had the usual reference to the committee on elections. Mr. Sibley’s argument was ingenious and exhaustive, and it proved effective, for the committee absorbed its substance into their favorable report. On January 15, 1849, the House by a vote of 124 to 62 accorded Mr. Sibley his seat as delegate from Wisconsin. The same House refused, however, to make any appropriation for the expenses of a territory existing by virtue of mere geographical exclusion. A bill for the establishment of the Territory of Minnesota had been introduced into the Senate in the previous session. It was identical with that which had been strangled on the last day of the Twenty-ninth Congress. Mr. Sibley properly devoted himself to advancing the progress of the bill. It was promptly passed by the Senate, but it lagged in the House. The Whig majority had no consuming desire to favor a beginning likely to result in a Democratic delegation from a new state. They therefore clapped on an amendment, to which the Senate could not possibly agree, that the act should take effect March 10, six days after the expiry of President Polk’s term of office. The end of the session was but four days away. A House bill for the establishment of a Department of the Interior was still pending in the Senate. It provided for a goodly number of officials to be named by the incoming Whig President. Senator Douglas, acting for colleagues, authorized Mr. Sibley to give out to his Whig opponents that the Senate would be better disposed to passing their interior department measure if they should find it agreeable to recede from their offensive amendment to the Minnesota bill. On the last day of the session Mr. Sibley had the pleasure of seeing his bill pass, under suspension of the rules, without opposition. No one was so much surprised at the outcome as Mr. Sibley himself. It took thirty-seven days for the good news to reach St. Paul by the first steamer of the season from below. The boundaries of the new territory were those of the state later admitted, except that the west line was pushed out to the Missouri River, thus including an area of some 166,000 square miles. The governorship fell to Alexander Ramsey of Pennsylvania, then thirty-four years of age, who deserved well of his party in its late campaign and had done some excellent service as a member of the Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth Congresses. He had been well educated in the best school, that of a life of industry and aspiration. Clear-headed, cautious, patient, he knew how to anticipate the courses of things and to plan for the probabilities of the future. He identified himself from the first with his new territory, and remained to the end of his long life, in 1903, a steadfast, loyal Minnesotian.
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