The Jacksonian Conservatism of Rufus P. Ranney. David M. Gold
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discovered, is founded in a few principles of obvious right. Their application to cases is artificial. The law, for its own wise purposes, takes care of itself; of its own force, it embraces everything, investigates everything, construes itself, and enforces itself, as the sole power in the premises. Its rules in the text-books read plain enough, and are not difficult of apprehension. The uncertainty of the law arises in the doubt and uncertainty of the facts; and hence the doubt about which, of many rules, ought to govern. A man of genius, as you describe him, ought to become a good lawyer; he would excel in the investigation and presentation of facts; but none but a lawyer saturated with the spirit of the law until he comes to have a legal instinct, can with accuracy apply it.8
That Ranney had come to such conclusions at an early age is possible, but Riddle may have been projecting the thought of a mature and experienced lawyer and judge back in time onto a man in his twenties. The foundation of a few, unchanging principles, the importance of careful investigation and presentation of facts, and the recognition of the “spirit” of the law would all find a place in Ranney’s jurisprudence.
Giddings and Wade had a falling out in 1836, and Ranney soon replaced Giddings as Wade’s partner. The new firm remained intact for ten years despite Wade’s election to the Ohio Senate as a Whig and Ranney’s run for Congress as a Democrat. “The firm of Wade & Ranney had quite the lead in Ashtabula,” recalled Riddle years later. “The rapid rise of Mr. Ranney at the bar and the constant calls to Trumbull, were such as to warrant, require, the opening of an office at its shiretown—Warren.” Ranney moved back to Warren, “which soon brought the partners to the lead in that wealthy and important county also.” The partnership finally dissolved with Wade’s election to the court of common pleas in February 1847. Soon thereafter Ranney seems to have entered into a short-lived professional association with Ebenezer Spalding, a thirty-year-old graduate of Yale who had attended Harvard Law School for a time before moving to Ravenna, Ohio, in 1840. He then formed a more durable partnership with Charles S. Simonds and Darius Caldwell, both of whom had studied law in the office of Wade & Ranney.9
Ranney’s legal practice probably involved a great deal of commercial and property law. The growing population of the Western Reserve and thriving trade of Lake Erie ports produced lots of litigation. “It was not until comparatively recently that the admiralty laws of congress were extended to the great lakes,” wrote Riddle.
Their want in the meantime was supplied by legislation of the state, which permitted suits for supplies, wages, claims for damages, for all causes of action against a craft by name, in any county along the lake coast, in whose water service of process could be made, no matter where or by whom owned. Geauga had a port, Ashtabula had two. There was power in the courts to change the venue of marine cases, as of others. Shipping increased. Lake Erie was stormy. There were many cases for collisions, especially between steamers and sailers, as between steam vessels or sailers. Many of these became famous cases. They paid well.10
Wade served for two years as prosecuting attorney of Ashtabula County, so perhaps he brought a criminal defense practice to the firm after his term ended. The Panic of 1837 generated legal business, including “[j]udgments innumerable, followed by creditors’ bills, to uncover properties and reach equities.” Much of this business, though, was unremunerative. The new firm of Wade & Ranney “had its full share of this unsatisfactory business, procured its full share of never to be satisfied judgments.” The twenty reported cases between 1836 and 1851 in which Wade & Ranney or Ranney alone appeared as counsel before the Ohio Supreme Court involved a wide range of subjects.11
On May 1, 1839, Ranney felt secure enough to marry. His bride, Adeline Warner, was the daughter of a lawyer, local politician, and soon-to-be judge of the Ashtabula County Court of Common Pleas. Between 1840 and 1859 the couple had six children, but only three survived into adulthood and one of those died at the age of thirty. One of the two remaining children, John Rufus, would practice law with his father. The other, Charles Percival, became a successful Cleveland businessman. Rufus and Adeline also raised Henry Clay Ranney, whose father, Rufus’s brother Elijah, died in 1836 when Henry was seven. H. C. Ranney achieved prominence as a lawyer and businessman.12
Ben Wade, Joshua Giddings, and their mentor, Elisha Whittlesey, were all Whigs, and from the name of Ranney’s nephew it appears that the Ranney clan included enthusiastic supporters of the National Republican and later Whig hero Henry Clay. The Whigs did not share the Democrats’ limited-government views. They believed that government had a positive role to play in the economic development of the nation and the moral improvement of individuals. Most Whigs had less sympathy for foreign immigrants, especially Catholics, than Democrats did, but they tended to be far less racist. By the 1830s the Western Reserve was well on its way to becoming a Whig stronghold and a hotbed of political abolitionism. But Rufus P. Ranney became a Democrat even before he could vote. Budding politicians typically began their public careers by engaging in civic activities. Ranney belonged to an independent militia company, helped found the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ashtabula County and the Jefferson Library Association, and was twice elected a trustee of the Village of Jefferson. In 1843, not yet thirty years old, he received the Democratic nomination for United States representative from Ohio’s newly created twentieth congressional district.13
The odd-year congressional election resulted from a law that gave Ohio two additional representatives and required that all House districts throughout the country be single-member districts. Ranney ran against Giddings and Ben Wade’s brother Edward, candidate of the antislavery Liberty Party, in Ohio’s new twentieth district, comprising Ashtabula, Cuyahoga, Geauga, and Lake Counties. History books and surviving newspapers reveal little about the issues discussed in the race, but the party platform adopted a few months later in anticipation of the gubernatorial and presidential elections shows where the Democrats stood on national issues: against a national bank, paper currency, a protective tariff, distribution of the federal surplus revenue to the states, and the assumption of state debts by the federal government; in favor of “immediate possession” of all of the Oregon Territory, then being disputed with Great Britain.14
Notwithstanding the existence of a soft-money, pro-banking wing of the Democratic Party, these were all standard Democratic positions. There is no reason to think that Ranney disagreed with any of them. But 1843 was a Whig year, and Ranney was running against a firmly ensconced Whig in a resolutely Whiggish part of the state. Whigs carried the state elections, and although Democrats won a majority of the congressional races, helped no doubt by gerrymandered districts, Ranney lost to Giddings in a landslide. Ranney pulled in just 35.13 percent of the vote, but that was a higher percentage than all but one of Giddings’s opponents polled in seven subsequent races, and that one received 35.17 percent.15
Ranney returned to Warren in Trumbull County in 1845. In September 1846 the Democratic convention for the nineteenth congressional district (Portage, Summit, and Trumbull Counties) unanimously nominated him for the U.S. House of Representatives. The convention adopted a platform containing the usual Democratic planks in favor of low tariffs and against special privileges for banks, but it also recognized two new realities: the Mexican War and the rise of political abolitionism. The convention approved a “vigorous prosecution” of the war and condemned “the course and conduct” of Giddings and Daniel R. Tilden, the nineteenth district’s Whig incumbent, “to embitter the North towards the South.” The sectional conflict, the convention declared, required “concession and compromise.” Ranney’s acceptance speech, reported the Portage Sentinel, reinforced “the abiding confidence reposed in him by the democracy of the district, and to his well established reputation as a man of the highest order of talent.”16
Ranney’s opponents were Whig John Crowell, another antislavery lawyer of New England provenance, and Liberty Party candidate John Hutchins. Ranney ran slightly ahead of his party in all three of the district’s counties, carrying Portage and Trumbull by small margins but losing overwhelmingly in Summit. In the district as a whole he lost to Crowell by fewer than four percentage points. It was the closest he would come to winning legislative office. The narrowness of the loss is misleading, however. Hutchins received more than 7 percent of the votes. Had he not been in the race, almost all of his support surely would have gone to Crowell.17