Robert Jr. Rantoul

• Robert Rantoul
• Born: April 13, 1805
• Died: August 7, 1852

Was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, the second child and first son among the seven children (five daughters, two sons) of Robert Rantoul and Joanna (Lovett) Rantoul. His father, an apothecary and son of a Scottish immigrant, was prominent in Massachusetts public life as a state legislator, delegate to the constitutional conventions of 1820 and 1823, and opponent of capital punishment. A liberal Unitarian, he was active in temperance and peace movements and an advocate of education for the working class, to further which he established one of the first Sunday schools in America. In later years the son furthered the father’s work in all of these reforms.

Robert Rantoul Jr. attended Andover and Harvard College, from which he was graduated in 1826. He began the practice of law in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1829. In 1831 he married Jane Elizabeth Woodbury. They had two sons, Robert Samuel, born in 1832; and Charles William, born in 1839.

Throughout his career Rantoul was both a reformer and a practical, ambitious politician. A strong Jacksonian like his father, he supported Jackson’s veto of the charter of the bank of the United States, the removal of its deposits, the independent subtreasury system, and free trade. As a member of the judiciary committee of the state legislature he prepared a widely circulated report advocating abolition of the death penalty, on the ground of both humanity and expediency. Believing with many Jacksonians that the common law had become an instrument of class oppression through the wide discretionary power it granted to judges, he favored written codes of law, and succeeded in having a special committee appointed to investigate the question. His frequent arguments on economic affairs showed a strong grasp of the subject. He inveighed against paper money as the cause of overspeculation and depression, advocated strict limits on the powers granted in corporate charters, and was largely responsible for defeating the plan of Boston merchants for a $10 million bank in 1836.

Both in the lobby and on the floor Rantoul was the most effective Democrat in the legislature, where he sharpened the debating skill for which he was remembered at Harvard. Slender, quick, and witty, Rantoul delivered his sometimes earnest, sometimes savagely indignant speeches with an excitement reflected in his pale, sallow face as he goaded, slashed, and usually destroyed the arguments of his opponents. Never identifying himself with the wealth and power of either Boston or Harvard, he spoke out against the interests of both in defending the state’s right to build a toll-free bridge over the Charles River, thus endangering the profits of the Warren toll bridge in which both Harvard and many prominent Bostonians were large stockholders. His arguments were upheld by the United States Supreme Court in the Charles River bridge decision (1842).

After returning to private practice, Rantoul continued to support Jacksonian causes. His arguments in the conspiracy trial of the Boston bootmakers were sustained by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in the case of Commonwealth v. Hunt, which opened the door to legal recognition of labor unions. In the same year Rantoul defended some of the Rhode Islanders charged with treason in the struggle for popular government known as the Dorr Rebellion. A foe of religious bigotry, he favored state indemnification of the Ursuline order, whose convent had been burned down by a Charlestown mob. In the interests of the working man he supported a shorter (ten-hour) work day as well as the lyceum and public education movements. From 1837 to 1842 he served on the first Massachusetts school board. Although fundamentally a believer in moral suasion and education as the way to temperance reform, he supported the fifteen-gallon liquor law over the objections of party leaders, and favored legal sanctions against dealers who sold liquor to those known to make bad use of it.

During this period, however, Rantoul was moving closer to the conservative wing of the Democratic party, now strengthened by the patronage of President John Tyler. His recess appointment as collector of the port of Boston was rejected in 1844 by the Senate, which in 1846 confirmed his recess appointment as district attorney for Massachusetts.

In the mid-1840s Rantoul’s political ambitions and financial interests coincided with his Jacksonian philosophy to make him an ardent expansionist and advocate of cheap land in the West, which he viewed as labor’s surest defense against Whiggish attempts to drive wages down to starvation levels. He became the political agent for eastern interests in obtaining a charter for the Illinois Central Railroad that was highly favorable to the corporation, maneuvering adroitly around the objections of state legislator Abraham Lincoln, who years later laughingly told the story to Rantoul’s son. His heavy investments in shaky midwestern business enterprises brought Rantoul to financial ruin, and undoubtedly hastened his early death just as he reached the summit of his political career.

The ascendancy of the slavery issue in the 1840s produced a new tension in Rantoul’s political loyalties, and gradually his antislavery opinions forced him back into the radical wing of the Democratic party. Like many other anti-slavery Democrats he resisted pressures to support the Free Soil candidacy of Martin Van Buren in 1848, but his outrage over the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 led him to campaign for Congress supported by a coalition of Free-Soilers and antislavery Democrats. In 1851 the coalition elected him to fill out the unexpired U.S. Senate term of Daniel Webster, now President Millard Fillmore’s secretary of state. Even after being unseated from the Democratic national convention because of his views, he supported the party platform it adopted, which pledged faithful execution of the Compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Law, without endorsing it. His sudden death in Washington that same summer cut short a promising career summed up by his old friend John Greenleaf Whittier:

We saw his great powers misapplied To poor ambitions; yet, through all, We saw him take the weaker side, And right the wrong, and free the thrall.

For biographical information, see L. Hamilton, ed., Memoirs, Speeches and Writings of Robert Rantoul (1854); “Rantoul,” in The Complete Poetical Works of John Green-leaf Whittier (1900); and genealogical material in vols. V and VI, Essex institute Historical Collections. See also R. S. Rantoul, Personal Recollection; The Dictionary of American Biography; and M. S. Curti, “Robert Rantoul, Jr.: The Reformer in Politics,” New England Quarterly. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (1945) and A. Nevins, Ordeal of Union, vols. I and II (1947) set Rantoul’s career in context.