Читать книгу The Jacksonian Conservatism of Rufus P. Ranney - David M. Gold - Страница 10

ONE

Western Reserve Democrat

AT TWO O’CLOCK in the morning on February 22, 1839, Benjamin F. Wade delivered a scathing attack on the Ohio Fugitive Slave Bill to a half-empty state senate chamber. Introduced at the behest of Kentucky slaveholders, the bill would make it easier for masters to recover runaways who sought freedom in Ohio. “[U]ntil the laws of nature and of nature’s God are changed,” Wade vowed, “I will never recognize the right of one man to hold his fellow man a slave.” Let the slaveholders, with their doctrine of states’ rights, “shrink back beyond their own dark borders, and there remain, a plague spot on the body politic,” roared the future Radical Republican; let them not look to Ohio for aid and sympathy. As a member of the Whig minority, Wade could not defeat the Fugitive Slave Bill. If he hoped at least to influence his young law partner with his speech, he was disappointed there too. Rufus P. Ranney was and always would be a Democrat, an advocate of states’ rights, and unsympathetic toward abolitionism. When Ranney ran for governor in 1859, Wade campaigned against him.¹

Ranney rose to local prominence in the 1840s as a Democratic politician and lawyer, but his early life is mostly a mystery. He was born to an undistinguished descendant of Thomas Ranny, who immigrated from Scotland in the seventeenth century and settled in Middletown, Connecticut. Ranney’s grandfather Elijah moved to Blandford in western Massachusetts in 1773, where his wife Mary gave birth to their son Rufus in 1779 or 1780. Rufus married a local girl, Dolly D. Blair, with whom he had eight children. The Ranneys were farmers in an area not noted for rural prosperity. Hampden County was a region of hardscrabble farms around the time Elijah Ranney settled there and no better off in the early nineteenth century.²

Rufus and Dolly’s third child, Rufus Percival Ranney, was born October 30, 1813. Nothing is known of his life in Blandford: his health, education, religious training, or anything else. In 1824 the Ranneys moved to Freedom Township in Portage County, Ohio. Portage County was part of the Western Reserve, a large swath of northeastern Ohio once claimed by Connecticut and settled largely by New Englanders. Freedom Township was still a wilderness, lacking roads, schools, and churches. When the Ranneys came, Rufus senior “cleared four acres, built a cabin, and for a year they lived on the game killed.” The elder Rufus, “an honest, industrious farmer . . . in humble circumstances,” could not spare young Rufus’s labor or afford to send him away to school. The boy received only one winter of formal education in Ohio. He may have acquired some learning from his mother, who, according to one source, “had received a good education” and “was very attentive to her children.”³

Notwithstanding the paucity of information about Rufus P. Ranney’s youth, one thing is clear: he hungered for knowledge. A Lincolnesque story has it that Ranney, unable to go to school, chopped wood for a local merchant to earn money for a volume of Virgil.⁴ In 1833 he headed off to Western Reserve College in Hudson, a small Presbyterian school founded just seven years earlier. Ranney showed up “in a suit of homespun butternut.” The college supposedly had the same admission requirements as Yale, including knowledge of Greek and Latin, but it is doubtful that the college adhered to those standards; Ranney learned to read French on his own, but no one ever claimed that he knew the classical languages. Ranney taught and performed manual labor, as all students were expected to do, but gave up in the spring of 1834. He may have been disappointed with the college, although his attachment to the school in later years suggests a lifelong fondness for the institution. Perhaps financial hardship impelled him to turn to more practical pursuits. There is no way to tell if the college left any significant impression on Ranney, but possibly it helped shape his views on one issue that would become crucial for his political career. Shortly before Ranney’s arrival, the college became a center of antislavery agitation. Abolitionist proposals set off heated debates, but the idea of colonizing American blacks in Africa enjoyed nearly universal support. Ranney’s experience at the college during the formative days of the organized antislavery movement possibly implanted antislavery ideas in his mind, but the political record of his postcollegiate career reveals no sympathy with abolitionism.⁵

Perhaps it was through political activities on campus or in the village that Ranney met lawyers and future abolitionist stalwarts Joshua R. Giddings and Benjamin F. Wade. Giddings and Wade, like Ranney, were the sons of farmers who had moved to the Western Reserve. Also like Ranney, they had had little formal education when they took up the study of law. In 1831 Giddings and Wade formed a law partnership in Jefferson, in Ashtabula County. In 1834 or 1835 the flourishing firm took Ranney on as a law student. He walked from his home to Jefferson, arriving with just the clothes he was wearing and an extra shirt tucked into his hat. In those days lawyers typically received their training as apprentices in the offices of established attorneys. They read whatever law books their mentors might possess, copied documents, ran errands, and generally observed the business of the office. After a time they presented themselves to an examining committee for admission to the bar. In Ohio the aspiring lawyer had to obtain a certificate from an attorney stating that the applicant had “regularly and attentively” studied law for two years, was of good moral character, and had the knowledge and ability to perform his professional duties. Two justices of the supreme court, or attorneys designated by them, then conducted an examination. According to Albert G. Riddle, another Western Reserve lawyer and politician, these requirements were not mere formalities. “The examinations were thorough and searching,” Riddle remembered, “often conducted by the judges themselves.” On the other hand, in 1845 future Ohio governor John Brough reportedly gained admission to the bar by treating the examining committee to the best bourbon in town. The nature of Ranney’s exam is unknown, but he passed, was admitted in Trumbull County in 1836, and set up practice in Warren.⁶

There are no contemporary portraits, in pictures or words, of Ranney as a boy or young man, but two men who knew him provided descriptions in later years. In remarks at a banquet of the Cleveland bar in 1881, Portage County probate judge Daniel R. Tilden, a native New Englander several years older than Ranney, recalled Ranney as solemn-looking and “a little unsociable,” with “a sort of prescience . . . of the dignities and honors that awaited him in his profession.” Riddle, who was born in Hampden County, Massachusetts, less than three years after Ranney and was brought to Geauga County as an infant, made the real-life Ranney a character in a novel. Bart Ridgeley: A Story of Northern Ohio, published in 1873 but set in the 1830s, tells the story of a young law student who becomes Ranney’s close friend. Riddle describes Ranney as “above the usual height, broad and heavy-shouldered, with a massive head and strong face, a high narrow forehead; rather shy in manner, and taciturn,” yet able to indulge in a good laugh with friends. Ranney already had a reputation as “a man of strong, profound, ingenious mind, with much power of sarcasm,” and seemed “destined to a distinguished career.” Although Ranney went to church with Bart, he and Wade were suspected of having “no religion of any kind.”⁷

Riddle attributes to the young Ranney a mature legal philosophy. When Bart asks whether “his lamp of genius” would aid a lawyer in his work, Ranney replies:

It might, and he might be misled by its flare. He would do better to use the old lights of the law. Some are a little lurid, and some a little blue, but always the same in tempest or calm. The law, as you have doubtless discovered, is founded in a few principles of obvious right. Their application to cases is artificial. The law, for its own wise purposes, takes care of itself; of its own force, it embraces everything, investigates everything, construes itself, and enforces itself, as the sole power in the premises. Its rules in the text-books read plain enough, and are not difficult of apprehension. The uncertainty of the law arises in the doubt and uncertainty of the facts; and hence the doubt about which, of many rules, ought to govern. A man of genius, as you describe him, ought to become a good lawyer; he would excel in the investigation and presentation of facts; but none but a lawyer saturated with the spirit of the law until he comes to have a legal instinct, can with accuracy apply it.⁸

That Ranney had come to such conclusions at an early age is possible, but Riddle may have been projecting the thought of a mature and experienced lawyer and judge back in time onto a man in his twenties. The foundation of a few, unchanging principles, the importance of careful investigation and presentation of facts, and the recognition of the “spirit” of the law would all find a place in Ranney’s jurisprudence.

Giddings and Wade had a falling out in 1836, and Ranney soon replaced Giddings as Wade’s partner. The new firm remained intact for ten years despite Wade’s election to the Ohio Senate as a Whig and Ranney’s run for Congress as a Democrat. “The firm of Wade & Ranney had quite the lead in Ashtabula,” recalled Riddle years later. “The rapid rise of Mr. Ranney at the bar and the constant calls to Trumbull, were such as to warrant, require, the opening of an office at its shiretown—Warren.” Ranney moved back to Warren, “which soon brought the partners to the lead in that wealthy and important county also.” The partnership finally dissolved with Wade’s election to the court of common pleas in February 1847. Soon thereafter Ranney seems to have entered into a short-lived professional association with Ebenezer Spalding, a thirty-year-old graduate of Yale who had attended Harvard Law School for a time before moving to Ravenna, Ohio, in 1840. He then formed a more durable partnership with Charles S. Simonds and Darius Caldwell, both of whom had studied law in the office of Wade & Ranney.⁹

Ranney’s legal practice probably involved a great deal of commercial and property law. The growing population of the Western Reserve and thriving trade of Lake Erie ports produced lots of litigation. “It was not until comparatively recently that the admiralty laws of congress were extended to the great lakes,” wrote Riddle.

Their want in the meantime was supplied by legislation of the state, which permitted suits for supplies, wages, claims for damages, for all causes of action against a craft by name, in any county along the lake coast, in whose water service of process could be made, no matter where or by whom owned. Geauga had a port, Ashtabula had two. There was power in the courts to change the venue of marine cases, as of others. Shipping increased. Lake Erie was stormy. There were many cases for collisions, especially between steamers and sailers, as between steam vessels or sailers. Many of these became famous cases. They paid well.¹⁰

Wade served for two years as prosecuting attorney of Ashtabula County, so perhaps he brought a criminal defense practice to the firm after his term ended. The Panic of 1837 generated legal business, including “[j]udgments innumerable, followed by creditors’ bills, to uncover properties and reach equities.” Much of this business, though, was unremunerative. The new firm of Wade & Ranney “had its full share of this unsatisfactory business, procured its full share of never to be satisfied judgments.” The twenty reported cases between 1836 and 1851 in which Wade & Ranney or Ranney alone appeared as counsel before the Ohio Supreme Court involved a wide range of subjects.¹¹

On May 1, 1839, Ranney felt secure enough to marry. His bride, Adeline Warner, was the daughter of a lawyer, local politician, and soon-to-be judge of the Ashtabula County Court of Common Pleas. Between 1840 and 1859 the couple had six children, but only three survived into adulthood and one of those died at the age of thirty. One of the two remaining children, John Rufus, would practice law with his father. The other, Charles Percival, became a successful Cleveland businessman. Rufus and Adeline also raised Henry Clay Ranney, whose father, Rufus’s brother Elijah, died in 1836 when Henry was seven. H. C. Ranney achieved prominence as a lawyer and businessman.¹²

Ben Wade, Joshua Giddings, and their mentor, Elisha Whittlesey, were all Whigs, and from the name of Ranney’s nephew it appears that the Ranney clan included enthusiastic supporters of the National Republican and later Whig hero Henry Clay. The Whigs did not share the Democrats’ limited-government views. They believed that government had a positive role to play in the economic development of the nation and the moral improvement of individuals. Most Whigs had less sympathy for foreign immigrants, especially Catholics, than Democrats did, but they tended to be far less racist. By the 1830s the Western Reserve was well on its way to becoming a Whig stronghold and a hotbed of political abolitionism. But Rufus P. Ranney became a Democrat even before he could vote. Budding politicians typically began their public careers by engaging in civic activities. Ranney belonged to an independent militia company, helped found the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ashtabula County and the Jefferson Library Association, and was twice elected a trustee of the Village of Jefferson. In 1843, not yet thirty years old, he received the Democratic nomination for United States representative from Ohio’s newly created twentieth congressional district.¹³

The odd-year congressional election resulted from a law that gave Ohio two additional representatives and required that all House districts throughout the country be single-member districts. Ranney ran against Giddings and Ben Wade’s brother Edward, candidate of the antislavery Liberty Party, in Ohio’s new twentieth district, comprising Ashtabula, Cuyahoga, Geauga, and Lake Counties. History books and surviving newspapers reveal little about the issues discussed in the race, but the party platform adopted a few months later in anticipation of the gubernatorial and presidential elections shows where the Democrats stood on national issues: against a national bank, paper currency, a protective tariff, distribution of the federal surplus revenue to the states, and the assumption of state debts by the federal government; in favor of “immediate possession” of all of the Oregon Territory, then being disputed with Great Britain.¹⁴

Notwithstanding the existence of a soft-money, pro-banking wing of the Democratic Party, these were all standard Democratic positions. There is no reason to think that Ranney disagreed with any of them. But 1843 was a Whig year, and Ranney was running against a firmly ensconced Whig in a resolutely Whiggish part of the state. Whigs carried the state elections, and although Democrats won a majority of the congressional races, helped no doubt by gerrymandered districts, Ranney lost to Giddings in a landslide. Ranney pulled in just 35.13 percent of the vote, but that was a higher percentage than all but one of Giddings’s opponents polled in seven subsequent races, and that one received 35.17 percent.¹⁵

Ranney returned to Warren in Trumbull County in 1845. In September 1846 the Democratic convention for the nineteenth congressional district (Portage, Summit, and Trumbull Counties) unanimously nominated him for the U.S. House of Representatives. The convention adopted a platform containing the usual Democratic planks in favor of low tariffs and against special privileges for banks, but it also recognized two new realities: the Mexican War and the rise of political abolitionism. The convention approved a “vigorous prosecution” of the war and condemned “the course and conduct” of Giddings and Daniel R. Tilden, the nineteenth district’s Whig incumbent, “to embitter the North towards the South.” The sectional conflict, the convention declared, required “concession and compromise.” Ranney’s acceptance speech, reported the Portage Sentinel, reinforced “the abiding confidence reposed in him by the democracy of the district, and to his well established reputation as a man of the highest order of talent.”¹⁶

Ranney’s opponents were Whig John Crowell, another antislavery lawyer of New England provenance, and Liberty Party candidate John Hutchins. Ranney ran slightly ahead of his party in all three of the district’s counties, carrying Portage and Trumbull by small margins but losing overwhelmingly in Summit. In the district as a whole he lost to Crowell by fewer than four percentage points. It was the closest he would come to winning legislative office. The narrowness of the loss is misleading, however. Hutchins received more than 7 percent of the votes. Had he not been in the race, almost all of his support surely would have gone to Crowell.¹⁷

Ranney got one more shot at Congress in 1848, when, the Western Reserve Chronicle tartly remarked, the Democrats were “again deceived into the fallacious hope of his success at the ballot box.” As election day neared, the Democratic Portage Sentinel trumpeted the Democratic Party’s national principles, including the traditional opposition to a national bank, a protective tariff, and special legislation that bestowed “exclusive charters and privileges” on banks. But slavery trumped all the old issues, especially in the Western Reserve. The Sentinel listed popular sovereignty—“the rights of the people of States and Territories of framing their own institutions”—as a national Democratic principle, along with “[o]pposition to all principles of a sectional character” and “to all fanatics who seek the dissolution of the American Union.” (Fanatics, in the parlance of the time, meant abolitionists.) However, no one who advocated such positions stood any chance of election in the Reserve. Giddings had gone over to the new Free Soil Party. Crowell, running as a Whig, openly avowed his support for the free-soil movement.¹⁸

The Free Soil Party grew out of a huge antislavery convention held in Buffalo, New York, in August 1848. Disaffected Whigs and Democrats with divergent views on various issues, along with Liberty men looking for a more effective antislavery vehicle than their existing party, adopted a “national platform of freedom.” The platform declared that slavery’s existence depended solely on state law, which the federal government lacked the power to annul. The Free Soilers asserted, however, that the federal government had no authority to establish slavery, and that it had a duty “to relieve itself from all responsibility for the existence or continuance of slavery wherever that government possesses constitutional authority to legislate on that subject.” The platform had little to say about the plight of slaves in the South, but it evinced deep concern for the condition of white settlers in the western territories, including the lands acquired in the Mexican War. “Let the soil of our extensive domains be ever kept free, for the hardy pioneers of our own land, and the oppressed and banished of other lands, seeking homes of comfort and fields of enterprise in the new world,” the convention resolved. “[W]e demand freedom and established institutions for our brethren in Oregon, now exposed to hardships, peril and massacre, by the reckless hostility of the slave power to the establishment of free government for free territories, and not only for them, but for our new brethren in California and New Mexico.”¹⁹

On September 30 antislavery activist Benjamin F. Hoffman challenged Ranney to state publicly his responses to a series of questions: on the power of Congress over slavery in the territories and the District of Columbia; on his attitude toward the use of such power and toward the Free Soil platform; and on his preference in the approaching presidential election. Although Ranney did not directly answer Hoffman’s query about the Buffalo platform, most of his replies should have warmed the hearts of Free Soilers. “[O]ur flag should never float over another foot of slave territory,” Ranney declared. It was well-settled that slavery existed in a state by virtue of local law; neither Congress nor a territorial legislature had the power to establish it. More than a decade ago he had publicly called upon Congress to abolish slavery in the nation’s capital, and time had only strengthened his opinion. As for the newly acquired territories, Ranney had no doubt of the power of Congress to prohibit slavery there, and he was “in favor of and would support such prohibition.” Keeping New Mexico and California free was “due to humanity, to republican principles, to our character and interests as a people, to Mexico, and above all to the poor of our own and other lands, who shall go there to find homes for themselves and their families, and who would be beggared and disgraced by the contact of slave labor.” Furthermore, Ranney recommended that public lands in the West “be freely granted, in limited quantities, to actual settlers only. This . . . would secure them against monopolists and speculators of all kinds; and would settle them with a hardy and industrious population of freemen.” If elected, Ranney promised, he would “support all such measures as were calculated to maintain” his antislavery views, “taking care at all times not to overstep the limits of the National compact, or to encroach upon the reserved rights of the States.”²⁰

The one reply of Ranney’s that must have stuck in the craw of Free Soil men was his support of Democrat Lewis Cass for president. Cass, a former governor of the Michigan Territory, secretary of war, and minister to France, advocated popular sovereignty in the territories, which allowed for the possibility that some or all of the territories would embrace slavery. The Whigs had nominated Louisiana slaveholder and Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor, a man with no political experience or principles until he discovered in 1848 that he was “a Whig but not an ultra Whig.” The Free Soilers in Buffalo, abhorring both candidates, nominated former president Martin Van Buren. Crowell, a four-square supporter of the Buffalo platform, announced that he would not vote for either Cass or Taylor. Ranney knew that Van Buren could not win. Of the two major-party candidates he preferred Cass, a “tried Statesman” whose views were known and whose “education, habits, location, and associations must all incline him to detest Slavery.” A Democratic vote for Van Buren, Ranney declared, would simply help elect the political cipher and southern slaveholder Taylor. Of course, Whigs made the same argument in reverse. Addressing the Whigs of the Western Reserve, former New York governor and soon-to-be U.S. senator William H. Seward declared that “seceding Whigs can only give success to the party of Lewis Cass.”²¹

Democratic papers professed confidence in Ranney’s candidacy. One pointed out that Ranney was “the uncompromising opponent of every species of slavery.” But the Whig Western Reserve Chronicle mocked the Democrats’ persistence in nominating Ranney for Congress and, on the very day on which the paper published Ranney’s reply to Hoffman, it also printed the claim of Whig Party committeemen that Ranney denied the power of Congress to prohibit slavery in the territories and the District of Columbia. The Chronicle believed that the claim was unfounded, but it questioned the honesty of someone who professed to oppose the extension of slavery and yet supported Cass for president.²²

Ranney stood no chance of election. He lost all three counties, receiving 44 percent of the vote in the district as a whole, the same as the Democratic candidate for governor and a few points higher than Cass’s plurality in the three-way presidential race.²³ After three straight defeats, Ranney gave up the hopeless cause. The nineteenth district would not elect another Democratic congressman until the twentieth century. But Ranney’s defeat meant that he was available for election as a delegate to the state constitutional convention in 1849. His espousal there of Radical Democratic principles would bring him statewide prominence and a seat on the Ohio Supreme Court.