The Jacksonian Conservatism of Rufus P. Ranney. David M. Gold
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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. While the people had to delegate some power, political wisdom dictated that they delegate as little power as possible, because all delegated power was liable to abuse. The adoption of a constitution was “the act of the great democracy—the people themselves prescribing their own rule of civil action.” But leaving fundamental laws to the legislature meant “placing the exercise of power one step further from the source; and the people possess no direct power to correct the decision” (2:49).
For all his reliance on the “people,” though, Ranney was no more willing to trust them with power than he was to trust the legislators. Editor John O’Sullivan raised this basic question of Jacksonian majoritarianism in the first issue of the Democratic Review in 1837. O’Sullivan conceded the plausibility of the antidemocratic argument that “[m]ajorities are often as liable to error of opinion, and not always free from a similar proneness to selfish abuse of power, as minorities.” “A strong and active democratic government,” he averred, “is an evil, differing only in degree and mode of operation, and not in nature, from a strong despotism.” Because majorities could no more be trusted with power than minorities, the “best government is that which governs least.”1
At the Ohio constitutional convention the committee on public debt and public works incorporated this principle into its report by prohibiting the General Assembly from authorizing the state or any local government, “by vote of its citizens of otherwise,” to be a stockholder in a private corporation or to aid private enterprise in other ways. Some Democrats objected to the ban as undemocratic. One, proclaiming “vox populi, vox Dei,” demanded that the voters be allowed to decide whether the state should incur debt to finance internal improvements. Another contended that the prosperous portion of the state, having “waxed fat at the public crib,” had no right to deny “their poorer, because less favored, fellow citizens, the humble privilege of helping themselves with their own money.” But Ranney regarded the government’s power of taxation as a “dangerous power” by which the “proceeds of the industry of the citizens” are put “at the mercy of the State.” He denied the right of the majority to tax the minority for any purpose “beyond the support of government” and the execution of the laws. When a delegate moved to amend the committee’s report to allow local governments to vote funds for the completion of works already begun, Ranney claimed that the amendment “amounted to about this: that where the minority has been robbed once, it shall be proper to do it again” (1:292, 2:123, 2:308, 1:530, 2:215–16, 2:310–11).
From the widespread distrust of the General Assembly arose many issues related to the legislature: annual versus biennial sessions, the manner of apportionment, the executive veto, legislative power over corporate charters, and so on. Ranney’s positions marked him as a consistent and outspoken Radical Democrat, wary of government and very aware that the people were the fount of political authority. As one of his adversaries observed, “it is pretty difficult to get ahead of him in democracy” (2:430).
Ranney opposed annual legislative sessions because the greatest legislative evil was “too much legislation and the instability of the law”; or, as Ranney also said, echoing a popular phrase of the day, “the world was governed too much” (1:174–79; 2:145). He resisted proposals to extend state senate terms from two to four years because over such a long period of time, especially in a rapidly growing and changing state, the views of the people and their delegates might diverge (1:175, 179; 2:145). He wanted to fix the method of legislative apportionment in the constitution, leaving no