scribed
in the rule adopted by the joint convention of the two Houses as the
requisite to election. On the 15th of March the convention rescinded
this stringent rule and declared that "any candidate receiving a
plurality of votes of the members present shall be declared duly
elected." The Legislature was composed of a Senate with twenty-one
members and an Assembly with sixty members. The resolution giving to
a plurality the power to elect was carried in the joint convention by
a majority of one--forty-one to forty. In this vote eleven senators
were in the affirmative and ten in the negative, and of the members of
the House thirty were in the affirmative and thirty in the negative.
It was therefore numerically demonstrated that the resolution could not
have been carried with the two Houses acting separately. There would
have been a majority of one in the Senate and a tie in the House.

Proceeding to vote under this new rule, John P. Stockton, the
Democratic candidate, received forty votes, John C. Ten Eyck, the
Republican candidate, thirty-seven votes, and four other candidates
one vote each. Forty-one votes were thus cast against Mr. Stockton,
but as he had secured a plurality he was duly elected according to the
rule adopted by the joint convention.--Mr. Stockton was thirty-nine
years of age at the time of his election. His family had been for
several generations distinguished in the annals of New Jersey. His
great-grandfather Richard Stockton was a member of the Continental
Congress and was a signer of the Declaration of Independence; his
grandfather Richard Stockton was a senator of the United States under
the administrations of Washington and John Adams; his father was the
well-known Commodore Robert F. Stockton, who was conspicuously
effective as a naval officer in the conquest of California, and
afterwards a senator of the United States. Mr. Stockton entered the
Senate, therefore, with personal _prestige_ and a good share of
popularity with his party.

On the 20th of March, five days after the alleged election of Mr.
Stockton, seven senators and thirty-one members of the Assembly
forwarded to the Senate of the United States a protest against his
admission, for the reason that he was not elected by a majority of the
votes of the joint meeting of the Legislature. The substantial ground
on which the argument in the protest rested, was that a Legislature
means at least a majority of what constitutes the Le