Wisconsin provided by law for the holding of a constitutional convention, a similar proviso was made to govern the election of delegates to the convention.
In Milwaukee County the Democrats nominated eight candidates for delegates. Dr. Franz Huebschmann was the sole German named. The Wisconsin Banner, while remarking that Germans constituting one-third of the population were to have but a single delegate, urged Germans to vote as one man for him. He was needed, said the editor, especially to contend for equality in the voting privilege, for which he had striven manfully during the past three years. In the neighbor county of Washington, Germans were urged to support two Irish candidates who favored equality of the voting privilege and whom the Whigs (so it was asserted) were trying to defeat by the same wiles they employed against Huebschmann. The moral of the Banner editorials was: "Don't trust the Whigs. They have always opposed the rights of the foreign born."[1] In preparation for the vote on delegates, Milwaukee Germans who had not declared their intention were given every direction for completing that formality, and the indications are that a large number of voters were newly made for the occasion.
Dr. Huebschmann, in the first convention, was a powerful advocate of equality, giving as the chief ground in favor of the principle that it would tend to bring Americans and foreigners into more harmonious relations with one another. "The more distinctions you make between them politically," he said, "the more you delay this great end [amalgamation], which is so essential to the future welfare of this state. And, in fact, I regard only one measure equally important as the political equality which I ask for, and that is a good common school system.... Political equality and good schools will make the people of Wisconsin an enlightened
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