The President and his cabinet were taken by surprise. Frequent consultations were held. Douglas was repeatedly closeted with the President. All the members of the cabinet agreed that the plan of leaving the slavery question to the people of the new State was ingenious; but many objections were raised to a single State. In repeated interviews, Polk urged Douglas to draft a separate bill for New Mexico; but Douglas was obdurate.[267] To Douglas's chagrin, the California bill was not referred to his committee, but to the Committee on the Judiciary. Perhaps this course was in accord with precedent, but it was noted that four out of the five members of this committee were Southerners, and that the vote to refer was a sectional one.[268] An adverse report was therefore to be expected. Signs were not wanting that if the people of the new province were left to work out their own salvation, they would exclude slavery.[269] The South was acutely sensitive to such signs. Nothing of this bias, however, appeared in the report of the committee. With great cleverness and circumspection they chose another mode of attack. The committee professed to discover in the bill a radical departure from traditional policy. When had Congress ever created a State out of "an unorganized body of people having no constitution, or laws, or legitimate bond of union?" California was to be a "sovereign State," yet the bill provided that Congress should interpose its authority to form new States out of it, and to prescribe rules for elections to a constitutional convention. What sort of sovereignty was this? Moreover, since Texas claimed a part of New Mexico, endless litigations would follow. In the judgment of the committee, it would be far wiser to organize the usual territorial governments for California and New Mexico.[270] To these sensible objections, Douglas replied ineffectively. The question of sovereignty, he thought, did not depend upon the size of a State: without doing violence to the sovereignty of California, Congress could surely carve new States out of its territory; but if there were doubts on this point, he would move to add the saving clause, "with the consent of the State." He suggested no expedient for the other obstacles in the way of State sovereignty. As for precedents, there were the first three States admitted into the Union,--Kentucky, Vermont, and Tennessee,--none of which had any organized government recognized by Congress.[271] They never furnished their constitutions to Congress for inspection. Here Douglas hit wide of the mark. No one had contended that a State must present a written constitution before being recognized, but only that the people must have some form of political organization, before they could be treated as constituting a State in a constitutional sense.[272]