"HIGHER FOR ITS OBJECT":

Despite his growing melancholy, Ames managed to parlay early success as a country lawyer into a seat at Massachusetts's constitutional ratifying convention. From there he upset Samuel Adams in the nation's first congressional elections in 1788. Once in Congress, he helped author the First Amendment, played a vital role in lobbying for Alexander Hamilton's financial policies, and wrote the lower house's address to Washington when he retired from the presidency. Most famously, he arose in opposition to Jefferson's Republicans on the question of funding Jay's Treaty. His words movingly evoked the faith that composes a nation and binds its pledges to others:

What is patriotism? Is it a narrow affection for the spot where a man was born? Are the very clods where we tread entitled to this ardent preference because they are greener? No, sir; that is not the character of the virtue, and it soars higher for its object. It is an extended self-love, mingling with all the enjoyments of life, and twisting itself with the minutest filaments of the heart. It is thus we obey the laws of society, because they are the laws of virtue. In their authority we see, not the array of force and terror, but the venerable image of our country's honor. Every good citizen makes that honor his own, and cherishes it not only as precious, but as sacred. He is willing to risk his life in its defense, and is conscious that he gains protection while he gives it.

For what rights of a citizen will be deemed inviolable when a state renounces the principles that constitute their security? Or if his life should not be invaded, what would its enjoyments be in a country odious in the eyes of strangers and dishonored in his own? Could he look with affection and veneration to such a country as his parent? The sense of having one would die within him; he would blush for his patriotism, if he retained any, and justly, for it would be a vice. He would be a banished man in his native land.

Funding of the treaty helped stay a war with Britain and ushered in a decade of prosperous trade with the country from which we won independence.

Successes notwithstanding, Ames was forced to forego reelection in 1796 due to declining health. To his chagrin, nothing he achieved while in office seemed to carry any lasting influence. The United States were shifting culturally and electorally. The Federalists were declining as a party. The Republicans--the "Jeffs" as he called them--were growing. Soon, war with Britain would come; France under Napoleon would loom as a threat; rights-speak would become the vernacular of the governed as well as the governors; and Jefferson's shadow would forever cast itself upon the nation.

Ames believed that there was little he and like-minded Federalists could do but "mitigate a tyranny." His outlook not only struck many of his contemporaries as alarmist, but later thinkers--even conservatives--tended to agree. Russell Kirk, in The Conservative Mind, wrote, "Ames was wrong, so far as the immediate future was concerned; for already a counterbalance to American radicalism was making its weight felt. That saving influence was in part the product of an innate moderation in the planter society Jefferson represented."

But Jefferson's planter society happened to have hung its hat on an immoderate--and infamously peculiar--institution. And whatever Federalist ideals were in place before Reconstruction, we lost them in its wake.

Ames's philosophy can be summed up as follows: the "power of the people, if uncontroverted, is licentious and mobbish." But if checked by a powerful and well-led state, a more virtuous citizenry could be procured, one that feels a "love of country diffused through the Society and ardent in each individual, that would dispose, or rather impel every one to do or suffer much for his country, and permit no one to do anything against it."

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