LITMIR.BIZ

      ONE

      Western Reserve Democrat

      AT TWO O’CLOCK in the morning on February 22, 1839, Benjamin F. Wade delivered a scathing attack on the Ohio Fugitive Slave Bill to a half-empty state senate chamber. Introduced at the behest of Kentucky slaveholders, the bill would make it easier for masters to recover runaways who sought freedom in Ohio. “[U]ntil the laws of nature and of nature’s God are changed,” Wade vowed, “I will never recognize the right of one man to hold his fellow man a slave.” Let the slaveholders, with their doctrine of states’ rights, “shrink back beyond their own dark borders, and there remain, a plague spot on the body politic,” roared the future Radical Republican; let them not look to Ohio for aid and sympathy. As a member of the Whig minority, Wade could not defeat the Fugitive Slave Bill. If he hoped at least to influence his young law partner with his speech, he was disappointed there too. Rufus P. Ranney was and always would be a Democrat, an advocate of states’ rights, and unsympathetic toward abolitionism. When Ranney ran for governor in 1859, Wade campaigned against him.¹

      Ranney rose to local prominence in the 1840s as a Democratic politician and lawyer, but his early life is mostly a mystery. He was born to an undistinguished descendant of Thomas Ranny, who immigrated from Scotland in the seventeenth century and settled in Middletown, Connecticut. Ranney’s grandfather Elijah moved to Blandford in western Massachusetts in 1773, where his wife Mary gave birth to their son Rufus in 1779 or 1780. Rufus married a local girl, Dolly D. Blair, with whom he had eight children. The Ranneys were farmers in an area not noted for rural prosperity. Hampden County was a region of hardscrabble farms around the time Elijah Ranney settled there and no better off in the early nineteenth century.²

      Rufus and Dolly’s third child, Rufus Percival Ranney, was born October 30, 1813. Nothing is known of his life in Blandford: his health, education, religious training, or anything else. In 1824 the Ranneys moved to Freedom Township in Portage County, Ohio. Portage County was part of the Western Reserve, a large swath of northeastern Ohio once claimed by Connecticut and settled largely by New Englanders. Freedom Township was still a wilderness, lacking roads, schools, and churches. When the Ranneys came, Rufus senior “cleared four acres, built a cabin, and for a year they lived on the game killed.” The elder Rufus, “an honest, industrious farmer . . . in humble circumstances,” could not spare young Rufus’s labor or afford to send him away to school. The boy received only one winter of formal education in Ohio. He may have acquired some learning from his mother, who, according to one source, “had received a good education” and “was very attentive to her children.”³

      Notwithstanding the paucity of information about Rufus P. Ranney’s youth, one thing is clear: he hungered for knowledge. A Lincolnesque story has it that Ranney, unable to go to school, chopped wood for a local merchant to earn money for a volume of Virgil.⁴ In 1833 he headed off to Western Reserve College in Hudson, a small Presbyterian school founded just seven years earlier. Ranney showed up “in a suit of homespun butternut.” The college supposedly had the same admission requirements as Yale, including knowledge of Greek and Latin, but it is doubtful that the college adhered to those standards; Ranney learned to read French on his own, but no one ever claimed that he knew the classical languages. Ranney taught and performed manual labor, as all students were expected to do, but gave up in the spring of 1834. He may have been disappointed with the college, although his attachment to the school in later years suggests a lifelong fondness for the institution. Perhaps financial hardship impelled him to turn to more practical pursuits. There is no way to tell if the college left any significant impression on Ranney, but possibly it helped shape his views on one issue that would become crucial for his political career. Shortly before Ranney’s arrival, the college became a center of antislavery agitation. Abolitionist proposals set off heated debates, but the idea of colonizing American blacks in Africa enjoyed nearly universal support. Ranney’s experience at the college during the formative days of the organized antislavery movement possibly implanted antislavery ideas in his mind, but the political record of his postcollegiate career reveals no sympathy with abolitionism.⁵

      Perhaps it was through political activities on campus or in the village that Ranney met lawyers and future abolitionist stalwarts Joshua R. Giddings and Benjamin F. Wade. Giddings and Wade, like Ranney, were the sons of farmers who had moved to the Western Reserve. Also like Ranney, they had had little formal education when they took up the study of law. In 1831 Giddings and Wade formed a law partnership in Jefferson, in Ashtabula County. In 1834 or 1835 the flourishing firm took Ranney on as a law student. He walked from his home to Jefferson, arriving with just the clothes he was wearing and an extra shirt tucked into his hat. In those days lawyers typically received their training as apprentices in the offices of established attorneys. They read whatever law books their mentors might possess, copied documents, ran errands, and generally observed the business of the office. After a time they presented themselves to an examining committee for admission to the bar. In Ohio the aspiring lawyer had to obtain a certificate from an attorney stating that the applicant had “regularly and attentively” studied law for two years, was of good moral character, and had the knowledge and ability to perform his professional duties. Two justices of the supreme court, or attorneys designated by them, then conducted an examination. According to Albert G. Riddle, another Western Reserve lawyer and politician, these requirements were not mere formalities. “The examinations were thorough and searching,” Riddle remembered, “often conducted by the judges themselves.” On the other hand, in 1845 future Ohio governor John Brough reportedly gained admission to the bar by treating the examining committee to the best bourbon in town. The nature of Ranney’s exam is unknown, but he passed, was admitted in Trumbull County in 1836, and set up practice in Warren.⁶

      There are no contemporary portraits, in pictures or words, of Ranney as a boy or young man, but two men who knew him provided descriptions in later years. In remarks at a banquet of the Cleveland bar in 1881, Portage County probate judge Daniel R. Tilden, a native New Englander several years older than Ranney, recalled Ranney as solemn-looking and “a little unsociable,” with “a sort of prescience . . . of the dignities and honors that awaited him in his profession.” Riddle, who was born in Hampden County, Massachusetts, less than three years after Ranney and was brought to Geauga County as an infant, made the real-life Ranney a character in a novel. Bart Ridgeley: A Story of Northern Ohio, published in 1873 but set in the 1830s, tells the story of a young law student who becomes Ranney’s close friend. Riddle describes Ranney as “above the usual height, broad and heavy-shouldered, with a massive head and strong face, a high narrow forehead; rather shy in manner, and taciturn,” yet able to indulge in a good laugh with friends. Ranney already had a reputation as “a man of strong, profound, ingenious mind, with much power of sarcasm,” and seemed “destined to a distinguished career.” Although Ranney went to church with Bart, he and Wade were suspected of having “no religion of any kind.”⁷

      Riddle attributes to the young Ranney a mature legal philosophy. When Bart asks whether “his lamp of genius” would aid a lawyer in his work, Ranney replies:

      It might, and he might be misled by its flare. He would do better to use the old lights of the law. Some are a little lurid, and

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