The Jacksonian Conservatism of Rufus P. Ranney. David M. Gold

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

      Ranney got one more shot at Congress in 1848, when, the Western Reserve Chronicle tartly remarked, the Democrats were “again deceived into the fallacious hope of his success at the ballot box.” As election day neared, the Democratic Portage Sentinel trumpeted the Democratic Party’s national principles, including the traditional opposition to a national bank, a protective tariff, and special legislation that bestowed “exclusive charters and privileges” on banks. But slavery trumped all the old issues, especially in the Western Reserve. The Sentinel listed popular sovereignty—“the rights of the people of States and Territories of framing their own institutions”—as a national Democratic principle, along with “[o]pposition to all principles of a sectional character” and “to all fanatics who seek the dissolution of the American Union.” (Fanatics, in the parlance of the time, meant abolitionists.) However, no one who advocated such positions stood any chance of election in the Reserve. Giddings had gone over to the new Free Soil Party. Crowell, running as a Whig, openly avowed his support for the free-soil movement.¹⁸

      The Free Soil Party grew out of a huge antislavery convention held in Buffalo, New York, in August 1848. Disaffected Whigs and Democrats with divergent views on various issues, along with Liberty men looking for a more effective antislavery vehicle than their existing party, adopted a “national platform of freedom.” The platform declared that slavery’s existence depended solely on state law, which the federal government lacked the power to annul. The Free Soilers asserted, however, that the federal government had no authority to establish slavery, and that it had a duty “to relieve itself from all responsibility for the existence or continuance of slavery wherever that government possesses constitutional authority to legislate on that subject.” The platform had little to say about the plight of slaves in the South, but it evinced deep concern for the condition of white settlers in the western territories, including the lands acquired in the Mexican War. “Let the soil of our extensive domains be ever kept free, for the hardy pioneers of our own land, and the oppressed and banished of other lands, seeking homes of comfort and fields of enterprise in the new world,” the convention resolved. “[W]e demand freedom and established institutions for our brethren in Oregon, now exposed to hardships, peril and massacre, by the reckless hostility of the slave power to the establishment of free government for free territories, and not only for them, but for our new brethren in California and New Mexico.”¹⁹

      On September 30 antislavery activist Benjamin F. Hoffman challenged Ranney to state publicly his responses to a series of questions: on the power of Congress over slavery in the territories and the District of Columbia; on his attitude toward the use of such power and toward the Free Soil platform; and on his preference in the approaching presidential election. Although Ranney did not directly answer Hoffman’s query about the Buffalo platform, most of his replies should have warmed the hearts of Free Soilers. “[O]ur flag should never float over another foot of slave territory,” Ranney declared. It was well-settled that slavery existed in a state by virtue of local law; neither Congress nor a territorial legislature had the power to establish it. More than a decade ago he had publicly called upon Congress to abolish slavery in the nation’s capital, and time had only strengthened his opinion. As for the newly acquired territories, Ranney had no doubt of the power of Congress to prohibit slavery there, and he was “in favor of and would support such prohibition.” Keeping New Mexico and California free was “due to humanity, to republican principles, to our character and interests as a people, to Mexico, and above all to the poor of our own and other lands, who shall go there to find homes for themselves and their families, and who would be beggared and disgraced by the contact of slave labor.” Furthermore, Ranney recommended that public lands in the West “be freely granted, in limited quantities, to actual settlers only. This . . . would secure them against monopolists and speculators of all kinds; and would settle them with a hardy and industrious population of freemen.” If elected, Ranney promised, he would “support all such measures as were calculated to maintain” his antislavery views, “taking care at all times not to overstep the limits of the National compact, or to encroach upon the reserved rights of the States.”²⁰

      The one reply of Ranney’s that must have stuck in the craw of Free Soil men was his support of Democrat Lewis Cass for president. Cass, a former governor of the Michigan Territory, secretary of war, and minister to France, advocated popular sovereignty in the territories, which allowed for the possibility that some or all of the territories would embrace slavery. The Whigs had nominated Louisiana slaveholder and Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor, a man with no political experience or principles until he discovered in 1848 that he was “a Whig but not an ultra Whig.” The Free Soilers in Buffalo, abhorring both candidates, nominated former president Martin Van Buren. Crowell, a four-square supporter of the Buffalo platform, announced that he would not vote for either Cass or Taylor. Ranney knew that Van Buren could not win. Of the two major-party candidates he preferred Cass, a “tried Statesman” whose views were known and whose “education, habits, location, and associations must all incline him to detest Slavery.” A Democratic vote for Van Buren, Ranney declared, would simply help elect the political cipher and southern slaveholder Taylor. Of course, Whigs made the same argument in reverse. Addressing the Whigs of the Western Reserve, former New York governor and soon-to-be U.S. senator William H. Seward declared that “seceding Whigs can only give success to the party of Lewis Cass.”²¹

      Democratic papers professed confidence in Ranney’s candidacy. One pointed out that Ranney was “the uncompromising opponent of every species of slavery.” But the Whig Western Reserve Chronicle mocked the Democrats’ persistence in nominating Ranney for Congress and, on the very day on which the paper published Ranney’s reply to Hoffman, it also printed the claim of Whig Party committeemen that Ranney denied the power of Congress to prohibit slavery in the territories and the District of Columbia. The Chronicle believed that the claim was unfounded, but it questioned the honesty of someone who professed to oppose the extension of slavery and yet supported Cass for president.²²

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