleventh hour, proposed to re-establish a
freehold difference between senators and assemblymen. The Chief
Justice, with all his faults, and they were many and grave, had in him
the capacity of a statesman; but it was a statesman of fifty years
before. He had learned little by experience. The prejudices o