The Jacksonian Conservatism of Rufus P. Ranney. David M. Gold
improvident and go-ahead party—a Democratic, a Loco-Foco party!”15
Jacksonian Democrats gladly conceded the conservative designation to the Whigs, calling themselves the party “of movement, of progress, of reform.” After listing a host of reforms accomplished in the United States and England—the extension of suffrage, moderation of the penal laws, abolition of imprisonment for debt, establishment of asylums for the handicapped, restriction of monopolies, and so on—the United States Magazine and Democratic Review declared them all to be “the legitimate fruits” of American Democratic and English liberal principles. Some antebellum northern Democrats were Burkean conservatives who believed in “the importance of community, the sanctity of established institutions, the authority of existing arrangements, and the necessity of public policies that harmonized with local customs.” But while the Democratic Party was broad enough to accommodate admirers of Edmund Burke, Burkean conservatism appealed more to Whigs than to Democrats.16
It is true that even in Jackson’s day many Democrats revered the wisdom of the past. When Orestes Brownson, in his Radical Democratic phase, called for a society in which every man worked for himself in his own shop or on his own farm, he was looking back to “Jefferson’s vision of a self-sufficient yeomanry” while “articulat[ing] an implicit ideal of Democratic theory and policy.” But Jefferson was not a conservative. Russell Kirk observed that Jefferson’s doctrines “always were more radical than his practice”; but the doctrines were the stuff to which Jacksonian Democrats appealed. No one who derived the equality of men from universal reason, believed in a “wall of separation” between church and state, saw Shays’s Rebellion as a salutary “refreshing” of the “tree of liberty,” and sympathized with the French Revolution could have qualified as a conservative.17
It similarly seems a stretch to regard the Jacksonians of Ranney’s time as conservative for seeking to “restore” the Jeffersonian radicalism that had flourished in their own lifetimes. Andrew Jackson’s leading biographer, Robert V. Remini, described Jackson as a “conservative, cautious man” with “a conservative philosophy of government.”18 That is not how Jackson’s contemporaries saw him. Jackson’s National Republican and Whig opponents thought of the president and his followers as revolutionaries. A Boston newspaper equated Jacksonianism with Jacobinism. “Its Alpha is ANARCHY and its Omega is DESPOTISM,” the paper howled. Henry Clay warned about Jackson, “We are in the midst of a revolution, hitherto bloodless, but rapidly tending towards a total change of the pure republican character of the Government.” Seven years later, with Jackson’s chosen successor in the White House, New York Whigs were still crying, “We are in the midst of a revolution! Your Federal Government . . . is undergoing a change fatal to its republican character.”19 Even allowing for rhetorical excess, it is clear that Jackson’s enemies attributed his failings to radicalism, not conservatism.
Jackson did not think of himself as a conservative. When a question involving Conservative Democrats arose, he declared his detestation of conservatism in general as well as the political faction. Conservatives, Jackson asserted, think “the people unfit to govern themselves.”20 After Jackson’s death, a writer for the Democratic Review defined radicalism as “that which is constantly modifying, changing, reforming, and improving the institutions of society,” as opposed to conservatism, which was stuck in the past. The author hailed Jefferson and Jackson as the “champions of Radicalism.”21
Ranney admired Andrew Jackson and his principles. Ranney believed in equality among (white) men, popular government, a government without the power to direct either economic or moral life; he attacked corporate privilege, favored hard money, and sympathized with the legal codification movement. Although advocacy of small government today tends to get people tagged as conservatives, in the 1840s it was a hallmark of Radical Democracy. And no one who approved of Jackson’s populism and egalitarianism could have passed as a conservative at that time. The Whigs who knew Ranney in 1850 certainly did not regard him as one. They called him radical, even “destructive.” Recalling Ranney’s role at the constitutional convention, a Republican paper in 1859 said that he “took an active part in favor of the most radical views.”22
But soon after the convention, mainstream Democrats, including Ranney, began to think of themselves as conservatives. Before then both Whigs and Democrats had often invoked the past, but for different reasons. For Whigs, the past was a teacher, a guide, and a constraint. “Our American liberty,” intoned Daniel Webster, “has an ancestry, a pedigree, a history.” Edward Everett asserted that the Founding Fathers had built the “temple of freedom” on “history and tradition,” digging the foundation “deep down to the eternal rock” so that the temple might be expanded on that foundation in the future. For Democrats, the past was a launching pad for future progress. The Democratic Review warned against an undue appeal to “the wisdom of our fathers” and a fear of “untried experiments.” The American Revolution, said the Review, was the boldest of experiments, “the germ from which has sprung the revolution of the world.” Despite occasional bumps in the road, Democrats in the 1850s could look back on a steady march of progress against conservatism. The Revolutionary generation had overthrown monarchical government. Jefferson had routed the Federalists, Jackson and his successors the National Republicans and Whigs. The demise of property qualifications for voting, followed by high voter turnout in boisterous political campaigns, and the change from the appointive to the elective method of choosing major public officers, spoke to the advance of government by “the people.”23
In the 1850s, though, the “go-ahead party” perceived a new threat, not from conservatives but from radical abolitionists and the new Republican Party. Democrats thought they saw American institutions under assault by a “revolutionary and agrarian” party filled with fanatics and determined to use its numerical majority to discard hard-won political compromises, run roughshod over the Constitution, and create a powerful central government. They complained of the “revolutionary movements” of the “black republicans.” The old Whig Rufus Choate, who supported the Democrat Buchanan for president in 1856, disdained the Republicans’ “revolutionary banner.” The state party convention that nominated Ranney for governor called upon the people of Ohio to rebuke “the wanton, factious, revolutionary designs of the leaders of the self-styled Republican party.” Believing themselves charged by history with preserving American liberty, Democrats adopted the mantle of conservatism and wore it through political upheavals, civil war, and industrialization. Men such as Ranney remained devoted to the Jeffersonian tradition of strict construction of the government’s constitutional powers, to states’ rights, and to a government close to the people. Ranney went from radical to conservative without changing his principles or his party.24
It was Ranney’s conservatism that drove him to participate in a splinter reform movement in the early 1870s, a movement aimed at ending corruption in public offices and reinvigorating the limited government ideals of an earlier age. By 1875 Ranney was back in the party’s good graces, chairing the Democratic state convention, but he never again ran for elective office. Instead he concentrated on his law practice and the development of the legal profession, associating with legal and business elites, representing railroads and Standard Oil, and presiding over the state bar association. How the Radical Jacksonian Democrat came to be one of John D. Rockefeller’s favorite attorneys, and what that turn of events meant for Democratic ideology, are intriguing questions. The answers must be speculative because Ranney stepped back from the limelight and left little record of his political or legal thought in the last fifteen years of his life. But the attitudes of Ranney and some other old Jacksonian jurists in the Gilded Age showed a remarkable continuity with the positions of their younger, radical selves in favor of limited government, laissez-faire economics, general incorporation laws, and, at least in Ranney’s case, judicial review, legal science, and an educated bar.
This book, a study of Ranney’s public life, is based on newspaper reports, the published proceedings of the Ohio constitutional convention, the reported opinions of the Ohio Supreme Court, and the records of the Ohio State Bar Association. Finding out about Ranney’s personal life or his behind-the-scenes role in law or politics is impossible. No cache of Ranney correspondence appears to have survived. Ranney may not