Men such as Ranney remained devoted to the Jeffersonian tradition of strict construction of the government’s constitutional powers, to states’ rights, and to a government close to the people. Ranney went from radical to conservative without changing his principles or his party.24
It was Ranney’s conservatism that drove him to participate in a splinter reform movement in the early 1870s, a movement aimed at ending corruption in public offices and reinvigorating the limited government ideals of an earlier age. By 1875 Ranney was back in the party’s good graces, chairing the Democratic state convention, but he never again ran for elective office. Instead he concentrated on his law practice and the development of the legal profession, associating with legal and business elites, representing railroads and Standard Oil, and presiding over the state bar association. How the Radical Jacksonian Democrat came to be one of John D. Rockefeller’s favorite attorneys, and what that turn of events meant for Democratic ideology, are intriguing questions. The answers must be speculative because Ranney stepped back from the limelight and left little record of his political or legal thought in the last fifteen years of his life. But the attitudes of Ranney and some other old Jacksonian jurists in the Gilded Age showed a remarkable continuity with the positions of their younger, radical selves in favor of limited government, laissez-faire economics, general incorporation laws, and, at least in Ranney’s case, judicial review, legal science, and an educated bar.
This book, a study of Ranney’s public life, is based on newspaper reports, the published proceedings of the Ohio constitutional convention, the reported opinions of the Ohio Supreme Court, and the records of the Ohio State Bar Association. Finding out about Ranney’s personal life or his behind-the-scenes role in law or politics is impossible. No cache of Ranney correspondence appears to have survived. Ranney may not have been a prolific letter-writer, and he apparently did not keep letters he received. When an autograph collector asked him for a letter signed by Ranney’s one-time law partner Benjamin F. Wade, Ranney replied that he had seen no reason to keep Wade’s letters because they did not relate to business. “Besides,” he continued, “I have several times destroyed piles of papers that were no longer of value to any one, to get handily at those which were.”25 Searches of the usual sources have turned up almost nothing. Newspapers from Portage, Ashtabula, and Trumbull Counties, where Ranney lived before 1850, have survived incomplete, and those were mostly Whig papers that gave little space to Democrats. Ranney apparently never set down his ideas on politics or law in systematic fashion. He wrote no books, and the indexes to nineteenth-century law journals contain no entries for him as an author, although he was for a few months a department editor of a short-lived legal periodical.26 But even without documentation of Ranney’s inner world, a study of Ranney’s long and noteworthy public life reveals the durability of the relationship between Jacksonian political and legal thought and the Jacksonian contribution to American conservatism in the second half of the nineteenth century.
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
