[5] From his early years, Rantoul exhibited a precociousness, maturity, and love for learning that made an indelible impression on those around him.

"[7] At age 14, Rantoul enrolled at Phillips Academy, where he would study under the tutelage of the famous educator John Adams.

[8] Recalling Rantoul, one Andover classmate stated: "The trait which impressed me the most, was his unquestionable thirst for knowledge, which he sought for gratification in every field of human inquiry.

Whatever arrested his attention, whether it were a paper in the Spectator, a speech in Congress, a new poem by Lord Byron, or recent invention in the arts, it absorbed all his faculties, and was thoroughly mastered and digested before he left it.

[11] After graduating from Harvard in 1826, Rantoul began studying law in Salem, Massachusetts, under the tutelage of John Pickering and later under the Hon.

This unhappy state of affairs, made Rantoul all the more resolute in his decision to provide counsel to Knapps; Rantoul "felt in every way the unjust and sickening effects of this excited state of feeling in the public; an excitement which he regarded not only as hostile to the accused, but to the calmness and the fairness of judicial proceedings, in a case of life and death.

Unfortunately, the decision also came at a cost: for his role in the defense of Knapps, Rantoul lost many friends, earned widespread public ire, and was ultimately forced to leave Salem.

[16] In Boston, Rantoul would come across many of the same challenges that he faced as a young lawyer in Salem, namely opposition from the wealthy and elite whose political views differed so starkly from his own.

He had a sincere and just respect for mental power, exerted in any useful direction, and, especially, for that intelligence, which, triumphing over adverse circumstances, is able to secure success to enterprise and reward to industry.

He acknowledged no authority in an oligarchy of wealth; no other nobility than that conferred by beneficence to mankind, by services actually rendered to his fellow-creatures.

With this victory, Rantoul "succeeded in obtaining one of the completest triumphs that it ever fell to the lot of an American lawyer to achieve.

"[18] In 1842, Rantoul came to the defense of several individuals charged by the government with attempts "of a revolutionary character" for their efforts to extend suffrage to African-Americans in Massachusetts.

"[20] In order "[t]o unloose this unjust grasp of power, and to save some of the best citizens of Rhode Island from these anti-American and tyrannical modes of proceeding, Mr. Rantoul was employed as leading counsel; and he brought to bear, on the merits of the question, a force of reason, and an extent of learning, which startled and electrified the court, and a convincing eloquence, which drew involuntary outbursts of applause from a numerous and enlightened assembly .

Mr. Rantoul set forth the substantial benefits of this right, the growth of which he traced from the times of Alfred and Charlemagne, and conjured the court not to throw away a guarantee which had ripened under the varied experience of a thousand years, for a forced and unnatural construction of a statute, which was itself, at least, of very doubtful constitutionality.

among the ablest lawyers of his time, and committed to furthering just ends in all manners of cases, many of his strongest efforts to promote social justice came outside of the courtroom.

[27] Among these causes were the codification of the common law, the promotion of public education through lyceums, and the abolishment of capital punishment in the United States.

The subtle spirit of the Common Law is reason double distilled, till what was wholesome and nutritive becomes rank poison .

He extends his precedents, which were themselves the extension of others, till, by this accommodating principle, a whole system of law is built up without the authority or interference of the legislator.

Although the legal profession of the time continued the historical preference for the common law, one sees echoes of Rantoul's sentiments even today through efforts like the Restatements (summations of common law standards widely adopted by state legislatures as statute) and the judicial trend toward textualist interpretations.

At these Lyceums, Rantoul displayed "that remarkable aptitude for debate, that keen logical acuteness in argument, and those ready and ample resources of wit and learning which afterwards so distinguished him in the courts of law and the halls of legislation.

[33] His floor speeches on the subject of capital punishment were printed, and eventually became so widely distributed that they became regarded as authoritative in France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy.

Senator Charles Sumner stated in Congress: "Some of [Rantoul's] most devoted labors, commencing in the legislature of Massachusetts, were for the abolition of capital punishment.

Perhaps no person since the consummate jurist, Edward Livingston, has done so much by reports, articles, letters, and speeches, to commend this reform to the country.

a few days before his 47th birthday [36] In announcing his death, the Taunton Democrat printed, "Mr. Rantoul stood in the front rank of the legal profession.

Of the abolition of the death penalty, it may be said that he was its ablest advocate, and that he died, like John Quincy Adams, clothed in the armor of compromising hostility to what he deemed the encroachments of the institution of southern slavery.

"[37] Rantoul was the subject of a bust by the self-taught Massachusetts sculptor Joanna Quiner, cast in plaster and presented to the Boston Athenaeum in 1842;[38] it was the first sculpture by a woman to be shown there when it was exhibited in 1846, and remains in the collection.