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

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      TWO

      The Constitutional Convention

       Corporations and Citizens

      IN 1864 the Union Pacific Railroad, chartered by Congress to build a railroad from Missouri to the Pacific, created the secretly affiliated Crédit Mobilier of America to serve as its construction contractor. Through bribes of cash and stock, Crédit Mobilier ensured that Congress appropriated money to pay inflated invoices, to the immense profit of Union Pacific’s shareholders. The scandal came to light during the 1872 presidential campaign, by which time Rufus P. Ranney had been decrying the chumminess between corporations and Congress for years. In a widely noted speech in 1867, Ranney lambasted the corruption of the Republican administration, claiming that “vast manufacturing interests,” their agents loaded with money with which to promote their clients’ interests, “clustered around the Government” demanding legislation for the benefit of the industrialists. The problem was hardly confined to the federal government. As Luke P. Poland, the antislavery Democrat-turned-Republican who chaired the House committee investigating the Crédit Mobilier affair, lamented, “gigantic corporations” had gained such control over state legislatures that in some states they had become “the ruling power.” Ranney’s concern about the baleful influence of corporations on both the political process and the economic well-being of individual citizens long predated the postbellum rise of huge industrial and railroad enterprises. It impelled some of his most dogged argumentation at Ohio’s constitutional convention in 1850–51, argumentation that cemented his reputation as a Radical Democrat.¹

      After suffering his third straight defeat in pursuit of a seat in Congress, Ranney won a place in the forthcoming convention in a popular election of delegates. Ohio’s first constitution could be amended only by a convention, for which proponents of judicial reform and biennial legislative sessions had called in vain before 1846. In the late 1840s an accumulation of judicial backlogs, financial crises, partisan conflicts, and bribery and election scandals raised the pressure for a convention to an irresistible level.²

      Whigs viewed the prospect of a convention with foreboding. Whig state representative Miller Pennington warned against “rush[ing] headlong upon the wild sea of experiment.” But Democrats denounced apprehensions about the “ghosts of anarchy and confusion and agrarianism and disorganization and civil strife.” If the people could not be trusted to address acknowledged defects in the constitution, then the American adventure in popular government must be deemed a failure. The Democratic Portage Sentinel listed the constitutional reforms demanded by Democrats: a state legislature that would meet only once every two years; popular election of judges and other state and county officers; a prohibition on the incurrence of state debt and the creation of banking corporations without popular approval; “equal distribution” of the “burdens of taxation,” with no special favors for stockholders of banks or other business corporations; judicial reform to make the operations of the legal system simpler and more expeditious; referral of all proposed legislation of a local or private character to a special county tribunal; and a general school law to ensure a good education for poor children, funded by “an equal tax upon all the property within the State.”³

      Advocates of a convention finally succeeded in 1849, when partisan passions had reached a fever pitch and popular disenchantment with government seemed deeper than ever. The General Assembly set April 1, 1850, as the date for the election of convention delegates and created special election districts, with each district choosing a number of delegates equal to the number of its state representatives and senators. Trumbull and Geauga counties formed one district, with three delegates to be elected in common. The Whigs and Democrats of Trumbull County called for interparty cooperation to choose delegates on a nonpartisan basis. According to the free-soil Western Reserve Chronicle, the central committee of the Free Democrats, as Ohio’s Free Soilers called themselves, responded by sending a questionnaire on the issues to likely nominees, to which all but Ranney responded. The paper accused Ranney and other major-party politicians of striking a bargain by which Whigs Peter Hitchcock of Geauga and Jacob Perkins of Trumbull would be nominated along with Ranney and then of managing poorly attended county conventions to consummate the deal. In their lust for office, charged the Chronicle, the Whig and Democratic Party leaders had forfeited all principle. “Can the whigs support [Ranney’s] radical notions, which they believe he entertains? . . . Are the whigs really in love with Ranney, and the democrats in love with Hitchcock? If there are two politicians in the district who stand farther apart than Hitchcock and Ranney, we are unacquainted with them.” The Free Democrats, unwilling to participate in an “unholy alliance,” nominated three candidates of their own.⁴

      In the election Ranney, then living in Trumbull, led all candidates by a wide margin in both counties. Two of the Free Democrats ran neck-and-neck with Hitchcock and Perkins in Geauga, but the combined Whig-Democratic slate comfortably outpolled the Free Democrats in Trumbull and secured all the district’s seats at the convention. In the state as a whole Democrats won a majority of the seats. A minority of Conservative Democrats occasionally combined with Whigs to stymie some of the more Radical proposals, but the document that emerged from the convention represented a victory for the mainstream of the Democratic Party.⁵

      At thirty-six years of age Ranney was one of the younger convention delegates. Familiar to voters in his congressional district and to lawyers in the Western Reserve, he was probably little known in the rest of the state. His prominent role at the convention would give him a statewide reputation as a staunch Jacksonian Democrat. At the convention Ranney praised Andrew Jackson as “the greatest man of this age,” whose “great and glorious deeds” entitled him “to the highest niche in the temple of fame!” A disgusted adversary labeled Ranney “a good representative of the Locofoco, destructive agrarian party of this country.” The harshness of this characterization no doubt stemmed in part from Ranney’s tendency to antagonize men with whom he disagreed, including some fellow Democrats. Taking criticisms of his political positions as personal affronts, he sometimes responded with uncivil barbs. From the Whig point of view, the characterization had a firm basis in political principle. Ranney went into the convention as a known Radical.⁶

      In an age when “liberal” was rarely used in political discourse, American commentators usually divided the political world into two groups, conservatives and radicals. There were, said the Whig American Review, two parties, the cautious, conservative Whigs and the rash, radical Democrats.⁷ There were genuine radicals in Jacksonian America: socialists and Transcendentalists who formed rural communes; workingmen who denounced private property and organized their own political parties; abolitionists who saw the Constitution as a pact with the devil and who would sooner sunder the Union than live within it with slavery. But the so-called Radicals of the Democratic Party were what would later be called classical liberals; they were, said the Democratic Review, simply more “ardent spirits” who sometimes “carr[ied] their ideas to the verge of extravagance”—a necessary “counterbalance [to] the opposite tendency to anti-liberal opinions.” They were followers of Jefferson, Madison, and “accredited writers upon political economy”; nothing they proposed, “when fairly understood, with proper allowances, should excite the apprehensions of the most sober-minded republican.” The Radicals’ creed, shared with all Democrats, was individual liberty, respect for the rights and property of all, and no “exclusive privileges” or “selfish monopolies.” Their notion of government was “[a]s little government as possible; that little СКАЧАТЬ