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correctly) and insisted that if he had uttered such words Case was now taking them out of context. Indeed, Ranney quoted numerous instances in which he had made clear his position that corporate franchises were not property and insisted that no one at the convention could possibly have misunderstood his position. He castigated Case for referring to him, however obliquely, as “a knave or a fool” and retorted that “[i]f a man will make a blackguard of himself, he must not complain if he is treated as such.” Along the way he picked a fight with fellow Democrat William Hawkins over an innocuous remark Hawkins had made in an attempt to excuse Ranney’s apparent inconsistency (2:488, 492–93, 596).

      On February 11 the committee of the whole punted, informally passing Section 33 with the understanding that the fight would continue in convention. Two days later Case reignited the personal feud. Having missed Ranney’s “blackguard” comment in the heat of the debate on February 5, he now challenged Ranney to declare whether or not it was meant to apply to him. His honor affronted, Case would not accede to the requests of other delegates to let the matter go. Ranney refused to be drawn again into “this small potatoe business,” but Case announced that if Ranney “intended to apply to me that dirty word ‘blackguard,’ I hurl it back into his teeth—yes, I cram that filthy word down his very throat, to the place from whence it came—filth to filth.” Case sat down to cries of “order, order,” and the convention at last proceeded with its business (2:569, 595–96).

      For the rest of the convention Ranney strove valiantly but futilely to get an explicit, unrestricted right of repeal into the constitution. He lost the key battle when the delegates voted to strike the proviso from Section 33 and rejected attempts to replace it with language that Ranney and his friends considered more suitable. After Section 33 was ordered engrossed, the struggle for repeal shifted to the debate on the report of the committee on nonbanking corporations. Ranney let others carry the water in that phase of the fight, but he tried again in a debate on the bill of rights, proposing to include an express right of the General Assembly “to alter, repeal or abolish any law hereafter created by it” (2:605–33, 619, 621–22, 644–50, 659–62, 690–92). Ranney lost this round, too. He would have to be satisfied with a guarantee that “no special privileges or immunities shall ever be granted, that may not be altered, revoked, or repealed by the General Assembly,” along with the suggestion by Justice Story in the Dartmouth College case that any corporate charter could be made repealable by the reservation of the right of repeal in the charter itself.¹⁹

      Ranney’s anticorporation animus showed up in the debates on other issues. He won a victory against tax exemptions for corporations. The report of the committee on corporations provided that the property of corporations would “forever be subject to taxation, the same as the property of individuals.” Ranney moved that the section be amended to apply to corporations already in existence as well as those formed in the future. Notwithstanding the fact that the amendment might effectually modify the charters of corporations already in existence, a majority of the delegates agreed that the state could not barter away any aspect of its sovereignty, including the power of taxation. The amendment passed by a comfortable margin and became part of the constitution. But Ranney’s attempt to limit the legislature’s power to grant rights of way to corporations to cases “where the public good imperatively demands it” failed. Charles Reemelin complained that Ranney’s proposal would reintroduce special legislation, allowing the General Assembly to decide on a case-by-case basis whether to grant a valuable right. In classic Jacksonian language, Reemelin insisted that legislative acts “should be like the dews of heaven, capable of being enjoyed by all.” The General Assembly, he maintained, should no longer be “a dispenser of unequal laws, of special privileges and immunities.” Ranney did not press the point (1:260; 2:665–66, 674–75).²⁰

      In his arguments against corporate privilege Ranney stood up for the ordinary citizen. Concern for the poor animated his remarks on other aspects of the convention’s work. He supported a motion to specify in the constitution an amount of money that the General Assembly must raise for the support of the common school fund. Other delegates who agreed that the General Assembly should be required to provide funding for the support of a “thorough and efficient system of common schools” objected to enshrining the extent of that support, which Simeon Nash labeled a “mere [question] of policy,” in the constitution. But Ranney, who had struggled to acquire an education, wanted to ensure that the legislature would “establish a system of education that shall reach every poor, every ragged, every destitute child in the State.” When the committee on finance and taxation proposed that the legislature be prohibited from levying poll taxes for county or state purposes, as under the original constitution, Ranney urged a blanket prohibition. Under the existing law every citizen had to pay an annual tax of two dollars for highway maintenance or perform a certain amount of labor on the roads. The committee argued that the existing constitutional provision had worked well and generated no complaints, but Ranney demanded consistency of principle. If poll taxes were “grievous and oppressive,” as the constitution declared, they ought to be outlawed for all purposes. To require a young man, living away from home, working by the month, with no spare time, to be under the same obligation as a rich person, was simply unjust. In both cases, the schools and the poll tax, Ranney failed to sway the majority of delegates (2:13, 16, 34–35).

      Ranney’s sympathy for the poor affected his attitude toward the criminal justice system, too. It was the one issue that elicited religious sentiment from him. He supported Reemelin’s proposal that inmates of the state penitentiary be paid for their labor while confined. Ranney believed that reformation of the criminal was one of the chief objectives of punishment. To deny the offender his wages deprived him of “all hope of reformation” and “consigned him to irretrievable ignominy.” If the prisoner had a family, “his wife and children are beggared, and pining and starving from want.” Ranney did not fear being labeled a friend of rascals, for “the greatest of all philanthropists” had been reproached as “a friend of publicans and sinners.” “[H]owever poor, degraded, and down-trodden the citizen may be,” declared Ranney, there remained the “great rule of justice, that, to the laborer belongs the proceeds of his labor.” The convention rejected Reemelin’s amendment, as Ranney knew it would (1:542, 545–46, 549).

      Ranney argued with equal earnestness, and equal futility, for a constitutional prohibition of capital punishment. He again insisted that one of the objects of punishment was reformation of the criminal; the death penalty left nothing to reform. Those who would maintain that murderers were beyond reformation, he said, would “deny the power of the divine arrangement to reform the heart of man.” Nor was vengeance a legitimate purpose of punishment, because vengeance belonged to God. He conceded that capital punishment might deter would-be offenders, but he “held human life more sacred.” Ranney saw no need for the state to follow a murderer’s bad example. He had witnessed one hanging, and that had been enough—the worst possible spectacle from which to learn a moral lesson (2:23).

      As the official record of the convention’s proceedings reveals, Ranney was one of the most active and vocal members of the convention. Given the scope of delegates’ duties and the division of labor among numerous committees, neither Ranney nor anyone else could have played a leading role in every area. In light of the havoc that temperance and slavery were already wreaking on the existing party system of Whigs and Democrats, Ranney’s active involvement with those issues would have been enlightening. However, he had little to say about them. He proclaimed himself a supporter of temperance but questioned the wisdom of prohibiting the sale of liquor in the constitution. The success of the temperance movement, said Ranney, depended upon moral suasion, not legal force (2:875–76). Ranney may have taken this position in all sincerity—it did, after all, accord with the general Democratic view that “there are some subjects unfit for legislation, and among them is ‘what we shall eat and what we shall drink and wherewithal we shall be clothed’”—but it also conveniently allowed him to sympathize with a popular movement without alienating important political constituencies.²¹

      Slavery was not an issue at the convention; it had always been outlawed in Ohio. But the convention did confront ancillary matters of political and legal rights for blacks. The General Assembly had repealed most of the notorious “blacks laws” in 1849 as part of a political deal between Free Soil and Democratic legislators,

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