The Jacksonian Conservatism of Rufus P. Ranney. David M. Gold
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 emanating from, and controlled by, the people; and uniform in its application to all.” Even the Whig American Review called Radicals rather innocuously “the 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