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 of Jay and other patriots of the Revolution, still lingered in his mind, arousing painful apprehensions of what would happen if the exclusive privileges of landowners should disappear, and robbing him of that faith in the people which made Erastus Root the forerunner of the broad suffrage that obtains to-day. Chancellor Kent backed Spencer's proposition in an abler speech than that made by the Chief Justice himself. Kent was an honourable, upright statesman, who, unlike Spencer, had never wavered in his fealty to that federalism which had been learned at the feet of John Jay and Alexander Hamilton; but, like Spencer, he had failed to discover that the people, jealous of their rights and liberties, could be trusted regardless of property holdings. "By the report before us," he said, "we propose to annihilate, at one stroke, all property distinctions, and to bow before the idol of universal suffrage.