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Favorable or Unfavorable #12: Fisher Ames


vcczar

Favorable or Unfavorable #12: Fisher Ames  

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  1. 1. Did you read my first comment?

  2. 2. Favorable or Unfavorable #12: Fisher Ames



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Rep. Fisher Ames (MA-F). Considered the Federalists top orator. Died young, about the time Hamilton was killed. Losing both Ames and Hamilton, both under 50 years old, really hurt the Federalists. Imagine an 1812 election, which the Federalists were temporarily rebounding with both Hamilton and Ames active. 

His actions:

Ames, Fisher 1789 Suggests Bill of Rights would weaken public confidence in new Constitution
Ames, Fisher 1789 Breaks w/ fellow Federalists by opposing Thomas Willing as US Bank Pres
Ames, Fisher 1789 Federalist counterpart to Madison in US House
Ames, Fisher 1791 model for his party as pro-exec, anti-House
Ames, Fisher 1794 big speech against democratic (Jacobin) societies
Ames, Fisher 1794 Burned in effigy in Charleston, SC for pro-British positions
Ames, Fisher 1796 pro-Jay Treaty speech arguably saves the treaty
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Going with favorable, but really a mixed bag, probably a result of politics of the era being so divorced from modern day.  As I said when we were doing the other thing, if you had to label me in that era, "Pro-France Federalist" would be one of the simplest distillations, which of course isn't going to line up with many people who actually got into office.

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1 hour ago, OrangeP47 said:

Going with favorable, but really a mixed bag, probably a result of politics of the era being so divorced from modern day.  As I said when we were doing the other thing, if you had to label me in that era, "Pro-France Federalist" would be one of the simplest distillations, which of course isn't going to line up with many people who actually got into office.

Yeah. I would have been a Federalist wanting expanded suffrage. My closest analogy is James Wilson who, though a Federalist, was the first to advocate a popular vote. 

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3 minutes ago, vcczar said:

Yeah. I would have been a Federalist wanting expanded suffrage. My closest analogy is James Wilson who, though a Federalist, was the first to advocate a popular vote. 

Yeah, it's like, it's more an ideological thing than issue-positions a lot of the time in that era for me, and the DRs actually do have a lot of good issue positions... it's just this "rural farmer ideal" is really gross to me.

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4 minutes ago, OrangeP47 said:

Yeah, it's like, it's more an ideological thing than issue-positions a lot of the time in that era for me, and the DRs actually do have a lot of good issue positions... it's just this "rural farmer ideal" is really gross to me.

Yeah, it's not very future-oriented. It's nostalgic and idealistic. That's okay for an individual but not for a nation. Jefferson had to moderate as president, keeping the US bank, the tariff, and doing some Federalists things out of necessity. 

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5 minutes ago, vcczar said:

Yeah, it's not very future-oriented. It's nostalgic and idealistic. That's okay for an individual but not for a nation. Jefferson had to moderate as president, keeping the US bank, the tariff, and doing some Federalists things out of necessity. 

Yeah ironically the post War of 1812, pre-1824 election chaos era when everyone was jammed into one party they kinda "got it", it's just the Federalists had to die for it to happen (and not over those issues, but over the unrelated Hartford Convention).

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