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.”
He realized, however, that a republican state cannot coincide with a democratic state—into which he perceived us slipping—and a democratic state cannot nurture a more virtuous citizenry. “A democratick society will soon find its morals the incumbrance of its race, the surly companion of its licentious joys. … In a word there will not be morals without justice; and though justice might possibly support a democracy, yet a democracy cannot possibly support justice.”
He warned of “schemes of an abolition of debts and an equal distribution of property” that would be “pursued with unremitting industry.” For Ames, the truth was that “our country is too big for union, too sordid for patriotism, too democratick for liberty. What is to become of it? He who made it best knows. Its vice will govern it, by practising upon its folly. This is ordained for democracies.”