The Jacksonian conservatism of Rufus P. Ranney : the politics and jurisprudence of a northern Democrat from the Age of Jackson to the Gilded Age / David M. Gold.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gold, David M., 1950- author.

Series:

Ohio University Press series on law, society, and politics in the Midwest

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ranney, R. P. (Rufus Percival), 1813-1891.

Ranney, R. P.

Judges--Ohio--Biography.

Judges.

Ohio.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

vii, 232 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Athens : Ohio University Press, [2017]

Summary:

Ohio's Rufus P. Ranney embodied many of the most intriguing social and political tensions of his time. He was an anticorporate campaigner who became John D. Rockefeller's favorite lawyer. A student and law partner of abolitionist Benjamin F. Wade, Ranney acquired an antislavery reputation and recruited troops for the Union army; but as a Democratic candidate for governor he denied the power of Congress to restrict slavery in the territories, and during the Civil War and Reconstruction he condemned Republican policies. Ranney was a key delegate at Ohio's second constitutional convention and a two-time justice of the Ohio Supreme Court. He advocated equality and limited government as understood by radical Jacksonian Democrats. Scholarly discussions of Jacksonian jurisprudence have primarily focused on a handful of United States Supreme Court cases covering a limited range of subjects, but Ranney's opinions, taken as a whole, reveal the broader impact of Jacksonian thought on judicial decision making. Ranney left no private papers, even destroying his own correspondence. In The Jacksonian Conservatism of Rufus P. Ranney, David M. Gold works with the public record to reveal the contours of Ranney's life and work. The result is a new look at how Jacksonian principles crossed the divide of the Civil War and became part of the fabric of American law and at how radical antebellum Democrats transformed themselves into Gilded Age conservatives. Book jacket.

Contents:

Western Reserve Democrat

The constitutional convention: corporations and citizens

The constitutional convention: government

Supreme Court judge

The Republican challenge

The great debates

Constitution and union

Conserving democracy

Conservative reform in the Gilded Age

Corporate lawyer

Elder statesman.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780821422342

0821422340

OCLC:

951955700