Wisconsin with a better reputation for honesty and integrity than Nelson Dewey. He was the soul of honor, and his word was as good as his bond. He possessed sufficient moral rectitude, everybody thought, to run a whole political party, and still have something in reserve for home consumption. He was also a man of most excellent judgment, not only of men and business affairs, but of party policy and expediency. All his neighbors valued his advice highly in every-day affairs, and all the prominent politicians of the Democratic party often sought his advice and acted upon it. He was not a public speaker; he was tongue-tied, modest, and of a retiring disposition even in private life. He was little accustomed to the use of the pen, seldom if ever wrote articles for the newspapers discussing public questions, and his messages to the Legislature, while he acted as Governor, displayed none of the rhetorical graces and finish that distinguished the well-read scholar. He was simply plain, honest, straightforward, reliable Nelson Dewey, and his sincerity and sound common-sense won for him a host of friends. So when the dominant Democratic party was looking about for a suitable candidate for Governor of the State, when Wisconsin was admitted into the Union in 1848, the choice easily fell upon Dewey, and he was nominated and elected with little opposition.

"Of his political career I am not now speaking, but of things personal. He was a man small of stature, with a well-knit and compact frame, something of the style of General Grant; brown hair and light blue eyes, and altogether of rather a pleasing, but nowise of a striking personality. He had married the gifted daughter of Judge Dunn, a distinguished jurist and politician in territorial days, who inherited much of her eminent father's intelligence, wit and family pride, and of course when Dewey was elected, Governor of the new State and took up his residence in Madison, the family naturally took its place at the head of society. When his first term was ended he was easily nominated and reelected and things went well with him. Unlike other Governors, he never made use of the Governor's office as a convenient stepping-stone to the United States Senate, as is the fashion in these

latter days, but was seemingly content to rest on his laurels that had been already so easily won and modestly worn. Then he retired to private life and disappeared from public view. When a man has been Governor for two terms, even though he has discharged his official duties ably and well and to the satisfaction of his constituents, he seems to be a much smaller man, somehow, than when he was first elected. At the time Dewey went out of office, 1852, Daniel Wells, Jr., of Milwaukee, and George Dousman, of Prairie du Chien, both of them millionaires, owned large quantities of unimproved lands in the western and northern portions of the State, and ex-Governor Dewey was made their agent. For many years he looked after their interests, and such was their abiding faith in his honesty and integrity that no accounting was made with him for years, the proprietors forgetting that good old adage, proved to be true in a thousand instances, that 'short settlements make long friends.' But settlement day came at last. Meanwhile, Dewey had been seemingly prosperous, and had been spreading himself like the proverbial green bay tree. He had sent his wife and daughter to Europe for the purpose of educating the latter, and he commenced the building of a residence that far excelled in elegance and in all its appointments anything of the kind in Western Wisconsin. The day of settlement was the day of judgment. His wife and daughter were recalled from their protracted stay in Europe, and for the first time the wife was made acquainted with the unwelcome and humiliating fact that her expenses in Europe had been paid with money belonging to other people. Then followed those domestic difficulties which financial ruin is always sure to bring in its train, especially among the higher classes, and it all ended in a separation of the father and mother, and the accomplished daughter being thrown upon her own resources for a livelihood. Dejected, humiliated, ashamed, broken in health and spirit, Governor Dewey often sought reconciliation with his wife, but all in vain. That proud woman made one answer to all her friends who pleaded with her to return to her husband, and that was that he had no right to deceive her as to his real financial situation, and that to send his family abroad at the expense of other people was to her mind an unpardonable sin. It

was one she never condoned. The Governor's last days were spent in darkness and gloom, with the accumulating sorrows and infirmities of old age gathering thick upon him, augmented by a comparison of bankruptcy with the splendor and glamour of official grandeur, when all joined in the one acclaim: 'Long live the king! He died in poverty and obscurity, July 21, 1889.”

CHAPTER VII.

FARWELL AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

1789

Before taking final leave of the territorial epoch, it may be well to remind the student of our early history that perhaps he may find instruction and enjoyment in comparing the first convention, which met in Madison October 5, 1846, to frame a constitution for the State of Wisconsin, with that other more distinguished and eminent group of men who assembled in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, September, 1798, to form the organic act of a great nation. Perhaps we are not yet far enough removed from the scene and date of their labors to properly estimate their value, and we are still to some extent deprived of that enchantment which distance lends to the view. But just as the photographer takes a large picture and reduces the size of his copy of it by those delicate processes known only to his cunning art, so the reader must allow his imagination to help him in his comparison of the two bodies, that he may not break the images which we have been worshiping for over one hundred years.

The Philadelphia aggregation consisted of 55, men; the Madison convention numbered 124. In the former, 29 were college-bred men; in the latter a university or liberal education was the exception and not the rule. There were only seventeen college graduates in the first convention. In the Federal Convention Benjamin Franklin was the oldest man, 81; and Jonathan Dayton was the youngest, 26. In the Badger Convention the oldest man was William Berry, 65; and the youngest, George B. Smith, 23. If the Federal Convention had consisted of 124 members instead of 55, it is safe to say that it would never have agreed upon a constitution, and if it had not been for the wisdom and conciliatory spirit of Washington and Franklin, it would have broken up in fruitless disorder, without accomplishing anything, as Washington

at one time predicted it would. Our first convention was found to be too cumbersome and unwieldy, and so the next one was reduced to only a little more than one-half as large-69 members. Some of the great men of Revolutionary times that one would naturally expect to find in that renowned gathering were not there. Thomas Jefferson, of all others, and his intimate friend and co-worker, John Adams, were absent on a foreign mission; and Samuel Adams, who did more by his fiery eloquence to stir the colonies to revolt than any other one man, was for a long time opposed to the adoption of the constitution. And Patrick Henry, who wanted. "liberty or death," in his famous speech, not only opposed the convention from the start, but fought the adoption of the constitution after it was made, by the State of Virginia, to the best of his fine ability. The two ablest men in the convention were unquestionably Madison, 36, and Hamilton, who was only 30. Madison has been called the Father of the Federal Constitution, and the title is well deserved. Hamilton was a brilliant orator and an aristocrat in his tastes, habits, and opinions; Madison, the skillful manager, the adroit politician, the suave peacemaker, who brought about compromises, allayed irritations, and reconciled differences of opinion. Our convention consisted of a different class of men. Some of them had never seen the inside of a college, and most of them could have carried their private libraries on their backs. But they were broad-gauged men of affairs, intensely practical and hard-headed, and had studied. human nature instead of books. The men in the Federal Convention afterwards held high positions in the nation; Washington and Madison becoming Presidents, Hamilton the greatest financier the country has ever known, and others rising to be cabinet officers, foreign ministers and members of the Congress. So some of the Wisconsin delegates got to be Governors, Chief Justices, Congressmen and State officers. The Federal Constitution was debated for weeks by the State Legislatures before it was finally ratifiedMassachusetts and New York being the storm centers of the controversy, where the opposition to it was most violent and long continued, while the work of the Wisconsin convention was doomed to ignominious defeat. And when Marshall M. Strong