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

      Introduction

      WHEN RUFUS P. RANNEY turned old enough to vote, Andrew Jackson, the scourge of corporations, occupied the White House, while Jackson’s nemesis, the old Federalist John Marshall, presided over the United States Supreme Court. Ranney extolled Jackson as the greatest man of his time; as a good Jacksonian, Ranney sought to keep business corporations under legislative and judicial control. Today Ranney lies buried in the same cemetery as his former client, the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. His statue flanks the north entrance of the Cuyahoga County Courthouse in Cleveland; on the other side of the doorway sits a bronze John Marshall. For as long as he remained active in public life, Ranney adhered to the Jacksonian creed of his youth. That he became Rockefeller’s favorite lawyer and Marshall’s perpetual companion tells us something about both the nature of both Jacksonian Democracy and the evolution of nineteenth-century American conservatism.

      After Ranney died in 1891, a distinguished Cleveland attorney remembered him as “a great advocate, a great lawyer, a great judge and a great man.” Ranney had been an important figure in Ohio since 1850. A three-time Democratic candidate for Congress in the 1840s, he came to statewide prominence as an outspoken delegate to Ohio’s midcentury constitutional convention and then as a judge of the state supreme court. He was the Democratic candidate for governor on the eve of the Civil War, engaging in a series of debates with Republican William Dennison that captivated audiences across the Buckeye State. During the war Ranney stirred up controversy among otherwise like-minded Democrats by recruiting troops for the Union cause. After the war he chaired state Democratic conventions, represented his state party at national conventions, and presided over the Democratic counterpart to the reformist Liberal Republican movement. Ranney also became one of Ohio’s leading corporate attorneys, representing Standard Oil and possibly creating the first industrial trust. He was a founder of the Ohio State Bar Association and the Case School of Applied Science, serving as first president of the former and first board chairman of the latter. When Ranney died eulogists ranked him “with the great American lawyers and jurists.” Historian James Ford Rhodes called Ranney “a profound jurist” whose decisions on state constitutional law, “for sound doctrine, clearness of thought and expression, are probably not surpassed in the court records of any State.”¹

      The importance of nineteenth-century state judges in the development of American common and constitutional law is undeniable; the dearth of biographies of such significant figures might therefore be justification enough for a book on Ranney.² But Ranney has the additional merit, from a historian’s perspective, of having been a Jacksonian Democrat. Scholars have published works on Roger B. Taney and other Jacksonians who served on the United States Supreme Court before the Civil War; but the Court’s jurisdiction, limited to federal issues and such diversity cases as happened to come the Court’s way, restricted the scope of the justices’ jurisprudence. Antebellum state judges, who plowed a much bigger field, remain a rarely studied breed. It is especially hard to think of full-length works on state judges who were Democrats in the Age of Jackson, even when that age is extended into the 1850s. Ranney’s participation in the Ohio constitutional convention of 1850–51, where Democrats and Whigs fought over fundamental ideological issues, together with his immediately subsequent service on the Ohio Supreme Court, offer an opportunity to examine constitutional and common law as developed by a Democratic state judge at the end of the Jacksonian era.

      Ranney’s jurisprudence can be best understood within the context of Jacksonian Democracy. Historians disagree over the nature of that political phenomenon. One scholar, taking note of interpretations based on class conflict, nostalgia for Jeffersonian republicanism, ethnicity and religion, and so on, concludes that “it is futile to apply such phrases as ‘the age of Jackson,’ ‘the Jacksonian persuasion,’ or ‘the concept of Jacksonian democracy.’” Another student of Jacksonian politics points out that Democrats occupied a spectrum “which encompassed a wide range of social thought and theory ranging from the anti-capitalist protest of the radicals to the entrepreneurial commercialism of the conservatives.” Still, it is fair to say that the chief components of Jacksonian Democracy, whatever the reasons for their being, were majority rule by the “producing classes” of independent farmers and artisans; opposition to “associated wealth,” especially in the form of banking corporations with special privileges; equal rights, at least for white men; states’ rights; limited government; popular participation in government; and territorial expansion for the benefit of native-born and immigrant whites.³

      “[T]he first principle of our system,” proclaimed Andrew Jackson, is “that the majority is to govern.” The will of the majority became the guiding principle of the Democratic Party. The great party organizer, Jackson’s vice president and close political ally Martin Van Buren, believed that the party’s purpose was to make “every aspect of government . . . directly responsible to the majority will of the people.” A Democratic newspaper declared itself “ready to be advised and instructed by the party—the people themselves—we will always obey the voice of the majority.” “The democratic theory,” intoned the New York Evening Post, “is that the people’s voice is the supreme law.”⁴

      Majority rule had a concomitant: political equality. By definition, a majority could not be a wealthy, privileged elite. Some historians reject the term “Jacksonian Democracy” because Jacksonian equality did not extend to women, blacks, and Indians. Furthermore, even “white male democracy”—that is, universal white male suffrage—came about naturally and largely before Jackson took office.⁵ But Jackson went beyond suffrage to insist that being of the lower classes did not preclude one from holding public office—“no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another,” he avowed—or deprive one of the right to the equal solicitude of government. As military governor of Florida in 1821, Jackson declared that “just laws can make no distinction of privilege between the rich and the poor. . . . In general, the great can protect themselves, but the poor and humble require the arm and shield of the law.” As president he announced that “the humble members of society, the farmers, mechanics, and laborers,” had the same rights under the law as the rich and powerful. Moreover, Jackson had “great confidence in the virtue of a great majority of the people” and believed that they could be trusted to do the right thing. According to Robert V. Remini, this political and social egalitarianism—the obligation of government to treat all classes the same and to protect the weak from abuse by the rich and powerful—was “the fundamental doctrine of Jacksonian Democracy.”⁶

      Jacksonians linked equality to limited government. With political power too apt to be abused for the benefit of the wealthy, Jacksonians generally believed that government should be confined to a few essential tasks and otherwise leave people alone. “We want,” said an Ohio Democratic congressman, “a plain, a simple, a frugal government.” Limited government could be ensured by frequent elections, rotation in office, checks and balances among the three branches of government, the right of the people to instruct their representatives, and strict construction of the powers delegated to the government by the people.⁷

      The concept of limited government would make Jacksonian Democracy a constitutional as well as a political movement. Although Jackson feared that too much governmental power at any level could endanger