twenty-one, and a citizen of the United States, and a citizen of the State of Tennessee was allowed to vote. The election was held on the 3d of December and resulted in a large majority in favor of the Convention.
The first constitutional Convention in the history of the State was the one which had met in Knoxville, and framed the Constitution under which Tennessee had been admitted into the Union.[1] Conspicuous among the members of the first Convention were John Sevier and Andrew Jackson. The constitution they adopted was modelled after that of the mother State, North Carolina. In 1834, a second Convention met at Nashville, and modified the old Constitution, so as to bring it into harmony with the industrial changes of the first quarter of a century. The next assertion of constituent powers was in 1861, when the Legislature passed the Declaration of Independence, and the Ordinance of Union with the Confederacy. In 1865, the Radical Convention, as we have seen, framed a number of constitutional amendments.
The newly elected convention assembled at Nashville on the 10th day of January. The character of its members was a guaranty that its action would be Conservative. It has been pronounced the most intelligent body ever elected in Tennessee for any purpose. John C. Brown, an ex-major-general of the Confederate army, was elected to preside over its deliberations. As the Authorization Act did not limit the power of the Convention, it was at liberty to enter into a thorough-going provision of the constitution, but it manifested from the start the intention to confine itself to the task of settling the question growing out of the war. Chief among these was negro suffrage.
The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States had not yet been adopted, so it was still in the power of the State to withhold the franchise from
- ↑ Caldwell's "Studies in the Constitutional History of Tennessee."
