April 6, 1847: Voters in the Wisconsin Territory rejected the proposed state constitution, 20,233 to 14,119. The principal points of contention were property rights of married women, exemption of a man's homestead from forced sale to settle debts, restriction of currency and Negro suffrage.

There can no longer be a doubt that a respectable majority of the democrats of the Territory have voted against the Constitution. We are warranted in this conclusion by the known democratic majority in the Territory, and the prodigious majority against the Constitution, taken in connection with the wellknown fact that large numbers of whigs voted for the Constitution.

The Constitution being defeated, it is a consolation to us that a majority of our party voted against it, inasmuch as it has the conclusion that the objectionable provisions which caused its defeat, were not those which recognized and carried out the established principles of the democratic party. So far as the democratic party were responsible for all the principles contained in the Constitution, by the large majority which they had in the Convention, they have undoubtedly met with a defeat. But the party is not responsible for all the principles contained in that instrument. The democratic members of that Convention were elected to frame a Constitution upon sound democratic principles, and not to invent new, untried, and unsound principles and saddle them upon the party as democratic principles, and they have met with a severe and merited rebuke from their own party for attempting it.