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,
