Works of Fisher Ames. - book reviews

National Review, March 9, 1984 by Forrest McDonald

Works of Fisher Ames

THE YANKEE DIALECT

IF SOMEONE should rank the Founding Fathers on a least-appreciated scale--one that weighed positive contributions to constitutional liberty along with negative recognition by posterity --first place would surely go to Fisher Ames, even as last place would go to Thomas Jefferson. Ames, an obscure Federalist from Dedham, Massachusetts, born in 1758, entered public life at the age of thirty as a delegate to his state's ratifying convention. On that occasion his eloquence and political skills may well have made the difference between his state's ratifying and not ratifying, and without that the Founding could not have happened. Shortly afterward he was elected to the First Congress, where, in the face of Madison's apostasy, he carried the cause of Washington's and Hamilton's nation-making measures.

Until 1796 he remained a tower of conservative strength in the increasingly radical House of Representatives, foiling with his brilliant oratory and his unquestioned wisdom and virtue the efforts of demagogues and ideologues to democratize and even Jacobinize the Constitution. Repeatedly, befuddled opponents said to him, "I don't understand it. We have the majority and you carry every major issue.' Then his health broke and he was forced to retire from the political arena, though he continued to write occasional political essays and to advise Federalist leaders. He lived, mostly in debility and pain, for another dozen years, during which Jeffersonians took control of the national government; and then he expired, convinced that the Constitution and the Republic would soon follow him to the grave.

The Republic survived, despite itself and despite the folly of its leaders after 1796, though it scarcely deserved to do so; and Ames, as an early-nineteenth-century prophet of doom, all but faded from memory. After his death his friends and admirers caused the publication of some of his more memorable public addresses and writings, and in 1856 his son Seth Ames published a two-volume collection of his works and letters. One of his greatest speeches was memorized by a generation of aspiring orators, including Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln, but otherwise no one paid much attention to the publications. The volumes went out of print, and though they contained invaluable information for historians, few historians consulted them except to cite them as examples of Federalist extremism.

In recent years, however, more and more conservatives have chanced upon Ames's Works, and have realized that here was a man who, if not quite on a par with Hamilton or Burke, was not far behind them, and was in some ways more sagacious than either. Word began to get around; and two or three years ago some of the perceptive folks at the Liberty Fund, in Indianapolis, conceived the idea of republishing his works. They engaged the extremely able political scientist W. B. Allen, of Harvey Mudd College, to supervise the project; the choice was a happy one, for Allen found and included 23 essays, 85 letters, and a considerable number of speeches that had not been published in the original collection. The result is the magnificent work at hand.

Quite in addition to their value for historians, the documents speak powerfully to our times. Readers who are not intimately acquainted with the history of the period, for instance, may be surprised to learn that the early Republic was infested by a "hive,' fully as pernicious and dangerous as the modern hive that two of NR's contributors have described so skillfully. The fall of the Bastille took place just as the government under the Constitution was being established. In France the course of events was precisely what Americans had been taught was an inevitable sequence: Constitutional monarchy gave way to republicanism, which gave way to democracy, which degenerated into mob rule, which was ended only by resort to military dictatorship. Yet there were Frenchmen, and Americans too, who fervently believed that this was a progression toward a libertarian millennium. (Jefferson, apropos of the Terror: "Rather than [that the French Revolution] should have failed I would have seen half the earth desolated; were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.') In nation after nation of Europe, French agents and their dupes undermined governments and roused popular discontents, and then the powerful French army rolled in and enslaved the masses in the name of liberation. In America, the enemies of the Washington Administration were diverse--old anti-Federalist foes of the Constitution, democratic ideologues, Jacobin ideologues, power-hungry demagogues, and a variety of economically interested groups--but, as Ames put it, they all "spoke French.' And he added, pithily, "I prefer the Yankee dialect.'

Ames was especially telling in his criticism of ideologues of any description. "In political affairs,' he wrote, "there are no more self-conceited blunderers than the statesmen who affect to proceed, in all cases, without regard to circumstances, but solely according to speculative principles.' The pre-1787 constitution-makers in America, he believed, had generally been of that sort. For his own part, he preferred to be guided by the prescriptions of history, agreeing with the proposition that "history is philosophy teaching by example.' Experience was also a valuable guide, but it was too often dearly bought ("Experience must be our physician, though his medicines may kill'; and again, "Experience, though she teaches wisdom, teaches it late').