Charles Gordon Ames

Ames Family Historical Collection – Series 7 Charles Gordon Ames, 1828-1912 by Edwin L. Wolff, April 2006     Ames was born out of wedlock.  Until he was 21, he did not know his mother’s name.  He was raised on a New Hampshire farm by rigidly Presbyterian foster parents who treated him as a hired hand and constantly reminded him of his sinful birth.     Almost in desperation, Ames, at the age of 12, joined a sect called the Free Will Baptists, who gave him hope and made him feel welcome.  By age 20, he had become an itinerant preacher.     At age 22, after much searching, he found his mother and visited her for the first and only time.  She was the granddaughter of General Henry Knox.  Born in Maine, she was married and living with her husband and daughter on a farm in southern Michigan.   Ames’s account of his visit to her, in a letter to his mother-in-law, is very touching.  His mother was in ill health and poor economic circumstances, deeply depressed, with an unshakeable sense of sinfulness.  Ames’s loving but circumspect response was to comfort her, as much as a minister as a son.     In 1852, Ames and his new wife, Sara Jane, moved to St. Anthony Falls, Minnesota Territory (now Minneapolis) to organize a Free Will Baptist congregation there.  He entered into the life of the town, editing the first Republican paper in Minnesota and campaigning for temperance and the end of slavery.     As his mental horizons widened, he began  to question the narrow, ultraconservative teachings of the Free Will Baptists.  They put almost total emphasis on the life to come, and gave but little support to the here-and-now efforts of the pioneers who had come west to civilize the wilderness.  They held that unbaptized infants would suffer hellfire, and that any sect whose baptism rituals differed from those of the Free Will Baptists were sentencing their members to perdition.         Ames resigned his ministry.  After three years of soul-searching, he came into full sympathy with the Unitarians.  In this transition, he was greatly aided by Sara Jane.  At the beginning of her long siege of bad health, she had gone East to see her family.  She visited Boston, where she met some of the leaders of the Transcendentalist movement.  When Ames also visited Boston, she introduced him around.     His first Unitarian ministerial positions were in Bloomington, Illinois, Cincinnati, Ohio and Albany, New York.  He then spent seven years organizing new Unitarian congregations in several California towns.  For the remainder of his life, he preached in pulpits in Philadelphia and Boston, ending with 24 years as the beloved pastor of Boston’s Church of the Disciples.     His life had not been easy.   He had many sieges of bad health. Sara Jane died when she was only 33, after years of undiagnosed illness and pain.  They has one child, a son, Charles Wilberforce Ames (1855-1921).  (Ames remarried two year later, to Julia Frances (Fanny) Baker, a lifelong activist in women’s causes.  They had two daughters.)     Ames’s economic circumstances were always tenuous.  Most important, feelings of little self-worth, instilled in him in childhood, never completely left him.  Photographs of him as an elderly minister have a haunted look of self-doubt, even on his 80th birthday, when he received tributes from many of greater Boston’s leaders.     He once wrote to a man who attended his church, “You say I shall soon learn that you are not so good as you might be.  I suspected that, because neither am  I.   But keep on coming, and perhaps we can help each other to be better.” Brief quotes from the writings of Charles Gordon Ames     From Ames’s Spiritual Autobiography.     “I cannot say that I ever took the Unitarian name, rather it took me....  I found among Unitarians those three great blessings which I had coveted, freedom, fellowship and opportunity....   I saw with great satisfaction that the Unitarian people were working and worshiping together without cramping or crowding each other, that everyone, minister or layman, was left perfectly free to form and re-form his doctrines and guide his life...”     From a sermon preached by Ames on December 4, 1859, two days after the execution of John Brown, before his Unitarian congregation in Bloomington, Illinois.     “For the last twenty or thirty years,...John Brown had been revolving in his mind a project for the overthrow of slavery in the United States.  Whether he had always thought that violent methods were best I cannot say.  But it is probable that what he saw in Kansas destroyed all hope that the slaveholder would ever let go his victim peacefully....  And so, for the last two years, he seems to have been diligently engaged in organizing the rash expedition that cost him his life....     “John Brown’s fame or infamy is not the great matter at issue....   Slavery is on trial for its life; and we are  in court, interested parties, likely to be arraigned before God and the world as accomplices in the guilt of upholding it....”     Written at age 31, on the day  of the funeral of his wife, Sara Jane:     “I feel as if her life had been like a crucifixion for my sake, and I open my eyes in sad  astonishment to see it so clearly  revealed that I have been so unworthy  a husband....  I felt that all the value of my life and of everything in the world had depended upon its relationship to her....  The work which God has begun in me so largely through her precious influence must go on till the day of perfection....  I must, as her spirit and her example have so fully taught me, abandon myself and submit to suffering....  I must be faithful to the end, which is not far distant after all.  And, as Charlie says, I shall meet her in the gates of heaven.”     Letter written to his son, Charles Wilberforce Ames, on the son’s impending graduation from Cornell in the spring of 1878:     “Dear Sir,  I am beginning to look up with awe to an impending Bachelor of Arts.  It is very gracious in you, ’pon my word, sir, to send an occasional letter to a humble ancient acquaintance who never read Story, nor got much Latin, nor wrote a prize essay....     “I have never got over being surprised at the transformation of my first baby into a grown-up man; and I am always trying to reassure myself that it’s a fact!  A latent suspicion haunts me that you will some day come out of this disguise--for I know it is something you have put on--and will reappear in your proper personal character as my lost little boy, whom I shall have right and might and occasion to thank....”       A quotation from a newspaper interview on his 75th birthday:     “With much of joy in these more than fifty years of public work, it is yet the  joy of an apprentice who is glad to be learning a business not yet to be mastered....” END

 

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