Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,423

This is the grave of Robert Rantoul.

Born in 1805 in Beverly, Massachusetts, Rantoul grew up wealthy, went to Phillips Andover and then was on to Harvard, where he graduated in 1826. He was known for a pretty limitless mind, someone who had a deep commitment to education and personal improvement. He went into the law and was admitted to the bar in 1829.

It did not take Rantoul long to make an impression, largely because he bucked the conservative elite that dominated Massachusetts. He started in Salem and his first big case was a murder case. But this was the kind of case where the citizens of that town, a place where people would never ever assume guilt over innocence and then act on it using questionable means, believed that Rantoul’s client totally did it and were disgusted that the young lawyer would even defend such a scumbag. I have no idea of the merits of the case, but for Rantoul, everyone deserved a good legal defense. That principle still angers a lot of people today.

Well, this eventually forced Rantoul out of Salem. He moved around a bit and even got into the state legislature while he lived in Gloucester. In 1838, he moved to Boston and things got pretty interesting. He became the go-to lawyer for those fighting against the capitalist-conservative elite of that time, which controlled New England pretty thoroughly. This is the era of Daniel Webster, the era of capitalist consolidation, the era of child labor, the era of courts routinely ruling that anything that constituted “progress” was legally solid and anything getting in the way of said “progress” must be eliminated.

Rantoul led some really important cases around this point. Perhaps the most significant was in Commonwealth v. Hunt, which determined whether labor unions were legal.

Commonwealth v. Hunt originated with the Boston Journeyman Bootmakers’ Society, an early craft union. A worker named Jeremiah Horne agreed to do extra work on a pair of boots without charging for his labor. The Society fined Horne. He refused to pay, but his master did. But Horne was a jerk and kept breaking the rules. Finally, the Society demanded the master fire him and he did. Horne went to the Suffolk County Attorney to complain. He decided to prosecute the Bootmakers’ Society for unlawfully engaging in a criminal conspiracy to impoverish non-union members and their bosses. The trial began on October 14, 1840 and ended eight days later. The Bootmakers had a strong defense, crafted by Rantoul, who made a case that such combinations were common and unexceptional. The judge, Peter Oxenbridge Thacher, was however a rabid pro-business conservative Whig and told the jury that such actions would “render property insecure, and make it the spoil of the multitude, would annihilate property, and involve society in a common ruin.” So the workers lost. But they appealed and the case went to the Massachusetts Supreme Court.

Judge Lemuel Shaw ruled on the appeal. He wrote, “We cannot perceive, that it is criminal for men to agree together to exercise their own acknowledged rights, in such a manner as best to subserve their interests.” Now, Shaw was hardly a pro-worker judge. A mere one week earlier, his ruling in Farwell v. Boston and Worcester Rail Road Corporation created the precedent that employers had no responsibility for workplace safety or anything else concerning workers since they had chosen to work that job. In short, it laid the foundation that would get reinforced seven decades later in Lochner. But in this case, he ruled in a reasonable manner. It wasn’t a sweeping victory for workers. This only applied if their actions remained legal and their ends reasonable. Basically, it means-tested each strike and so long as it stayed within proper boundaries, that was OK. In other words, strikes for wages and hours might well be legal but strikes to challenge capitalism were not. Shaw took Rantoul’s legal reasoning almost fully, noting that there were no laws in Massachusetts against raising wages and so the appeal to English common law where there was precedent for that was irrelevant. Some have speculated that Shaw, a Whig himself, made a politically expedient decision and didn’t want to have a riled up Boston working class voting overwhelmingly for Democrats in the 1844 election. In any case, we don’t really know why he gave labor a rare favorable ruling that so clearly articulated the right to strike.

Among Rantoul’s other cases were defending those trying to get the right of Black men to vote in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, which was seen as “revolutionary” against the state. He also loathed the Fugitive Slave Act and was one of the leading Boston lawyers to fight it, representing the first slaves arrested under its odious provisions, including Thomas Sims. Rantoul was unable to win that case, but in the aftermath, it made Boston an almost impossible place to prosecute escaped slaves since mobs would form to free them and slavery ultimately relied on white people not caring about the fate of black people to survive.

Rantoul loathed the death penalty and fought his whole career against it. In fact, his speeches against the practice were not only reprinted in the U.S., but translated and reprinted throughout Europe. He was a big promoter of public education and founded New England’s first lyceum in 1828. He became U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts in 1846; as a strong Democrat, Polk named him to the position. This was when you could be an anti-slavery Democrat and still get a good patronage position in a party dominated by slaveholders, though this would soon change thanks largely to Polk’s Texas policies. In 1850, he decided to run for Congress. He won, but before his term started, Robert Winthrop stepped down from his Senate seat with a month to go. This was because Winthrop, named to the position when Webster stepped down the previous year to become Fillmore’s Secretary of State, had lost the election for a full term and so he petulantly refused to serve the last month of the term. So Rantoul got a month in the Senate and then Charles Sumner took over. Then he went into Congress when the new term started in 1851. Love antebellum politics.

Rantoul might have had a very useful role in the fight against slavery. But in 1852, Rantoul had erysipelas, which is a relatively common skin condition that is usually a rash. But it is caused by strep and when Rantoul had this attack, it killed him. He was 46 years old. Basically, the 19th century was just a time when anyone could die of anything at any time.

Robert Rantoul is buried in Central Cemetery, Beverly, Massachusetts.

If you would like to visit others who served in the Senate in 1851, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. George Wallace Jones is in Key West, Iowa (perhaps not the greatest of our nation’s Key Wests) and Lewis Cass is in Detroit. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.