In the past, Christie joked with reporters that he would have to go to great lengths to put an end to those pesky questions about his candidacy for president or vice president.

“Apparently I actually have to commit suicide to convince people I’m not running,” he commented in February.

Chris Christie. Image via Walter Burns/Wikimedia Commons.

But recently, Christie dropped hints he would possibly consider an invite from Romney to be his running mate.

On Wednesday, polling data from Quinnipiac University showed that Christie as a GOP running mate wouldn’t be a factor in New Jersey for most voters in the November election.

New Jersey could be in play as a swing state if Christie could deliver it to Romney, but so far, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

“Christie gives no measurable boost to the Republican presidential effort in the Garden State as a ticket of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney with Gov. Christie running for vice president trails President Barack Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden 50-42 percent,” Quinnipiac said in a press release.

The big reason: Voters in the Garden State can’t picture the blustery Christie as taking a second seat to anymore, including Romney.

Historically, the odds are really against Christie if he ran with Romney and then lost the general election.

The only recent losing vice presidential candidate to later win an election as president was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who ran an a virtual unknown in 1920 on the Democratic ticket. It took another 12 years for FDR to get elected as president.

Technically, James K. Polk was also a losing vice presidential candidate who won a general election four years later, because he received one electoral vote as vice president in 1840, in a different system used to pick candidates.

However, Polk was voted out of office in Tennessee in 1841 as governor–not a great omen for Christie, if he chose to run for the veep position and lost.

Scott Bomboy is the editor-in-chief of Constitution Daily.

On May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court issued its decision on Plessy v. Ferguson. The ruling established the “separate but equal” doctrine that allowed states to offer separate facilities to different races.

On May 17, 1954, Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education, overturning the Plessy v. Ferguson case.

In the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, several southern states refuse to integrate facilities, leading to some of the most dramatic public moments of the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower sent Army troops to Arkansas after that state’s governor tried to use the state guard to block integration at a high school.

And in 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace try to bar African-American students from a state university, without success.

Now here’s another addition we’d love to see on “America’s Got Talent”: U.S. presidents. Although the historical presidents might be tricky, here are five presidents that should be at the top of the audition list.

President Barack Obama

President Obama recently revealed his vocal skills, coolly crooning a line from Al Green and slow-jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon.

President Bill Clinton

President Clinton played the saxophone throughout high school and, according to his biography My Life, even considered pursuing a career as a musician. Although he obviously pursued another career, the paths of musician and politician crossed when his he performed sax solos on the campaign trail.

President Harry Truman

Although he was modest about his talent, President Truman was an ardent pianist. According to the Truman Library & Museum, as a boy he woke up at five in the morning to practice, and later in life he said that if he had been a good pianist he never would have become president. His skills may have come in handy as president, though. In 1945, as he performed for an audience in Missouri, he winked and quipped: “When I played this, Stalin signed the Potsdam Agreement.”

President James Garfield

Let’s not forget that there are other talents besides singing and dancing. Enter James Garfield, the 20th president, who was both ambidextrous and multilingual. The impressive part: he could write in two languages at the same time–Greek with the left hand and Latin with the right.

President George Washington

The father of our country also ruled on the dance floor. One observer extolled: “The ball was opened by his Excellency the General. When this man unbends from his station, and its weighty functions, he is even then like a philosopher, who mixes with the amusements of the world, that he may teach it what is right, or turn trifles into instruction.”

Check out a re-enactment of a dance inspired by George Washington below.

Runners-up

Three other presidents could be interesting contestants: Thomas Jefferson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.

President Jefferson played three instruments and composed his own music, while Reagan was trained in all things entertainment as a contract actor for Warner Brothers back in the golden age of Hollywood.

And Richard Nixon would be a wild-card contestant. He played piano and wrote music—and made a big splash in the 1968 presidential election when he appeared on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.”

If NBC wants to really make the most of its show, it should certainly consider making “America’s Got Talent” a presidential affair.

Holly Munson is a programs coordinator at the National Constitution Center and the assistant editor of Constitution Daily.

On May 13, 1846, the United States Congress declared war on Mexico after a request from President James Knox Polk. Then, on May 26, 1848, both sides ratified the peace treaty that ended the conflict.

In between those dates was enough drama to last for generations and the appearance of some familiar names that would dominate the Civil War, from Abraham Lincoln to General Robert E. Lee.

To save space and make a long story short, the conflict centered on the independent republic of Texas, which opted to join the United States after establishing its independence from Mexico a decade earlier.

Mexico considered that an act of war, and after border skirmishes, President Polk asked for the war declaration, since in the Constitution, only the House of Representatives can declare a war (as in Article I, Section 8).

In the fighting that followed, the mostly volunteer United States military secured control of Mexico after a series of battles, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed on February 2, 1848.

The pact set a border between Texas and Mexico, and ceded  California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming to the United States.

In today’s terms, those 10 states account for 136 electoral votes, more than half of the votes needed to secure a win in a presidential election.

It also cut the territorial size of Mexico in half.

One underlying issue behind the war was slavery, and how addition of states and territories would alter the balance between free and slave states.

The Missouri Compromise of 1850 attempted to appease Southern concerns about the shifting balances, but the die was cast as the nation headed toward the Civil War in 1861.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo also set in motion a whole range of issues for Mexican-Americans and Native Americans.

During the conflict, one of the vocal objectors in the Whip party was Rep. Abraham Lincoln from Illinois. Key players on the political side included Jefferson Davis and Stephen Douglas.

On the battlefield, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant and Stonewall Jackson were among the dozens of commanders who would later emerge in the Civil War.

Scott Bomboy is the editor-in-chief of Constitution Daily.

Buchanan has long been the subject of rumors about his private life, but there isn’t concrete proof one way or another. (It doesn’t help that Buchanan was one of the most obscure of all the presidents.)

The personal lives of presidents have long been the source of speculation, exaggeration, and even fabrication.

Even before then, our nation had plenty of scandal fodder–thanks to the mystery and intrigue of some of the Founding Fathers.

Last year, The National Constitution Center’s Mark Kehres took us on a tour of the Signers’ Hall and lets us in on some personal facts about the men who framed the Constitution.

The reaction to the Newsweek cover was widespread and also led to a lot of attention to James Buchanan, who was in Google’s top 20 trends list for two days.

It turns out Newsweek had considered multiple covers with photo shopped images of President Obama with different same-sex marriage symbols.

As for Buchanan, aside from renewed speculation about his personal life, the renewed attention could focus more light on the president who preceded Abraham Lincoln.

Buchanan hasn’t received high grades from historians, but he did make key decisions that precipitated the Civil War.

The survey from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press showed the majority of those polled, about 52 percent, didn’t have any change in their opinion of the president after he told ABC News he was in favor of same-sex marriages.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

And while the Pew survey didn’t draw any conclusions about the president’s decision, or address the election, a brief look at its numbers shows that the same-sex marriage decision may not have a big direct effect on his re-election campaign.

About 25 percent of those polled by Pew said the decision lessened their opinion of President Obama, while 19 percent said they had a more favorable opinion.

But given the already clear divide among voters with a political preference,  and known preferences based on age and education, Obama’s announcement doesn’t seem to have “moved the needle” in the re-election process.

In fact, 53 percent of Republicans surveyed said the president’s statement increased their negative opinion of him.

In areas key to the Obama campaign, like his popularity among Independents and young voters, the same-sex marriage decision didn’t appear to change people’s minds.

Among Independents, about 60 percent said the decision had no effect on them at all, while an equal number had more positive or negative opinions of the president.

And 62 percent of young voters said the decision had no impact on them.

The youth vote could be a key to Obama’s re-election, and with jobless numbers at high levels among young workers, the president might need to work to get the youth-vote support he had in 2008.

The Wall Street Journal said on Monday that several conservative groups have formed a Super PAC to target disenfranchised young voters.

A February survey from Pew showed that young workers remained optimistic, despite facing the toughest job climate for their age group in decades.

More than 82 percent of people in that Pew survey from February said finding a job was harder for young adults now than it was for their parents’ generation.

But optimism among young workers remained at 2004 levels, and they were more optimistic than older people in the survey.

The decision may have a indirect affect on the Obama campaign as it seeks donations from sectors like the entertainment industry.

Scott Bomboy is the editor-in-chief of Constitution Daily.

In a statement to his supporters on his website, Paul said “we will no longer spend resources campaigning in primaries in states that have not yet voted.  Doing so with any hope of success would take many tens of millions of dollars we simply do not have. “

Paul didn’t officially drop from the presidential primary race and he urged supporters to “make sure you get to the polls and make your voices heard, particularly in the local, state, and Congressional elections.”

His campaign also said it would pursue  “fruitful delegate-attainment strategy still occurring at delegate-selection events such as state conventions.”

Paul also urged supporters to run for office. The GOP convention is in Tampa in August and Paul is expected to have a presence at the event.

The court decided on Monday to not consider an appeal requesting a vote in Congress for the territory.

The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had upheld a lower court decision to toss out a lawsuit seeking the vote, saying that only a state could have voting members in Congress. The Supreme Court passed on hearing an appeal of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision.

As a territory, Puerto Rico residents have U.S. citizenship, and they can serve in the military, but they can’t vote in presidential elections. (However, Puerto Rico has a role in the presidential primary system.)

Puerto Rico has one nonvoting congressional representative who is called a Representative Commissioner. The Commissioner serves a four-year term and can vote in House committees.

According to a 2011 briefing paper from the Congressional Research Service, there have been efforts to grant more state-like rights to Puerto Rico, over the years, without the territory becoming a state.

But there has been little success in gaining benefits like a voting House representative or other measures beyond what other U.S. territories have.

The last public vote on changing Puerto Rico’s status was in 1998, when a plebiscite held in the territory was inconclusive.

El Nuevo Dia, a popular news website in Puerto Rico, said attorney Gregorio Igartua had filed other appeals in past years unsuccessfully in the case.

Scott Bomboy is the editor-in-chief of Constitution Daily.

However, two of the biggest names were there, James Madison and George Washington, 11 days before the historic sessions began in earnest.

The movers-and-shakers behind the convention set May 14, 1787 as the start date, knowing it was a target date and a quorum of official delegates from seven of the 13 states needed to be in the room to start the convention.

According to notes from James Madison and other sources, there might have been eight delegates in Philadelphia on May 14, including Madison, Washington and members of the Pennsylvania delegation.

The logistics of travel in the 18th century made it difficult to journey from the Deep South to Philadelphia, and even travel from New England took days.

Some states were also determining their delegations, while other people already selected as delegates were wrapping up their business and personal lives.

By May 25th, there were 24 delegates in session in Philadelphia representing seven states, and that was enough to start the proceedings.  (Delegates from two other states were there, but not enough to form a quorum for Georgia and Massachusetts.)

Here is a list of the attendance record for the convention, from the website TeachingAmericanHistory.org that shows who showed up when for the convention.

Among those missing on May 25 were Elbridge Gerry and Roger Sherman, who would later play key roles at the convention, and Benjamin Franklin, who was not in attendance.

Franklin was 81 years old at the time of the convention and attended when his health
allowed him to do so. He arrived on May 28 and managed to be at most of the sessions.

Franklin lived two blocks away from Independence Hall.

Scott Bomboy is the editor-in-chief of Constitution Daily.

(Author’s note: While doing research for my book on the House of Representatives, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives,” I became more interested in one of its great early members, Fisher Ames, than space in the book would allow. Following are two sections on Ames that might make one wistful for a bygone era when division did not guarantee dysfunction.)

Click here for more information on “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives.”

Fisher Ames arrived in New York City by stagecoach on February 28, 1789, four days ahead of schedule. He disembarked with his belongings at a boarding house on 15 Great Dock Street, a short walk from where he and his colleagues in the 1^st Federal Congress would soon be convening.

Ames was, as of this moment, a resident of his young nation’s capital. Hardly did it resemble the “city upon a hill” envisioned by John Winthrop a century and a half before. The British army had deserted New York less than six years ago. The great fires of 1776 and 1778 had left whole neighborhoods in ruins. Pigs foraged along the reeking streets. Still, the population had climbed to 24,000. Tavern lights haloed the port. A wholesale renovation of the capital’s streets and docks was underway. This was America in its infancy—bloodied, impoverished, recklessly exuberant and in dire need of the coherency men like Fisher Ames were counted on to bring to it.

Ames was 30 years old. He had grown up in the inert country town of Dedham, Mass., nine miles south of Boston, descended from a long line of doctors and farmers. A bachelor (though with designs on a Springfield girl he would eventually wed), above average in height, with eyes that one contemporary would describe as “expressive of benignity and intelligence,” the young statesman possessed ambition “of that purified sort, which is rather the desire of excellence than the reputation of it.”

At the age of six he had begun to study Latin. At age 12, he was admitted to Harvard. The early deaths of his father and two of his brothers, combined with the torments of an abusive stepfather, had imbued in Fisher Ames an acute state of melancholy without for a second slowing him down. In short order the young man became a military volunteer against the British, then a Dedham town delegate, then a lawyer, then a columnist pleading for the immediate formation of a sturdy republic.

In January of 1788, the villagers of Dedham dispatched Ames to Boston to debate the newly drafted federal Constitution.  “If we adopt it,” the delegate told the divided assembly in his concluding speech, “we shall demonstrate to the sneering world,  who deride liberty because they have lost it, that the principles of our government are as free as the spirit of the people.” The Massachusetts Convention voted to ratify the Constitution, 187 to 168.

Ames pulls off early election upset

One year later on January 7, 1789, Ames pulled off an astonishing upset in the race to become one of Massachusetts’ members of the 1^st Federal Congress, beating out the venerable Samuel Adams by a grand total of 11 votes. By the end of this year, the Dedham physician’s son would be widely regarded as the nation’s greatest orator.

Ames was a Federalist. While he detested monarchy, he also maintained that “a democracy is a volcano, which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction…The people always mean right, and if time is allowed for reflection and information, they will do right. I would not have the first wish, the momentary impulse of the publick mind, become law.” For this reason, the Massachusetts delegate at the Constitutional Convention had pressed for biennial rather than annual elections to the House: “Will any man say that the national business can be understood in one year?”

Patriotism, Ames observed, was not “a narrow affection for the spot where a man was born,” but instead sprang from “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.” The question soon before the 60 newly elected representatives would be how to codify that honor. At this early juncture, the United States possessed little to bond them, apart from hatred of tyranny. “Our liberties cannot be preserved without union,” Ames warned. In this state of urgency he waited for Congress to convene.

The appointed day was March 4. Bells rang and cannons fired that morning to commemorate the moment. But only Ames and 12 of his colleagues had made it to New York, insufficient for a quorum. Anxious bulletins were sent out to the derelict, more than once. Alas, travel by water or by land was equally fraught with mishap in that era. Days became weeks. Ames was quietly going crazy waiting. “This is a very mortifying situation,” he wrote, adding, “The public will forget the government before it is born.”

Finally, on Wednesday, April 1, the western Pennsylvanian Thomas Scott arrived in town and a quorum of thirty was thereby constituted. They gathered in the former city hall, just recently re-imagined as the new seat of the American empire by the skilled architect Major Pierre-Charles L’Enfant at a cost of $65,000 by several wealthy New Yorkers, and renamed Federal Hall. The first Speaker, Frederick Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania, rapped the gavel. Upstairs, the Senate had yet to convene. Upon reaching a quorum on April 5, the Senate kept its doors closed to the public, and continued to do so for the next six years. On April 9, the “lower body” decided on the opposite approach: Muhlenberg ordered that the doors be thrown open. The citizens and journalists of New York filed in and proceeded to the upper gallery, where they munched noisily on peanuts while observing America’s foray into republican democracy.

First weeks of first Congress

Sitting at his desk in Federal Hall during those first weeks, Fisher Ames scribbled his ongoing observations with such proficiency that his colleagues soon nicknamed him the Secretary of State. Of the members, he wrote, “There are few shining geniuses…Many who expected a Roman senate, when the doors shall be opened, will be disappointed.” One colleague he described as “superficial, arrogant and rapacious”; another he more generously appraised as “plausible, though not over civil.” The esteemed Virginian, James Madison, Ames found to be “very much Frenchified in his politics” and “too timid”—yet intellectually formidable: “He is our first man.” In all, Ames allowed, they were “sober, solid, old-charter folks.” Only two of the sixty-five original members (including the five representatives from North Carolina, which joined the Union in 1790) were new to public service.

The newly elected president, General George Washington, arrived in New York by boat on the 23^rd, and a week later he was inaugurated before Congress. Young Ames had been one of the seven men appointed to oversee the great man’s reception. The freshman sat in the Senate chamber during that first inaugural address, unable to contain his awe. “Time has made havoc upon his face,” he would recall of Washington. “His aspect grave, almost to sadness; his modesty, actually shaking; his voice deep, a little tremulous, and so low as to call for close attention; added to the series of objects presented to the mind, and overwhelming it, produced emotions of the most affecting kind upon the members. I…sat entranced.”

The House’s first major legislative business that spring was the fulfillment of its primary Constitutional authority: the power of the purse. In this case, the lower body considered how to finance its war debt with impost taxes. Madison urged an eight-cent per gallon tax on molasses. In his maiden speech on the House floor, Fisher Ames argued that such a duty would cripple his state’s economy, because the Massachusetts fishermen swapped their catch on the open seas with producers of molasses, which was then transported back home to rum distilleries. Ames proposed a more limited tax and by a roll call vote trounced Madison, 41 to 8. “I think Mr. Madison was chagrined,” Ames wrote.

The freshman’s star was rising. “Ames makes a very pretty figure, let me congratulate you on his fame,” Vice President John Adams wrote a Massachusetts friend that year. Another observer found his speeches to possess “the most elegant language of any man in the House.” Ames confessed to a friend that his mind was “crazed with the chase” of politics—that it was hard to imagine returning “to the humble drudgery of earning bread.” Still he worried. His colleagues were endlessly jousting over minutiae: “We correct spelling, or erase `may’ and insert `shall,’ and Quidde in a manner which provokes me.” He feared that they were losing sight of the big picture. In particular, he found fault with the “southern nabobs” who “would not make the law, but the people, king.” He termed them “violent republicans.” To a friend he wrote, “I am commonly opposed to those who modestly assume the rank of champions of liberty, and make a very patriotic noise about the people. It is the stale artifice which has duped the world a thousand times, and yet, though detected, it is still successful. I love liberty as well as anybody…But I would guard it by making the laws strong enough to protect it.”

Laying the foundation of government

That spring and summer, the House would lay the foundations for a federal government. After first standing up an Executive Branch, they established a Treasury department and a federal bank. They instituted a federal judiciary—despite attempts by the South Carolinians to confer nearly all power on state courts, prompting Ames to argue, “A government that may make but cannot enforce laws, cannot last long, nor do good.”

On May 4, Madison introduced his much-anticipated Amendments to the Constitution. Ames was initially scornful, believing them to “stimulate the stomach as little as hasty-pudding”—a sop to Patrick Henry and other anti-Federalists, and ultimately a ploy to gain Madison “some popularity, which he wishes.” He hated to see Congress’s important work bog down in a protracted, acutely public rehashing of the already-ratified Constitution. In the nation’s frail state, Ames yearned to see allegiance to the republic rather than obsessing over individual rights: “I wish to have every American think the union so indissoluble and integral, that the corn would not grow, nor the pot boil, if it should be broken.”

Still, Ames was a realist. The hot-button issue of last year’s elections had been the public’s desire to codify individual liberties lest the federal government slowly assume a state of monarchy. He decided to engage constructively, so that the end product would “not be trash.” On August 15, 1789, New Hampshire representative Samuel Livermore clarified Madison’s then-Third Amendment to read, “Congress shall make no laws touching religion, or infringing the rights of conscience.” Ames mulled over the language. He was a New Englander; the clergy’s role in public life there was centuries old. The Virginians, with a less entrenched religiosity, had been conspicuously muted on the topic.

On August 20, Ames proposed a more focused revision to the Amendment: “Congress shall make no law establishing religion, or to prevent the free exercise thereof, or to infringe the rights of conscience.”

His language passed, was eventually ratified by the States and, after other provisions failed to do so, became the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Far from a Roman senate

On a Friday afternoon in midsummer 1789 Fisher Ames and nine of his fellow House members took momentary leave of their work. According to a newspaper, they “set out on a party of pleasure to take a view of West Point and the Hudson River, on board of Captain North…” They spent the night in West Point. On Saturday morning the 10 congressmen went for a march up to Fort Putnam, then set sail for Poughkeepsie, where they dined and spent their Sunday. The headwinds back to the capital city were rough; they arrived back in time for session on Monday morning, albeit with spinning heads, wrote one passenger: “my head is so deranged that the room, tables & chairs seem in motion.”

Even holiday was rigor. Still, there they had been, 10 congressmen from North and South, patrician and not, all in the same vessel. Fisher Ames, prone to despairing, was beginning to see some promise in the lower body, where he would ultimately spend four terms. “There is no intrigue, no caucusing, little of clanning together, little asperity in debate, or personal bitterness out of the House,” he wrote a friend after the outing.

“And yet,” he could not resist adding, “it is very far from being a Roman Senate.”

The legacy of Fisher Ames

Fisher Ames died of an unknown infirmity at the age of 50 on the 4^th of July, 1808, 32 years to the day after his beloved nation had declared its independence from England.

He had served four terms in the House, retiring at the age of 38. Along the way, the eloquent politician with an artist’s despairing core shaped an infant country in ways that must have seemed trivial at the time. It was Ames who provided the final language to the First Amendment. It was also Ames whose fear of an unwieldy and factionalized House compelled him to press hard for a larger proportion of representation and thus fewer members—which displayed prescience in a losing cause. It was Ames as well who helped beat back an attempt by Southern members to change the presidential line of succession from House Speaker to Secretary of State (at the time occupied by Southerner Thomas Jefferson). And it was apparently Fisher Ames who, in 1790, invited ladies to sit in the House gallery for the first time.

It was indubitably Fisher Ames whose April 28, 1796 floor speech moved his colleagues to sign the Jay Treaty with Great Britain and thus avert war—employing oratory that would gain worldwide attention: “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…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.”

But as another Massachusetts congressman, Tip O’Neill, would say two centuries later, “All politics is local.” Fisher Ames’ wariness of democracy’s “volcano” earned him ridicule as an elitist back home. He won a second term with nearly 74% of the vote. During his third race in 1794, however, Ames was accused of voting “to enlarge British imports which would increase the value of his stocks.” Noting Ames’ far closer 57-43 victory that year, Madison gossiped to Jefferson that “Ames is said to owe his success to the votes of Negroes and British sailors smuggled under a very lax mode of conducting the election there.”

Ames seemed untroubled by such less than glowing portrayals and by the fact that a few individuals in Charleston had reacted to his diatribes against the French by burning him in effigy. Still, the ceaseless battles between Federalists and the emerging Republicans had begun to weary him. “I attend Congress daily,” he wrote a friend at the conclusion of his penultimate term, “but crack jokes instead of problems, and think as little of the proceedings as the doorkeeper.” As the session ended, he wrote mordantly, “If we should finish and leave the world right side up, it will be happy. Do not ask what good we do: that is not a fair question, in these days of faction.”

And yet when he did leave the building—quietly departing the day before President Washington’s farewell to Congress on March 3, 1797—Fisher Ames did not do so as a disinterested party. For even as the Federalist aims of a robust and unifying central government came to be battered by the paleo-constructionist Nathaniel Macon and other Southerners, even as his electric yet still mannered speechifying gave way to the pugilistic banter of Macon’s protégé John Randolph of Roanoke (“Let John Randolph…have the amusement of the cockpit,” he wrote), and even as the House’s rusticity descended into mayhem when a Vermont freshman named Matthew Lyon spat on another member and was thereupon clubbed, he maintained an exasperated sort of affection for the body he helped create. In the fall of 1803, the retired House member wrote words of encouragement to an incoming freshman, his brother-in-law Thomas Dwight: “I am glad to hear of your safe, though weary, arrival at the heaven of other men’s ambition, your purgatory, where indeed you will see good spirits, with other spirits conjured by democracy from the vasty deep. Remember what I have often told you, that the scene you are entering upon will form the best characters, and display them to the greatest advantage. The furnace of political adversity will separate the dross, but purify the gold…To serve the people successfully, will be out of your power; the attempt to do it will be unpopular. To flatter, inflame and betray them, will be the applauded work of demagogues, who will dig graves for themselves, and erect thrones for their victors…”

A Federalist icon

A number of Ames’ colleagues from the 1st Federal Congress went on to higher office: nine became U.S. senators, one became treasury secretary (Thomas Tucker), another vice president (Elbridge Gerry) and still another president (James Madison). Ames never did—and indeed turned down an offer to be president of Harvard University. Perhaps to the detriment of lasting fame, he would be identified forever with the lower body, and with the Federalist cause that would soon give way to Jeffersonian democracy.

Ames did not seem to suffer for attention, however. On the occasion of George Washington’s death in 1800, the great orator was requested to say a few words before the Massachusetts state legislature, and once again he did not disappoint:

“Of those, however, who were born, and who acted, through life, as if they were born, not for themselves, but for their country and the whole human race, how few, alas! are recorded in the long annals of ages…Washington is now added to that small number. Already he attracts curiosity, like a newly discovered star, whose benignant light will travel on to the worlds and time’s farthest bounds. Already his name is hung up by history as conspicuously, as if it sparkled in one of the constellations of the sky…Our history is but a transcript of his claims on our gratitude.”

Despite the wishes of his wife and children, the funeral arrangements were subsumed into politics, as Federalists wished to make the moment a rallying point for their cause. Upwards of a thousand mourners—congressmen, senators, judges, mayors and common members in good standing of the “mobocracy”—gathered in the streets of Boston as the procession snaked its way towards Kings Chapel. Flags flew at half-mast. Shopkeepers locked their doors. A great tongue had been stilled—though within months of his passing, friends would hasten to publish his speeches and letters, which critics then set upon like vultures.

One of the latter was John Quincy Adams. “Mr. Ames was a man of genius and of virtue, he meant well to his country, and served her with fidelity according to his best judgment,” Adams allowed in a scathing critique of Ames’ works less than a year after the latter’s death. “But at a very early period of his public life, he connected himself with Hamilton, with his bank and his funding system, in a manner which warped his judgment and trammeled the freedom of his mind for the remainder of his days.” Ames’ later years, Adams asserted, were marked by physical disease that exacerbated “the vivacity of his imagination.” In short, the Federalist was reduced, by the eventual sixth President of the United States, first to dupe, then to madman.

Ames was neither. Instead, to paraphrase Robert Frost, the congressman maintained a lover’s quarrel with America, believing his country great and at the same time imperiled by its audaciousness—and he thereby came to be haunted by his own experience on the very tightrope between self-government and anarchy that the People’s House would navigate daily. He was wrong to predict imminent chaos—but no less wrong than the Nathaniel Macons who feared that any chink in the armor of states’ rights would spell America’s inexorable decline. On both sides, in any event, the cause was the same, and it would prove their ultimate rightness.

“We now set out with our experimental project, exactly where Rome failed with hers. We now begin, where she ended.”

Those words, written in a swell of anguish over the seemingly unstoppable momentum of Jeffersonian democracy, were penned by Fisher Ames in 1804, fully seven years after his retirement from the House of Representatives, and fifteen years after the thirty-year old proto-freshman first arrived in New York City to begin the American experiment. How exhilarating, how absolutely terrifying, so as to seem like only yesterday, the fateful reach for the mortal heavens: We now begin…not knowing what had truly begun, much less how it would end.