speech his opponents had claimed a majority of six, but the appropriation was finally passed, in the committee of the whole, by the casting vote of the chairman. When Washington retired from the presidency, Congress voted him an address and chose Ames to deliver it. In 1797 he returned to Dedham to resume the practice of the law, which the state of his health after a few years obliged him to relinquish. He published numerous essays, chiefly in relation to the contest between Great Britain and revolutionary France, as it might affect the liberty and prosperity of America. Ames was one of the group of New England ultra-Federalists known as the “Essex Junto,” who opposed the French policy of President John Adams in 1798, and were conspicuous for their British sympathies. Four years before his death he was chosen president of Harvard College, an honour which his broken state of health obliged him to decline. He died on the 4th of July 1808.
His writings and speeches, which abound in sparkling passages, displaying great fertility of imagination, were collected and published, with a memoir of the author, in 1809, by the Rev. Dr J. T. Kirkland, in one large octavo volume. A more complete edition in two volumes was published by his son, Seth Ames, at Boston, Mass., in 1854.
AMES, JOSEPH (1689–1759), English author, was born at Yarmouth on the 23rd of January 1689. He wrote an account of printing in England from 1471 to 1600, Typographical Antiquities (1749). Ames sent out circular letters with a list of two hundred and fifteen English printers with whose works he intended to deal, asking for any available information. He earned the gratitude of subsequent bibliographers by disregarding printed lists and consulting the title-pages of the books themselves. An interleaved copy of the work with many notes in the author’s hand is now in the British Museum. Editions of his works were published with added information by William Herbert (3 vols., 1785–1790), and T. F. Dibdin (4 vols., 1810–1819). Ames’s occupation is variously given. It is uncertain whether he was a ship-chandler, a patten-maker, a plane-iron maker or an ironmonger; but he led a prosperous life at Wapping, and amassed valuable collections of antiquities. He died on the 7th of October 1759. His other works are catalogues of English printers, of the collection of coins which belonged to the earl of Pembroke, of some two thousand English portraits, and Parentalia (1750), a memoir of the Wrens, undertaken in conjunction with Sir Christopher Wren’s grandson, Stephen Wren. Part of his correspondence in bibliography is included in Nichols’s Literary Anecdotes and Illustrations.
AMES, OAKES (1804–1873), American manufacturer, capitalist and politician, was born in Easton, Massachusetts, on the 10th of January 1804. As a manufacturer of shovels, in association with his father and his brother Oliver (1807–1877), he amassed a large fortune. In 1860 he became a member of the executive council of Massachusetts, and from 1863 to 1873 was a republican member of the national House of Representatives. As a member of the committee on railroads he became interested in the project, greatly aided by the government, to build a trans-continental railway, connecting the eastern states with California. Others having failed, he was induced in 1865 to assume the direction of the work, and to him more than to any other one man the credit for the construction of the Union Pacific railway was due. The execution was effected largely through a construction company, the Crédit Mobilier Company of America. In disposing of some of the stock of this company, Ames in 1867–1871 sold a number of shares to members of Congress at a price much below what these shares eventually proved to be worth. This, on becoming known, gave rise in 1872–1873 to a great congressional scandal. After an investigation by a committee of the House, which recommended the expulsion of Ames, a resolution was passed on the 28th of February 1873, “that the House absolutely condemns the conduct of Oakes Ames . . . in seeking to secure congressional attention to the affairs of a corporation in which he was interested, and whose interest directly depended upon the legislation of Congress, by inducing members of Congress to invest in the stocks of said corporation.” Many have since attributed this resolution to partisanship, and the influence of popular clamour, and in 1883 the legislature of Massachusetts passed a resolution vindicating Ames. He died at North Easton, Mass., on the 8th of May 1873. His son, Oliver Ames (1831–1895), was lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts from 1883 until 1887, and governor from 1887 to 1890.
See Crédit Mobilier of America and the references there given. For a defence of Oakes Ames, see Oakes Ames, A Memorial Volume (Cambridge, Mass., 1884).
AMES, WILLIAM (1576–1633), English Puritan divine, better known, especially in Europe, as Amesius, was born of an ancient family at Ipswich, Suffolk, in 1576, and was educated at the local grammar school and at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where, as throughout his life, he was an omnivorous student. He was considerably influenced by his tutor, the celebrated William Perkins, and by his successor, a man of kindred intellect and fervour, Paul Bayne. He graduated B.A. and M.A. in due course, and was chosen to a fellowship in Christ’s College. He was universally beloved in the university. His own college (Christ’s) would have chosen him for the mastership; but a party opposition led to the election of Valentine Cary, who had already quarrelled with Ames for disapproving of the surplice and other outward symbols. One of Ames’s sermons became historical in the Puritan controversies. It was delivered on St Thomas’s day (1609) before the feast of Christ’s nativity, and in it he rebuked sharply “lusory lotts” and the “heathenish debauchery” of the students during the twelve days ensuing. The scathing vehemence of his denunciations led to his being summoned before the vice-chancellor, who suspended him “from the exercise of his ecclesiastical function and from all degrees taken or to be taken.” After Cary’s election he left the university and would have accepted the great church of Colchester, but the bishop of London refused to grant institution and induction. Like persecution awaited him elsewhere, and at last he passed over to Holland, being aided by certain wealthy English merchants who wished him to controvert the supporters of the English church in Leiden. At Rotterdam, clad in the fisherman’s habit donned for the passage, he opposed Grevinchovius (Nicholas Grevinckhoven, d. 1632), minister of the Arminian or Remonstrant church, and overwhelmed him with his logical reasoning from Phil. ii. 13, “It is God that worketh in us both to will and to do.” The made a great stir, and from that day became known and honoured in the Low Countries. Subsequently Ames entered into a controversy in print with Grevinchovius on universal redemption and election, and cognate problems. He brought together all he had maintained in his Coronis ad Collationem Hagiensem—his most masterful book, which figures largely in Dutch church history. At Leiden, Ames became intimate with the venerable Mr Goodyear, pastor of the English church there. While thus resident in comparative privacy he was sent for to the Hague by Sir Horatio Vere, the English governor of Brill, who appointed him a minister in the army of the states-general, and of the English soldiers in their service, a post held by some of the greatest of England’s exiled Puritans. He married a daughter of Dr Burgess, who was Vere’s chaplain, and, on his father-in-law’s return to England, succeeded to his place.
It was at this time he began his memorable controversy with Episcopius, who, in attacking the Coronis, railed against the author as having been “a disturber of the public peace in his native country, so that the English magistrates had banished him thence; and now, by his late printed Coronis, he was raising new disturbances in the peaceable Netherlands.” It was a miserable libel and was at once rebutted by Goodyear. The Coronis had been primarily prepared for the synod of Dort, which sat from November 1618 until May 1619. At this celebrated synod the position of Ames was a peculiar one. The High Church party in England had induced Vere to dismiss him from the chaplaincy; but he was still held, deservedly, in such reverence, that it was arranged he should attend the synod, and accordingly he was retained by the Calvinist party at four florins a day to watch the proceedings on their behalf and advise them when necessary. A proposal to make him principal of a theological college at Leiden was frustrated by Archbishop Abbot; and when later invited by the state of Friesland to a professoriate at Franeker,
