The Free Soil Party grew out of a huge antislavery convention held in Buffalo, New York, in August 1848. Disaffected Whigs and Democrats with divergent views on various issues, along with Liberty men looking for a more effective antislavery vehicle than their existing party, adopted a “national platform of freedom.” The platform declared that slavery’s existence depended solely on state law, which the federal government lacked the power to annul. The Free Soilers asserted, however, that the federal government had no authority to establish slavery, and that it had a duty “to relieve itself from all responsibility for the existence or continuance of slavery wherever that government possesses constitutional authority to legislate on that subject.” The platform had little to say about the plight of slaves in the South, but it evinced deep concern for the condition of white settlers in the western territories, including the lands acquired in the Mexican War. “Let the soil of our extensive domains be ever kept free, for the hardy pioneers of our own land, and the oppressed and banished of other lands, seeking homes of comfort and fields of enterprise in the new world,” the convention resolved. “[W]e demand freedom and established institutions for our brethren in Oregon, now exposed to hardships, peril and massacre, by the reckless hostility of the slave power to the establishment of free government for free territories, and not only for them, but for our new brethren in California and New Mexico.”19
On September 30 antislavery activist Benjamin F. Hoffman challenged Ranney to state publicly his responses to a series of questions: on the power of Congress over slavery in the territories and the District of Columbia; on his attitude toward the use of such power and toward the Free Soil platform; and on his preference in the approaching presidential election. Although Ranney did not directly answer Hoffman’s query about the Buffalo platform, most of his replies should have warmed the hearts of Free Soilers. “[O]ur flag should never float over another foot of slave territory,” Ranney declared. It was well-settled that slavery existed in a state by virtue of local law; neither Congress nor a territorial legislature had the power to establish it. More than a decade ago he had publicly called upon Congress to abolish slavery in the nation’s capital, and time had only strengthened his opinion. As for the newly acquired territories, Ranney had no doubt of the power of Congress to prohibit slavery there, and he was “in favor of and would support such prohibition.” Keeping New Mexico and California free was “due to humanity, to republican principles, to our character and interests as a people, to Mexico, and above all to the poor of our own and other lands, who shall go there to find homes for themselves and their families, and who would be beggared and disgraced by the contact of slave labor.” Furthermore, Ranney recommended that public lands in the West “be freely granted, in limited quantities, to actual settlers only. This . . . would secure them against monopolists and speculators of all kinds; and would settle them with a hardy and industrious population of freemen.” If elected, Ranney promised, he would “support all such measures as were calculated to maintain” his antislavery views, “taking care at all times not to overstep the limits of the National compact, or to encroach upon the reserved rights of the States.”20
The one reply of Ranney’s that must have stuck in the craw of Free Soil men was his support of Democrat Lewis Cass for president. Cass, a former governor of the Michigan Territory, secretary of war, and minister to France, advocated popular sovereignty in the territories, which allowed for the possibility that some or all of the territories would embrace slavery. The Whigs had nominated Louisiana slaveholder and Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor, a man with no political experience or principles until he discovered in 1848 that he was “a Whig but not an ultra Whig.” The Free Soilers in Buffalo, abhorring both candidates, nominated former president Martin Van Buren. Crowell, a four-square supporter of the Buffalo platform, announced that he would not vote for either Cass or Taylor. Ranney knew that Van Buren could not win. Of the two major-party candidates he preferred Cass, a “tried Statesman” whose views were known and whose “education, habits, location, and associations must all incline him to detest Slavery.” A Democratic vote for Van Buren, Ranney declared, would simply help elect the political cipher and southern slaveholder Taylor. Of course, Whigs made the same argument in reverse. Addressing the Whigs of the Western Reserve, former New York governor and soon-to-be U.S. senator William H. Seward declared that “seceding Whigs can only give success to the party of Lewis Cass.”21
Democratic papers professed confidence in Ranney’s candidacy. One pointed out that Ranney was “the uncompromising opponent of every species of slavery.” But the Whig Western Reserve Chronicle mocked the Democrats’ persistence in nominating Ranney for Congress and, on the very day on which the paper published Ranney’s reply to Hoffman, it also printed the claim of Whig Party committeemen that Ranney denied the power of Congress to prohibit slavery in the territories and the District of Columbia. The Chronicle believed that the claim was unfounded, but it questioned the honesty of someone who professed to oppose the extension of slavery and yet supported Cass for president.22
Ranney stood no chance of election. He lost all three counties, receiving 44 percent of the vote in the district as a whole, the same as the Democratic candidate for governor and a few points higher than Cass’s plurality in the three-way presidential race.23 After three straight defeats, Ranney gave up the hopeless cause. The nineteenth district would not elect another Democratic congressman until the twentieth century. But Ranney’s defeat meant that he was available for election as a delegate to the state constitutional convention in 1849. His espousal there of Radical Democratic principles would bring him statewide prominence and a seat on the Ohio Supreme Court.
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