The undersigned, while contenting himself, in the spirit of the action taken by the General Assembly of his State, with the proposal of that substitute for the majority report, would be untrue to his own convictions, shared, as he believes, by the majority of the commissioners from Virginia, and to his sense of duty, if he did not emphatically declare, as his settled and deliberate judgment, that for permanent safety in this Union, to the slaveholding States, and the restoration of integrity to the Union and harmony and peace to the country, a guarantee of actual power in the Constitution and in the working of the Government to the slaveholding and minority section is _indispensable_. How such guarantee might be most wisely contrived and judiciously adjusted to the frame of the Government, the undersigned forbears now to inquire. He is not exclusively addicted to any special plan, but believing that such guarantee might be adequately afforded by a partition of power in the Senate between the two sections, and by a recognition that _ours_ is a Union of freedom and consent, not constraint and force, he respectfully submits, for consideration by members of the Convention, the plan hereto appended, marked No. 2. Whether he shall feel bound to invoke the action of the Convention upon it, may depend on the future manifestations of sentiment in this body. All which is respectfully submitted, JAMES A. SEDDON. _Commissioner from Virginia._ _February 15th, 1861._ No. 1. _Joint Resolutions proposing certain amendments to the Constitution of the United States._ _Whereas_, serious and alarming dissensions have arisen between the Northern and Southern States, concerning the rights and security of the rights of the slaveholding States, and especially their rights in the common territory of the United States; and _whereas_, it is eminently desirable and proper that those dissensions, which now threaten the very existence of this Union, should be permanently quieted and settled by constitutional provisions, which shall do equal justice to all sections, and thereby restore to the people that peace and good will which ought to prevail between all the citizens of the United States: Therefore, _Resolved_, by this Convention, that the following articles are hereby approved and submitted to the Congress of the United States, with the request that they may, by the requisite constitutional majority of two-thirds, be recommended to the respective States of the Union, to be, when ratified by Conventions of three-fourths of the States, valid and operative as amendments of the Constitution of the Union.