The Chairmanships of the different Committees were assigned as follows:
Preamble and Bill of Rights—Wm. Hutchinson, of Lawrence; Executive
Department—John P. Greer, of Shawnee; Legislative Department—Solon O.
Thacher, of Lawrence; Judicial Department—Samuel A. Kingman, of Brown
county; Military—James G. Blunt, of Anderson county; Electors and
Elections—P. H. Townsend, of Douglas; Schedule—John T. Burris, of
Johnson; Apportionment—H. D. Preston, of Shawnee; Corporations and
Banking—Robert Graham, of Atchison; Education and Public Institutions—W.
R. Griffith, of Bourbon county; County and Township Organizations—John
Ritchie, of Topeka; Ordinance and Public Debt—James Blood, of Lawrence;
Finance and Taxation—Benj. F. Simpson, of Lykins; Amendments and
Miscellaneous—S. D. Houston, of Riley county; Federal Relations—T. S.
Wright, of Nemaha county; Phraseology and Arrangement—John J. Ingalls,
of Atchison.
I have studied the composition of these Committees with some interest,
reviewing the work of their members in the Convention, and recalling
their subsequent careers. And it appears to me that in making them up,
President Winchell exhibited phenomenally quick and accurate judgment
of men. He was, indeed, one of the best presiding officers I have ever
known. His imperturbable coolness, never for an instant ruffled by the
most sudden and passionate outbreaks of excitement in the Convention;
his mastery of all the niceties of parliamentary law; his uniform
courtesy and tact; his promptness and clearness in stating his
decisions; and above all, the mingled grace and kindness and firmness
with which he announced to an indignant member an adverse decision,
were really wonderful. But what shall be said of that still more
wonderful prescience with which he made up the Committees? What
induced this calm, gray-eyed, observing little man, whose
brass-buttoned blue coat was first seen by two-thirds of the
Convention on the morning of the 5th of July—what impelled him, within
twenty-four hours, to select an obscure, dull-looking, shock-headed
country doctor as Chairman of the Military Committee, and thus name in
connection with military affairs, for the first time, the only Kansas
soldier who reached a full Major-Generalship? How did he happen to
pass by half a dozen more wide-known lawyers, and appoint as Chairman
of the Judiciary Committee a man who, during more than fifteen years
thereafter, occupied a place on the Supreme Bench of the State, for
the greater portion of this time as the Chief Justice? How came he to
recognize so quickly, in the Engrossing Clerk of the Territorial
Legislature, the ripest scholar and the fittest man in the body for
the Chairmanship of the Committee to which every article of the
Constitution was referred for final revision and amendment? In the
youngest and most boyish-looking member he found the man who was to
form, for this State, a code of Finance and Taxation whose clear
directions and wholesome restrictions have guarded Kansas against the
wasteful extravagance of Legislatures and the curse of a burdensome
public debt, during all the tempting and perilous affairs of its first
quarter of a century. And he named as head of the Committee on
Education, the first State Superintendent of Public Instruction. All
of his appointments were made with rare judgment, but those mentioned
appear notably discerning.