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

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СКАЧАТЬ party of change and reform” and “a spur to the progress of the State and of society.”⁸

      Whigs often used the term “radical” disparagingly. Just as Democrats routinely referred to Whigs as Federalists in order to tar them with what they saw as a discredited, antidemocratic political creed, Whigs frequently called the Democrats radicals as a way of deprecating their gravitas. But the Whigs also had a more pejorative term at their disposal: loco-foco. “Loco-foco” was the name of a match used by real New York City Radicals in 1834 to provide illumination at a Democratic meeting after party regulars turned off the gas lights. From then on stridently egalitarian, antibank Democrats were called loco-focos by their political adversaries. Whig editors lumped the loco-focos together with a variety of perceived social disorganizers: the radical equalizers and land redistributionists known as agrarians; the feminist and abolitionist social reformer Fanny Wright; and others whom they plainly regarded as dangerous and possibly crazy. In 1836, when Andrew Jackson’s chosen successor, Martin Van Buren, was running for president, a Whig newspaper in Maine expressed relief that Van Buren would “oppose the measures of the loco-focos, agrarians, and Fanny-Wright-men of our country.” As bad as Jacksonism was, declared the paper, it was “infinitely preferable to the disorganizing doctrines and dogmas of the infidels and anarchists who compose this lowest of all political parties.”⁹ What the paper could not foresee was that the Democratic Party would soon move in a Radical direction.

      The Democrats, like the Whigs, consisted of a mélange of interests. Jackson’s war on the Second Bank of the United States and Van Buren’s subsequent adoption of laissez-faire economics and the independent treasury, which removed federal funds from private banks, pushed a significant minority of influential Democrats into electoral alliances with the Whigs. The Democratic Party split into Conservative and Radical camps. Radical hard-money, anticorporate, laissez-faire thought came to characterize the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Conservatives—the designation applied by themselves and their antagonists—made up the minority within the party.

      Nevertheless, some historians have detected in Jacksonian Democracy a conservative, backward-looking disposition. The market-oriented and commercially minded Whigs, with their economic program of banks, tariffs, and publicly sponsored internal improvements, wrote Marvin Meyers, “spoke to the explicit hopes of Americans”; the Democrats, yearning for a restoration of the republican virtues of Jefferson’s time and a simple society that rested on the sturdy shoulders of the independent farmer, “addressed their diffuse fears and resentments.” According to Meyers, even the radical libertarian William Leggett shared this essentially conservative Democratic theme of restoration, an appeal to undo “the errors of the past generation” and recover “free trade and equal rights.” Similarly, Harry L. Watson writes that “Whigs advocated the rapid transformation of America’s economy and Democrats tended to resist it.” Jacksonian Democrats “embraced what they thought to be the cause of the many against the few, and battled for the restoration of better days.”¹⁰

      But Ranney did not seem conservative to his fellow convention delegates. He made clear his Radical Democratic proclivities from the start. The statute that provided for the holding of the convention directed the delegates to secure for the state the copyright of the report of the debates and proceedings. Whig Henry Stanbery offered a resolution declaring it “inexpedient” for the convention to comply with the statute. Pursuant to the statute the convention had already provided for the daily publication of the debates in the Ohio State Journal and the Ohio Statesman. Once the debates were published in the papers, said Stanbery, it was too late to secure the copyright. Furthermore, there was “a higher object than profit” in the publication of the debates: to inform the people as fully as possible of proposed changes to the constitution. Ranney agreed with both points, but in the creedal anti-monopoly and laissez-faire language of Radical Democrats. He questioned whether the debates of public bodies could be “put under the screw of monopoly” and doubted that the state would profit from sales of the books. “We have already tried our hands in several schemes for making money, in constructing roads and canals, besides a variety of other things, in all of which the State has failed to prosper” (1:18, 60–61, 83–84).¹¹

      About a month into the convention, Ranney set forth his political principles in arguments over the report of the committee on nonbanking corporations. Many Democratic delegates displayed deep hostility toward business corporations. Animosity toward banks had been a staple of mainstream Democratic rhetoric since the 1830s. Other corporations, especially those created for the purpose of constructing roads, bridges, or canals, tended to be seen as quasi-governmental in nature and thus attracted less criticism, at least before the Panic of 1837. The General Assembly spent much of its time before 1850 enacting or amending special laws that granted corporate charters. The charters of business corporations often included “special privileges,” such as the power to take property through eminent domain, the limitation of shareholder liability for corporate debts, or freedom from competition. After the Panic of 1837 and the heavy losses sustained by the state and by local governments that had invested in corporate enterprises, many Democrats developed a burning antipathy toward corporations. At the constitutional convention, they strove to put limits on corporate power into Ohio’s fundamental law.¹²

      The debates over business corporations occupied much of the convention’s time. Ranney spoke out forcefully and with his wonted acerbity on two significant issues, the liability of shareholders for corporate debts and the power of the legislature to repeal corporate charters. Jacksonian Democrats had long appealed for support to independent artisans and shopkeepers whom corporate enterprise threatened to destroy. In 1835 Connecticut Democrat Gideon Welles warned that “[t]he unobtrusive work-shop of the Mechanic, the residence of freedom, is beginning to be abandoned, because he cannot compete with incorporated wealth.” Corporations, Welles continued, were “destroying that equality of condition, which is the parent of independence.” Individuals could not hope to compete with capital “entering the field, under privileged laws.” Less than two years after the Ohio constitutional convention adjourned, the Democratic United States Review complained that the incorporation of manufacturing companies had concentrated capital and labor in a few hands, whereas previously these resources had been “diffused among all classes, and contributed equally to the prosperity of millions of industrious people,” who were “always improving their condition.” Corporations had “banished the loom and the spindle from the fireside,” driven housewives and mothers out of their homes and into factories, and turned independent mechanics, previously the “sole masters of their time and of themselves, into slaves of the steam-engine and spinning-jenny.”¹³

      Ranney declared that he had no objections to corporations created for “proper purposes,” by which he seems to have meant the construction of “public improvements”—he himself had recently been among the incorporators of two plank road companies—but he feared that “their introduction into all the departments of ordinary business” would “depress private enterprise, and break down men of small capital.” Without protection from the aggrandizement of corporations, said Ranney, mechanics (artisans) and small businessmen would soon be compelled “to find employment under the overshadowing power and influence of associated wealth.” The growing tendency “to engulph every branch of business in the vortex of corporations” had to be resisted with “guaranties against their frauds.” Two of the most important of these guarantees, he insisted, were shareholder liability and the right of repeal. Writing these two protections into the constitution would go a long way toward making “[e]qual rights to all, exclusive privileges to none . . . an operative, living principle” (1:370).¹⁴

      The first report of the committee on corporations other than banks proposed changing the method of creating corporations. The General Assembly would no longer be able to grant corporate charters by special acts of incorporation. Instead, it would have the authority to pass general laws under which any group of individuals could set up a corporation. However, all such general laws might “be altered from time to time, or repealed.” Upon repeal, “the property or credits legally acquired” by the corporation would “rest in the individual СКАЧАТЬ