Читать книгу The Jacksonian Conservatism of Rufus P. Ranney - David M. Gold - Страница 11

TWO

The Constitutional Convention

Corporations and Citizens

IN 1864 the Union Pacific Railroad, chartered by Congress to build a railroad from Missouri to the Pacific, created the secretly affiliated Crédit Mobilier of America to serve as its construction contractor. Through bribes of cash and stock, Crédit Mobilier ensured that Congress appropriated money to pay inflated invoices, to the immense profit of Union Pacific’s shareholders. The scandal came to light during the 1872 presidential campaign, by which time Rufus P. Ranney had been decrying the chumminess between corporations and Congress for years. In a widely noted speech in 1867, Ranney lambasted the corruption of the Republican administration, claiming that “vast manufacturing interests,” their agents loaded with money with which to promote their clients’ interests, “clustered around the Government” demanding legislation for the benefit of the industrialists. The problem was hardly confined to the federal government. As Luke P. Poland, the antislavery Democrat-turned-Republican who chaired the House committee investigating the Crédit Mobilier affair, lamented, “gigantic corporations” had gained such control over state legislatures that in some states they had become “the ruling power.” Ranney’s concern about the baleful influence of corporations on both the political process and the economic well-being of individual citizens long predated the postbellum rise of huge industrial and railroad enterprises. It impelled some of his most dogged argumentation at Ohio’s constitutional convention in 1850–51, argumentation that cemented his reputation as a Radical Democrat.¹

After suffering his third straight defeat in pursuit of a seat in Congress, Ranney won a place in the forthcoming convention in a popular election of delegates. Ohio’s first constitution could be amended only by a convention, for which proponents of judicial reform and biennial legislative sessions had called in vain before 1846. In the late 1840s an accumulation of judicial backlogs, financial crises, partisan conflicts, and bribery and election scandals raised the pressure for a convention to an irresistible level.²

Whigs viewed the prospect of a convention with foreboding. Whig state representative Miller Pennington warned against “rush[ing] headlong upon the wild sea of experiment.” But Democrats denounced apprehensions about the “ghosts of anarchy and confusion and agrarianism and disorganization and civil strife.” If the people could not be trusted to address acknowledged defects in the constitution, then the American adventure in popular government must be deemed a failure. The Democratic Portage Sentinel listed the constitutional reforms demanded by Democrats: a state legislature that would meet only once every two years; popular election of judges and other state and county officers; a prohibition on the incurrence of state debt and the creation of banking corporations without popular approval; “equal distribution” of the “burdens of taxation,” with no special favors for stockholders of banks or other business corporations; judicial reform to make the operations of the legal system simpler and more expeditious; referral of all proposed legislation of a local or private character to a special county tribunal; and a general school law to ensure a good education for poor children, funded by “an equal tax upon all the property within the State.”³

Advocates of a convention finally succeeded in 1849, when partisan passions had reached a fever pitch and popular disenchantment with government seemed deeper than ever. The General Assembly set April 1, 1850, as the date for the election of convention delegates and created special election districts, with each district choosing a number of delegates equal to the number of its state representatives and senators. Trumbull and Geauga counties formed one district, with three delegates to be elected in common. The Whigs and Democrats of Trumbull County called for interparty cooperation to choose delegates on a nonpartisan basis. According to the free-soil Western Reserve Chronicle, the central committee of the Free Democrats, as Ohio’s Free Soilers called themselves, responded by sending a questionnaire on the issues to likely nominees, to which all but Ranney responded. The paper accused Ranney and other major-party politicians of striking a bargain by which Whigs Peter Hitchcock of Geauga and Jacob Perkins of Trumbull would be nominated along with Ranney and then of managing poorly attended county conventions to consummate the deal. In their lust for office, charged the Chronicle, the Whig and Democratic Party leaders had forfeited all principle. “Can the whigs support [Ranney’s] radical notions, which they believe he entertains? . . . Are the whigs really in love with Ranney, and the democrats in love with Hitchcock? If there are two politicians in the district who stand farther apart than Hitchcock and Ranney, we are unacquainted with them.” The Free Democrats, unwilling to participate in an “unholy alliance,” nominated three candidates of their own.⁴

In the election Ranney, then living in Trumbull, led all candidates by a wide margin in both counties. Two of the Free Democrats ran neck-and-neck with Hitchcock and Perkins in Geauga, but the combined Whig-Democratic slate comfortably outpolled the Free Democrats in Trumbull and secured all the district’s seats at the convention. In the state as a whole Democrats won a majority of the seats. A minority of Conservative Democrats occasionally combined with Whigs to stymie some of the more Radical proposals, but the document that emerged from the convention represented a victory for the mainstream of the Democratic Party.⁵

At thirty-six years of age Ranney was one of the younger convention delegates. Familiar to voters in his congressional district and to lawyers in the Western Reserve, he was probably little known in the rest of the state. His prominent role at the convention would give him a statewide reputation as a staunch Jacksonian Democrat. At the convention Ranney praised Andrew Jackson as “the greatest man of this age,” whose “great and glorious deeds” entitled him “to the highest niche in the temple of fame!” A disgusted adversary labeled Ranney “a good representative of the Locofoco, destructive agrarian party of this country.” The harshness of this characterization no doubt stemmed in part from Ranney’s tendency to antagonize men with whom he disagreed, including some fellow Democrats. Taking criticisms of his political positions as personal affronts, he sometimes responded with uncivil barbs. From the Whig point of view, the characterization had a firm basis in political principle. Ranney went into the convention as a known Radical.⁶

In an age when “liberal” was rarely used in political discourse, American commentators usually divided the political world into two groups, conservatives and radicals. There were, said the Whig American Review, two parties, the cautious, conservative Whigs and the rash, radical Democrats.⁷ There were genuine radicals in Jacksonian America: socialists and Transcendentalists who formed rural communes; workingmen who denounced private property and organized their own political parties; abolitionists who saw the Constitution as a pact with the devil and who would sooner sunder the Union than live within it with slavery. But the so-called Radicals of the Democratic Party were what would later be called classical liberals; they were, said the Democratic Review, simply more “ardent spirits” who sometimes “carr[ied] their ideas to the verge of extravagance”—a necessary “counterbalance [to] the opposite tendency to anti-liberal opinions.” They were followers of Jefferson, Madison, and “accredited writers upon political economy”; nothing they proposed, “when fairly understood, with proper allowances, should excite the apprehensions of the most sober-minded republican.” The Radicals’ creed, shared with all Democrats, was individual liberty, respect for the rights and property of all, and no “exclusive privileges” or “selfish monopolies.” Their notion of government was “[a]s little government as possible; that little emanating from, and controlled by, the people; and uniform in its application to all.” Even the Whig American Review called Radicals rather innocuously “the party of change and reform” and “a spur to the progress of the State and of society.”⁸

Whigs often used the term “radical” disparagingly. Just as Democrats routinely referred to Whigs as Federalists in order to tar them with what they saw as a discredited, antidemocratic political creed, Whigs frequently called the Democrats radicals as a way of deprecating their gravitas. But the Whigs also had a more pejorative term at their disposal: loco-foco. “Loco-foco” was the name of a match used by real New York City Radicals in 1834 to provide illumination at a Democratic meeting after party regulars turned off the gas lights. From then on stridently egalitarian, antibank Democrats were called loco-focos by their political adversaries. Whig editors lumped the loco-focos together with a variety of perceived social disorganizers: the radical equalizers and land redistributionists known as agrarians; the feminist and abolitionist social reformer Fanny Wright; and others whom they plainly regarded as dangerous and possibly crazy. In 1836, when Andrew Jackson’s chosen successor, Martin Van Buren, was running for president, a Whig newspaper in Maine expressed relief that Van Buren would “oppose the measures of the loco-focos, agrarians, and Fanny-Wright-men of our country.” As bad as Jacksonism was, declared the paper, it was “infinitely preferable to the disorganizing doctrines and dogmas of the infidels and anarchists who compose this lowest of all political parties.”⁹ What the paper could not foresee was that the Democratic Party would soon move in a Radical direction.

The Democrats, like the Whigs, consisted of a mélange of interests. Jackson’s war on the Second Bank of the United States and Van Buren’s subsequent adoption of laissez-faire economics and the independent treasury, which removed federal funds from private banks, pushed a significant minority of influential Democrats into electoral alliances with the Whigs. The Democratic Party split into Conservative and Radical camps. Radical hard-money, anticorporate, laissez-faire thought came to characterize the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Conservatives—the designation applied by themselves and their antagonists—made up the minority within the party.

Nevertheless, some historians have detected in Jacksonian Democracy a conservative, backward-looking disposition. The market-oriented and commercially minded Whigs, with their economic program of banks, tariffs, and publicly sponsored internal improvements, wrote Marvin Meyers, “spoke to the explicit hopes of Americans”; the Democrats, yearning for a restoration of the republican virtues of Jefferson’s time and a simple society that rested on the sturdy shoulders of the independent farmer, “addressed their diffuse fears and resentments.” According to Meyers, even the radical libertarian William Leggett shared this essentially conservative Democratic theme of restoration, an appeal to undo “the errors of the past generation” and recover “free trade and equal rights.” Similarly, Harry L. Watson writes that “Whigs advocated the rapid transformation of America’s economy and Democrats tended to resist it.” Jacksonian Democrats “embraced what they thought to be the cause of the many against the few, and battled for the restoration of better days.”¹⁰

But Ranney did not seem conservative to his fellow convention delegates. He made clear his Radical Democratic proclivities from the start. The statute that provided for the holding of the convention directed the delegates to secure for the state the copyright of the report of the debates and proceedings. Whig Henry Stanbery offered a resolution declaring it “inexpedient” for the convention to comply with the statute. Pursuant to the statute the convention had already provided for the daily publication of the debates in the Ohio State Journal and the Ohio Statesman. Once the debates were published in the papers, said Stanbery, it was too late to secure the copyright. Furthermore, there was “a higher object than profit” in the publication of the debates: to inform the people as fully as possible of proposed changes to the constitution. Ranney agreed with both points, but in the creedal anti-monopoly and laissez-faire language of Radical Democrats. He questioned whether the debates of public bodies could be “put under the screw of monopoly” and doubted that the state would profit from sales of the books. “We have already tried our hands in several schemes for making money, in constructing roads and canals, besides a variety of other things, in all of which the State has failed to prosper” (1:18, 60–61, 83–84).¹¹

About a month into the convention, Ranney set forth his political principles in arguments over the report of the committee on nonbanking corporations. Many Democratic delegates displayed deep hostility toward business corporations. Animosity toward banks had been a staple of mainstream Democratic rhetoric since the 1830s. Other corporations, especially those created for the purpose of constructing roads, bridges, or canals, tended to be seen as quasi-governmental in nature and thus attracted less criticism, at least before the Panic of 1837. The General Assembly spent much of its time before 1850 enacting or amending special laws that granted corporate charters. The charters of business corporations often included “special privileges,” such as the power to take property through eminent domain, the limitation of shareholder liability for corporate debts, or freedom from competition. After the Panic of 1837 and the heavy losses sustained by the state and by local governments that had invested in corporate enterprises, many Democrats developed a burning antipathy toward corporations. At the constitutional convention, they strove to put limits on corporate power into Ohio’s fundamental law.¹²

The debates over business corporations occupied much of the convention’s time. Ranney spoke out forcefully and with his wonted acerbity on two significant issues, the liability of shareholders for corporate debts and the power of the legislature to repeal corporate charters. Jacksonian Democrats had long appealed for support to independent artisans and shopkeepers whom corporate enterprise threatened to destroy. In 1835 Connecticut Democrat Gideon Welles warned that “[t]he unobtrusive work-shop of the Mechanic, the residence of freedom, is beginning to be abandoned, because he cannot compete with incorporated wealth.” Corporations, Welles continued, were “destroying that equality of condition, which is the parent of independence.” Individuals could not hope to compete with capital “entering the field, under privileged laws.” Less than two years after the Ohio constitutional convention adjourned, the Democratic United States Review complained that the incorporation of manufacturing companies had concentrated capital and labor in a few hands, whereas previously these resources had been “diffused among all classes, and contributed equally to the prosperity of millions of industrious people,” who were “always improving their condition.” Corporations had “banished the loom and the spindle from the fireside,” driven housewives and mothers out of their homes and into factories, and turned independent mechanics, previously the “sole masters of their time and of themselves, into slaves of the steam-engine and spinning-jenny.”¹³

Ranney declared that he had no objections to corporations created for “proper purposes,” by which he seems to have meant the construction of “public improvements”—he himself had recently been among the incorporators of two plank road companies—but he feared that “their introduction into all the departments of ordinary business” would “depress private enterprise, and break down men of small capital.” Without protection from the aggrandizement of corporations, said Ranney, mechanics (artisans) and small businessmen would soon be compelled “to find employment under the overshadowing power and influence of associated wealth.” The growing tendency “to engulph every branch of business in the vortex of corporations” had to be resisted with “guaranties against their frauds.” Two of the most important of these guarantees, he insisted, were shareholder liability and the right of repeal. Writing these two protections into the constitution would go a long way toward making “[e]qual rights to all, exclusive privileges to none . . . an operative, living principle” (1:370).¹⁴

The first report of the committee on corporations other than banks proposed changing the method of creating corporations. The General Assembly would no longer be able to grant corporate charters by special acts of incorporation. Instead, it would have the authority to pass general laws under which any group of individuals could set up a corporation. However, all such general laws might “be altered from time to time, or repealed.” Upon repeal, “the property or credits legally acquired” by the corporation would “rest in the individual corporators, subject to the liability of the corporation.” The liability of each incorporator or shareholder would never be less than the amount of stock subscribed by that individual. Despite his concern that general incorporation laws would encourage the proliferation of corporations, Ranney reluctantly assented to the idea because they would eliminate legislatively granted monopolies and allow anyone who wanted to form a corporation to compete on an equal basis (1:260, 369–70). But he believed these provisions to be inadequate protections against corporate rapacity.

On its face the clause establishing minimum shareholder liability allowed the legislature to saddle shareholders with full liability for corporate obligations. Critics of the clause, though, took it for granted that the minimum would prove to be a maximum.¹⁵ And if a shareholder’s maximum liability were the amount of his investment, a corporation could run up enormous debts, beyond the value of its outstanding shares, while those individuals who owned the corporation would escape responsibility to the creditors. (The owners were not the thousands or millions of anonymous shareholders who invest in giant corporations today; they were usually a relative handful of men personally involved in the operations or general oversight of the business.¹⁶) Ranney moved to amend the report to make each shareholder liable for double the amount of his or her shares, and, in the case of a business corporation that was not created “to construct public improvements,” the stockholders would be “individually liable for all the debts and liabilities” of the corporation (1:369).¹⁷

Ranney thought it outrageous that every individual or group of individuals associated for business purposes except those with a charter was fully liable for debts incurred. A merchant who lost a ship or a farmer whose crops were ruined by drought had no exemption from liability, he observed, but a shareholder had the shield of corporate privilege. The shareholders might have taken five times the amount of their stock subscriptions in dividends or profits, but once their stock was gone, their liability was gone. They could “revel in wealth and luxury, while hunger and destitution were grinding in the dust those who had labored for the corporation.” Ranney believed it useless to leave to the General Assembly the matter of liability beyond the amount of the stock subscribed. The shareholders of the numerous corporations formed under general corporation laws would all seek to avoid liability. “They will be in the ear of every member before he comes here, and in his bed after he comes here, if necessary to effect their ends. They will be able to form the most powerful combinations, and raise any amount of money required for corruption purposes.” There would be no hope for “legislative purity” or “honest principle” (1:371).

Members of both parties questioned whether any capitalist would invest in a corporation without knowing the limits of his liability. Democrat Edward Archbold even denied that individual liability, as proposed by Ranney, was sound Democratic doctrine. “The principle, that a man worth $2000, with a family of 7 or 8 children, who wishes to contribute 50 or 100 dollars, towards the construction of a turnpike, or a plank road, shall thereby put to hazard his whole property, is not Democratic nor is the principle that he shall know the amount of his own engagements, and be liable to that extent only, Aristocratic,” Archbold maintained. The question really boiled down to one of expediency. Archbold recommended that the extent of shareholder liability for corporate debts be left to the people’s representatives to determine in the light of changing circumstances and experience (1:373, 387).

Ranney emphatically rejected these contentions. The principle of equal rights, he declared, “lies at the foundation of our institutions,” and he would not sacrifice principle to expediency. (Ranney conceded, though, that in his amendment he had limited liability in cases of public improvements to double the shareholders’ stake “more from the suggestions of others, than the dictates of my own understanding.”) Moreover, no such sacrifice was necessary. Fear of unlimited liability had never prevented men from engaging in enterprises they thought would produce a profit; if a road was worth building, it would be built and pay for itself (1:405).

When Ranney’s amendment finally came to a vote, the committee of the whole accepted the first part, which established minimum shareholder liability at twice the amount of stock subscribed, by a vote of 43 to 33. However, the delegates overwhelmingly rejected the portion that subjected to unlimited liability the shareholders of corporations other than those created to construct public improvements. Just before the vote was taken, Whig Benjamin Stanton noted that the standing committee had considered the matter and had been unable clearly to establish a principle by which to distinguish the different types of corporations. The amendment as adopted by the committee of the whole remained in the constitution (1:429).¹⁸

Besides trying to increase shareholder liability, Ranney sought to limit corporate privilege by enabling the General Assembly not just to repeal general incorporation laws but to revoke any corporate charter obtained under such laws. The committee of the whole agreed to the principle. Section 35 of the proposed legislative article prohibited the General Assembly from passing retroactive laws. The committee of the whole, with Ranney’s support, amended the section to allow the lawmakers to amend or repeal any corporate charter granted by any previous General Assembly (1:363, 282; 2:165).

Stanton found it incongruous that a provision forbidding the enactment of retroactive laws allowed the legislature to amend or repeal legally obtained corporate charters. Moreover, he believed that a charter constituted a contract between the incorporators and the state and that a repeal would violate the constitutional prohibition against impairing the obligations of contract. To protect rights that had vested under law before the passage of a repealing act, the convention, on Stanton’s motion, amended Section 35 to say that upon repeal, “the title to property and credits legally acquired under any former law, shall not be affected by such repeal” (2:165–66).

The question now before the delegates was whether to adopt the latest version of Section 35 as part of the report of the committee on the legislature. A motion to reconsider the vote on Stanton’s amendment passed, whereupon Elijah Vance moved to amend Stanton’s amendment to read that on repeal of a corporate charter, “the property or credits legally acquired by any corporation, or holder of a franchise, shall rest in the individual [corporators], subject to the liability of the corporation.” In the ensuing debate delegates argued over whether a corporate franchise was property, a contract, both, or neither. Ranney characterized charters as property—and property, he noted, could be seized by the state in case of public necessity, provided the state compensated the owner. Adverting to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Charles River Bridge case, Ranney declared that the right of the state was “paramount to every private right.” He voted against Vance’s amendment to Stanton’s amendment, then against Stanton’s amendment, and then, finally, in favor of the amendment (as amended by Vance and Stanton) made by the committee of the whole. He came out on the short end of three close votes. In other words, the attempt to give the General Assembly the explicit power to repeal corporate charters had failed (2:167, 169, 173–75).

But the fight was not yet over. Three days later Samuel Humphreville returned to Section 35, moving that it be amended to give the General Assembly the authority to repeal any corporate charter upon “just and equitable terms,” as determined by the lawmakers. Ranney moved to add language to specify that the right of repeal applied to existing as well as future charters. His purpose, he said, was to guard against court decisions, “founded in error,” holding corporate charters to be contracts that enjoyed constitutional protection from impairment by the legislature. The chief such erroneous decision was Dartmouth College v. Woodward, rendered by the United States Supreme Court in 1819. In the face of arguments that the Supreme Court had already decided the issue, Ranney’s amendment to Humphreville’s amendment passed. But the convention then rejected Humphreville’s amendment by a two-vote margin (2:185, 188–89, 191, 210).

Proponents of the right of repeal kept trying. Vance sought to amend Section 35 to provide that all acts granting corporate franchises could be amended or repealed “upon such terms and conditions pertaining to the inviolability of private property, as is provided in other cases in this Constitution”—in other words, upon payment of compensation as in cases of eminent domain. Ranney favored a declaration of the General Assembly’s power to repeal corporate charters, a power he believed the legislature possessed even without such a declaration, but he objected to the compensation requirement. Vance’s amendment, said Ranney, would require the state to pay a corporation for its franchise regardless of how much harm the corporation had caused to the community. (There followed a testy exchange between Ranney on one side and Archbold and Lucius Case on the other as to whether Ranney’s position was that of “the highwayman.”) Ranney then discoursed on the distinction between corporate franchises and property, throwing in along the way further remarks on the dangers of corporations and the injustice of “exclusive privileges.” The state, he said, was bound to protect the natural right to acquire and enjoy property, but it could not create property. A corporate franchise was nothing more than a privilege granted by the legislature to operate in association as an artificial person. The legislature could give it or take it away as the public good required (2:242, 249, 250–51).

After protracted arguments on the legal nature of corporate franchises, on the debaters’ political partisanship and fidelity to party principle, and on the allegedly biased newspaper reports of the proceedings, the convention decided to recommit the report on the legislative department, along with pending amendments, to the standing committee (2:286–87).

Ranney’s latest arguments over the right of repeal involved him in a paradox and a contradiction. In debates on other issues he had expressed deep distrust of the legislature. Now he insisted that the General Assembly, the “people’s representatives,” could be trusted to do right in determining whether the public good required the repeal of a corporate charter. Stanbery made a point of the apparent conflict (2:251, 264). But Ranney was not inconsistent in this instance. He sincerely opposed the concentration of power in the General Assembly, but he opposed concentrated power in private hands as well. For all its shortcomings, the legislature could still serve as a counterweight to associated wealth.

Ranney’s insistence that a corporate franchise was not property, however, flatly contradicted his prior statements. The subject came up again during debate over the second report of the committee on the legislative department. In that report the controversial section on corporate franchises, Section 33, read: “The General Assembly shall have no power to pass retroactive laws, or laws impairing the obligation of contracts, provided, however that acts of incorporation, or corporate franchises, privileges or immunities, whether granted by a general or special law, shall never be deemed contracts or irrepealable” (2:319).

The debate resumed with all its former fury. Tempers flared. On February 5 Case declared that any lawyer who, after reading Blackstone, could assert that a franchise was not property was “unfit to belong to the profession.” Case quoted “a very eminent lawyer” to the effect that any attorney who made such an argument “must be either a fool or a knave.” Although Case claimed not to endorse such language, and went on to quote Ranney and other Democrats who had stated during the debates that franchises were indeed property, his meaning could not be missed (2:487–88).

Ranney reacted in characteristic fashion. He denied ever asserting that a franchise was property (although he later conceded that his remarks had been reported correctly) and insisted that if he had uttered such words Case was now taking them out of context. Indeed, Ranney quoted numerous instances in which he had made clear his position that corporate franchises were not property and insisted that no one at the convention could possibly have misunderstood his position. He castigated Case for referring to him, however obliquely, as “a knave or a fool” and retorted that “[i]f a man will make a blackguard of himself, he must not complain if he is treated as such.” Along the way he picked a fight with fellow Democrat William Hawkins over an innocuous remark Hawkins had made in an attempt to excuse Ranney’s apparent inconsistency (2:488, 492–93, 596).

On February 11 the committee of the whole punted, informally passing Section 33 with the understanding that the fight would continue in convention. Two days later Case reignited the personal feud. Having missed Ranney’s “blackguard” comment in the heat of the debate on February 5, he now challenged Ranney to declare whether or not it was meant to apply to him. His honor affronted, Case would not accede to the requests of other delegates to let the matter go. Ranney refused to be drawn again into “this small potatoe business,” but Case announced that if Ranney “intended to apply to me that dirty word ‘blackguard,’ I hurl it back into his teeth—yes, I cram that filthy word down his very throat, to the place from whence it came—filth to filth.” Case sat down to cries of “order, order,” and the convention at last proceeded with its business (2:569, 595–96).

For the rest of the convention Ranney strove valiantly but futilely to get an explicit, unrestricted right of repeal into the constitution. He lost the key battle when the delegates voted to strike the proviso from Section 33 and rejected attempts to replace it with language that Ranney and his friends considered more suitable. After Section 33 was ordered engrossed, the struggle for repeal shifted to the debate on the report of the committee on nonbanking corporations. Ranney let others carry the water in that phase of the fight, but he tried again in a debate on the bill of rights, proposing to include an express right of the General Assembly “to alter, repeal or abolish any law hereafter created by it” (2:605–33, 619, 621–22, 644–50, 659–62, 690–92). Ranney lost this round, too. He would have to be satisfied with a guarantee that “no special privileges or immunities shall ever be granted, that may not be altered, revoked, or repealed by the General Assembly,” along with the suggestion by Justice Story in the Dartmouth College case that any corporate charter could be made repealable by the reservation of the right of repeal in the charter itself.¹⁹

Ranney’s anticorporation animus showed up in the debates on other issues. He won a victory against tax exemptions for corporations. The report of the committee on corporations provided that the property of corporations would “forever be subject to taxation, the same as the property of individuals.” Ranney moved that the section be amended to apply to corporations already in existence as well as those formed in the future. Notwithstanding the fact that the amendment might effectually modify the charters of corporations already in existence, a majority of the delegates agreed that the state could not barter away any aspect of its sovereignty, including the power of taxation. The amendment passed by a comfortable margin and became part of the constitution. But Ranney’s attempt to limit the legislature’s power to grant rights of way to corporations to cases “where the public good imperatively demands it” failed. Charles Reemelin complained that Ranney’s proposal would reintroduce special legislation, allowing the General Assembly to decide on a case-by-case basis whether to grant a valuable right. In classic Jacksonian language, Reemelin insisted that legislative acts “should be like the dews of heaven, capable of being enjoyed by all.” The General Assembly, he maintained, should no longer be “a dispenser of unequal laws, of special privileges and immunities.” Ranney did not press the point (1:260; 2:665–66, 674–75).²⁰

In his arguments against corporate privilege Ranney stood up for the ordinary citizen. Concern for the poor animated his remarks on other aspects of the convention’s work. He supported a motion to specify in the constitution an amount of money that the General Assembly must raise for the support of the common school fund. Other delegates who agreed that the General Assembly should be required to provide funding for the support of a “thorough and efficient system of common schools” objected to enshrining the extent of that support, which Simeon Nash labeled a “mere [question] of policy,” in the constitution. But Ranney, who had struggled to acquire an education, wanted to ensure that the legislature would “establish a system of education that shall reach every poor, every ragged, every destitute child in the State.” When the committee on finance and taxation proposed that the legislature be prohibited from levying poll taxes for county or state purposes, as under the original constitution, Ranney urged a blanket prohibition. Under the existing law every citizen had to pay an annual tax of two dollars for highway maintenance or perform a certain amount of labor on the roads. The committee argued that the existing constitutional provision had worked well and generated no complaints, but Ranney demanded consistency of principle. If poll taxes were “grievous and oppressive,” as the constitution declared, they ought to be outlawed for all purposes. To require a young man, living away from home, working by the month, with no spare time, to be under the same obligation as a rich person, was simply unjust. In both cases, the schools and the poll tax, Ranney failed to sway the majority of delegates (2:13, 16, 34–35).

Ranney’s sympathy for the poor affected his attitude toward the criminal justice system, too. It was the one issue that elicited religious sentiment from him. He supported Reemelin’s proposal that inmates of the state penitentiary be paid for their labor while confined. Ranney believed that reformation of the criminal was one of the chief objectives of punishment. To deny the offender his wages deprived him of “all hope of reformation” and “consigned him to irretrievable ignominy.” If the prisoner had a family, “his wife and children are beggared, and pining and starving from want.” Ranney did not fear being labeled a friend of rascals, for “the greatest of all philanthropists” had been reproached as “a friend of publicans and sinners.” “[H]owever poor, degraded, and down-trodden the citizen may be,” declared Ranney, there remained the “great rule of justice, that, to the laborer belongs the proceeds of his labor.” The convention rejected Reemelin’s amendment, as Ranney knew it would (1:542, 545–46, 549).

Ranney argued with equal earnestness, and equal futility, for a constitutional prohibition of capital punishment. He again insisted that one of the objects of punishment was reformation of the criminal; the death penalty left nothing to reform. Those who would maintain that murderers were beyond reformation, he said, would “deny the power of the divine arrangement to reform the heart of man.” Nor was vengeance a legitimate purpose of punishment, because vengeance belonged to God. He conceded that capital punishment might deter would-be offenders, but he “held human life more sacred.” Ranney saw no need for the state to follow a murderer’s bad example. He had witnessed one hanging, and that had been enough—the worst possible spectacle from which to learn a moral lesson (2:23).

As the official record of the convention’s proceedings reveals, Ranney was one of the most active and vocal members of the convention. Given the scope of delegates’ duties and the division of labor among numerous committees, neither Ranney nor anyone else could have played a leading role in every area. In light of the havoc that temperance and slavery were already wreaking on the existing party system of Whigs and Democrats, Ranney’s active involvement with those issues would have been enlightening. However, he had little to say about them. He proclaimed himself a supporter of temperance but questioned the wisdom of prohibiting the sale of liquor in the constitution. The success of the temperance movement, said Ranney, depended upon moral suasion, not legal force (2:875–76). Ranney may have taken this position in all sincerity—it did, after all, accord with the general Democratic view that “there are some subjects unfit for legislation, and among them is ‘what we shall eat and what we shall drink and wherewithal we shall be clothed’”—but it also conveniently allowed him to sympathize with a popular movement without alienating important political constituencies.²¹

Slavery was not an issue at the convention; it had always been outlawed in Ohio. But the convention did confront ancillary matters of political and legal rights for blacks. The General Assembly had repealed most of the notorious “blacks laws” in 1849 as part of a political deal between Free Soil and Democratic legislators, but Ohio’s blacks still did not have the right to vote. At the convention the committee on the elective franchise, following the precedent of the 1802 constitution, recommended that suffrage be limited to whites. On Saturday, February 8, 1851, the delegates took up Humphreville’s motion to eliminate the racial restriction. When they reconvened at 3:00 p.m. following a recess, Ranney joined in defeating a motion to adjourn. But when the convention turned to Humphreville’s motion, Ranney took no part in the debate and did not vote. Nor did he ask on Monday, as did several other delegates who missed the vote, to have his vote recorded (2:352, 550, 554–56).²²

There is no way of knowing whether Ranney deliberately avoided putting himself on record or missed the vote for some other reason, but he seems to have stayed away from racial issues. When the question of desegregating the public schools arose, he took little or no part in the debates,²³ but his votes on motions put him in a minority of antisegregation delegates. The report of the standing committee on education required the legislature to provide for a system of free common schools for all children in Ohio. Committee member Otway Curry drew up a minority report, Section 4 of which would have prevented blacks and mulattoes from attending white schools “unless by common consent.” The committee of the whole decided to recommit the majority report to the education committee. Some members wanted to instruct the education committee to incorporate Curry’s Section 4. Ranney voted against striking the phrase “unless by common consent” from the section, which would have left a blanket prohibition of racial mixing, and for a motion to delete the whole proviso dealing with black and mulatto children. In both cases he was on the short end of a lopsided vote. However, the committee of the whole decided to recommit the report without instructions, and the standing committee’s second report omitted all mention of race (1:693–94, 2:18–19, 663).²⁴

On September 18, 1850, during the five-month break between the first and second sessions of the convention, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act as part of the Compromise of 1850. The party leaders who shepherded the compromise through Congress hoped that the measures would end the agitation over slavery and with it the threat of disunion. The act required all citizens to cooperate in its enforcement. It authorized the appointment of federal commissioners to hear claims to the ownership of alleged runaways. Blacks who were seized and hauled before a commissioner had no right of habeas corpus, no right to testify, and no right to trial by jury. The commissioner could order the rendition of the captive upon nothing more than an affidavit sworn to before an officer of a southern court attesting to the claimant’s ownership of the alleged fugitive.²⁵

At public rallies abolitionists and other opponents of slavery attacked the Fugitive Slave Act for depriving seized blacks of their constitutional rights and encroaching upon the rights of the states. The Mahoning Index reported that, at an “indignation meeting” in Canfield, Ranney joined his old law partner Wade and other prominent Whigs, Democrats, and Free Soilers in denouncing the law. Ranney, said the paper, “exposed not only the INFAMOUS MANNER in which the bill was rushed through the House under the gag rule of the southern and infamous oppression but in SCATHING AND BLISTERING CURSES denounced the whole bill as UNCONSTITUTIONAL (!) and the MISCREANTS who assisted in its inception and passage by their votes, or fleeing when God and their duty required their aid in behalf of liberty and the rights of blood and life, as unworthy of our regard—as UNWORTHY OF OUR SUFFRAGE—now or hereafter!”²⁶

During Ranney’s gubernatorial campaign of 1859, Ranney would deny the Index’s version of events, and the Ohio Statesman would condemn it as a pack of lies.²⁷ But that was in the future, when Ranney was the conservative candidate for governor. At the convention, he burnished his Radical image not only with attacks on corporate privilege and advocacy for society’s underdogs but also, as we will see in the next chapter, with populist notions regarding the judicial system and future amendment of the constitution.