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.
THREE
The Constitutional Convention
Government
THE FIGHT at the constitutional convention by Democrats such as Ranney and Reemelin to end legislative grants of “special and exclusive privileges” revealed the Radicals’ fundamental distrust of government. Anxious to secure equal rights and equal liberty for all—or at least all white males—they loathed to give to a legislature that was susceptible to corruption by the rich and powerful the authority to do much of anything. Early in the convention proceedings Reemelin predicted that the convention would produce “a General Assembly reduced materially in power and the scope of duties, in all its arrangements; and we shall thus take away from them as much as possible all temptation to the abuse of their powers” (1:174).
Ranney insisted on severe limits to legislative discretion. “I am practically in favor of the doctrine of democracy—using the word in no party sense,” he declared.
