But I think if the men who signed that report, and the men who joined them in giving the assurance to the people, had been earnest and zealous in the matter it is quite likely they could have prevented the action of the Convention.
The scheme for a new constitution passed the Convention by a large majority and was submitted to the people.

The Whig leaders, who seemed to have had all their wisdom and energy taken out of them when the Free Soilers left them, were much alarmed by the strength of the discontent with the existing order of things manifested by the coalition victory in the election of the Constitutional Convention.

Many of them concluded that it would be unwise to resist the popular feeling.

One Saturday afternoon during that summer I was in the office of Francis Wayland, a great friend of mine, long Dean of the New Haven Law School, when Henry S.Washburn, a member of the Whig State Central Committee, came into Wayland's office and told me he had just attended a meeting of the Committee that day and that it determined to make no contest against the new Constitution.

The Springfield _Republican,_ then a Whig journal, had an article that day, or the following Monday, to the same effect.