By the middle of February, under their inspiration, a bill providing for a convention to frame a State constitution was perfected and enacted.
The Governor immediately sent the Legislature his message, reminding them that the leading idea of the organic act was to leave the actual _bona fide_ inhabitants of the Territory "perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way," and vetoing the bill because "the Legislature has failed to make any provision to submit the constitution when framed to the consideration of the people for their ratification or rejection." The Governor's argument was wasted on the predetermined legislators.

They promptly passed the act over his veto.
The cabal was in no mood to be thwarted, and under a show of outward toleration, if not respect, their deep hostility found such means of making itself felt that the Governor began to receive insult from street ruffians, and to become apprehensive for his personal safety.
In such a contest he was single-handed against the whole pro-slavery town of Lecompton.

The foundation of his authority was gradually sapped; and finding himself no longer sustained at Washington, where the private appeals and denunciations of the cabal were more influential than his official reports, he wrote his resignation on the day of Buchanan's inauguration, and a week later left the Territory in secrecy as a fugitive.

Thus, in less than three years, three successive Democratic executives had been resisted, disgraced, and overthrown by the political conspiracy which ruled the Territory; and Kansas had indeed become, in the phraseology of the day, "the graveyard of governors." The Kansas imbroglio was a political scandal of such large proportions, and so clearly threatened a dangerous schism in the Democratic party, that the new President, Buchanan, and his new Cabinet, proceeded to its treatment with the utmost caution.

The subject was fraught with difficulties not of easy solution.