The interconnectedness of people and events is one of history’s most fascinating topics. The Civil War produced many such stories, and the life and legacy of Adelbert Ames is a wonderful example.
Ames was born in Rockland, Maine, in 1835, the son of a sea captain named Jesse Ames (the irony of that name will be detailed below). Ames graduated from West Point in 1861 shortly after Fort Sumter fell. He was assigned to the artillery and was badly wounded at the Battle of First Bull Run (Manassas) but refused to leave his guns. He received a brevet promotion to major and in 1893 received the Medal of Honor for his heroism.
Returning to duty after recovering from his wound, he saw significant action during the Peninsula Campaign in the spring of 1862 and received a brevet promotion to lieutenant colonel. Ames sought higher rank and realized that quicker promotion was available in the infantry. He returned to Maine and lobbied for a commission to command an infantry regiment. On Aug. 20, 1862, he was given command of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry. The second-in-command assigned to him was an untried college professor named Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.
The 20th Maine saw little action until the Fredericksburg campaign, when the regiment was ordered to make one of the last assaults against Marye’s Heights. During the Chancellorsville campaign, Ames volunteered as an aide-de-camp to Gen. George G. Meade, then commanding the 5th Corps. This staff assignment probably influenced his being promoted to brigade commander in the 11th Corps after Chancellorsville.
Ames held a high opinion of Chamberlain’s leadership abilities, and recommended that Chamberlain succeed him as commander of the 20th Maine. Ames received due recognition for preparing the 20th Maine (and Chamberlain) for battle in the book and film versions of “Gods and Generals,” Jeff Shaara’s treatment of the war period prior to Gettysburg.
Ames’ experiences at Gettysburg were not as illustrious as Chamberlain’s and his former regiment, but he acquitted himself well. On the first day of the battle, Ames’ division commander was captured. Ames assumed command of the division and executed a difficult retreat through the streets of Gettysburg to Cemetery Hill. His brigade bore the brunt of Jubal Early’s assault on Cemetery Hill on the second day, and it stubbornly held its position. After the battle, the men of the 20th Maine presented Ames with their battle flag.
After Gettysburg, Ames was made a colonel in the regular Army and served in South Carolina and Florida. In 1864, his division became part of the 10th Corps under Gen. Benjamin Butler, and he took part in the Bermuda Hundred and Petersburg campaigns in Virginia.
In January 1865, Ames led the successful assault on Fort Fisher, which guarded the Cape Fear River and Wilmington, N.C., the South’s last open port. He received a brevet promotion to major general of volunteers and brigadier general in the regular Army for his role in the battle.
After the war, Ames remained in the Army, and in 1868 Congress appointed him provisional governor of Mississippi. During his administration, he advanced the cause of freed slaves and appointed the first black officeholders in the state’s history.
The Mississippi legislature elected Ames to the U.S. Senate after the state’s readmission to the Union, and he served in the Senate until 1874. While in Washington, Ames met and married Blanche Butler, daughter of his old commander Benjamin Butler, who was then a member of the House of Representatives for Massachusetts.
Ames returned to Mississippi and again became governor as a Reconstruction Republican. But as the state election of 1875 approached, the Democrats organized an armed insurrection to unseat the black-supported Republican government. That November, Democrats got control of both houses of the legislature. The new legislature drew up articles of impeachment against Ames, and he resigned a few months later when the legislature agreed to drop the impeachment.
After leaving office, Ames settled in Northfield, Minn., where his father and brother had a flour-milling business. On Sept. 7, 1876, Jesse James and his gang staged an abortive attempt to rob the First National Bank of Northfield.
Local citizens quickly armed themselves, and the ensuing seven-minute shootout put an end to the James-Younger gang for good. Ames was at the battle and, even though he was unarmed, he played a significant role. While the bullets were flying, Ames stood behind a local businessman, Ansel Manning, and steadied Manning’s nervous aim with encouraging words. Ames’ “generalship” must have worked; Manning severely wounded Cole Younger and put a bullet through the heart of another outlaw.
Jesse James escaped, and his reasons for singling out the Northfield bank quickly became known. Ames and his father-in-law were shareholders in the bank. As historian James M. McPherson writes, “Ames was everything Jesse James detested: a leader of the victorious army that had crushed James’ beloved Confederacy; an idealistic radical who had worked for racial justice; and perhaps worst of all, the son-in-law of the notorious (in Southern eyes) Radical Republican congressman Benjamin Butler.” The fact that James knew Ames and Butler had $75,000 on deposit in the bank probably had something to do with it, as well.
As an interesting sidelight, it is unknown whether Jesse Ames, Adelbert’s father, ever came face-to-face with Jesse James, his near namesake.
Ames moved to New York City and later to Lowell, Mass., where he operated a flour mill and other businesses. He obtained several patents for pencil sharpeners and other mechanical devices. He was appointed brigadier general of volunteers during the Spanish-American War and served in Cuba.
Ames died at age 97 at his winter home in Ormond Beach, Fla., next to the estate of his friend and golfing companion John D. Rockefeller. At the time of his death in 1933, he was the oldest surviving Civil War general.
Adelbert and Blanche Ames had six children, two of whom became famous in their own right. Adelbert Ames Jr. was a lawyer, artist and scientist who made many contributions to psychology, physics, physiology and ophthalmology.
A daughter, Blanche Ames Ames, married Oakes Ames, a professor of botany at Harvard (they were not related). Blanche was an accomplished artist whose drawings of orchids illustrated her husband’s pioneering work in orchidology. She was politically active as a leader in the women’s suffrage movement and in 1916 founded the Birth Control League of Massachusetts.
Blanche designed and engineered the dams and ponds throughout her 1,250-acre estate. During World War II, she invented and received a patent for a type of barrage balloon, a device for trapping the propellers of enemy airplanes with cables held up by balloons. At age 90, Blanche obtained a patent for an “antipollution toilet.”
Blanche also wrote a biography of her father for which John F. Kennedy was partially responsible. In his “Profiles in Courage,” Mr. Kennedy relied on Jim Crow-era historical documents to suggest that Adelbert Ames was nothing more than a carpetbagging politician during his administration in Mississippi.
Blanche Ames Ames was livid. Still a formidable presence in Massachusetts politics, she bombarded the then-senator with letters complaining about how her father was treated in the book and continued writing them after Kennedy entered the White House.
Mr. Kennedy asked George Plimpton, the author, to tell Blanche she was “interfering with government business.” Mr. Plimpton was not only Robert F. Kennedy’s Harvard classmate and a family friend, but also Blanche’s grandson and a great-grandson of Adelbert Ames.
Mr. Plimpton was unable to prevail on his grandmother. Instead, in 1964, when she was 80, Blanche wrote her father’s biography to set the record straight. The book bears the imposing title “Adelbert Ames, 1835-1933, General, Senator, Governor: The Story of His Life and Times and His Integrity as a Soldier and Statesman in the Service of the United States of America During the Civil War and in Mississippi in the Years of Reconstruction.”
Richard P. Cox is a lawyer and free-lance writer. He is a member of the Chesapeake Civil War Roundtable and lives in Annapolis.
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