Samuel Ames of Providence served in many public capacities, including state legislator, Speaker of the House, and quartermaster general of the state militia. However, his most memorable service was as the Rhode Island Supreme Court chief justice from 1856 to 1865. Ames studied at Phillips-Andover Academy and graduated from Brown University in 1823. He read law for two years under the direction of Samuel W. Bridgham, Providence’s first mayor, and studied for a year at the famous Litchfield Law School in Connecticut. Ames was both a successful lawyer and a legal scholar.

In 1832, he co-authored the book Treatise on the Law of Private Corporations Aggregate with Joseph K. Angell. This work went through ten editions and became a standard authority on private corporate law.

Ames mixed law with politics. As a staunch Whig, he served a decade in the Providence City Council (1841–51) and spent some time as a state representative, becoming Speaker of the House in 1844 and 1845. During the Dorr Rebellion, Ames was a leading member of the Law-and-Order faction and served as quartermaster general of the state militia that vanquished Dorr. His role in that controversy was ironic in that he had supported Dorr and Joseph Angell in the constitutional reform movement of 1834. He had married Mary Throop Dorr, sister of the famed reformer, in 1838.

On June 26, 1856, the Grand Committee of the General Assembly elected Samuel Ames, chief justice of the state’s Supreme Court, as the successor of William Read Staples. He served in that capacity until five weeks before his death in December 1865. He rendered his most notable opinion in the case of Taylor v. Place (1856), a landmark decision asserting the independence of the judiciary from the General Assembly. In this case, Ames declared unconstitutional (under the basic law of 1843) a special act of the legislature setting aside a verdict for Taylor reached by the Providence County Court of Common Pleas in a suit to recover debts. This decision barred a legislative practice that had been commonplace since 1663.

Contrary to popular opinion, however, the Taylor ruling did not fully embrace the separation of powers doctrine because it left the executive branch subservient to the General Assembly. As Ames stated in his ruling, “However great the personal influence of him who, from time to time may fill the executive chair of the state, may be, from his character and standing, his official power under our constitution amounts to nothing” (emphasis in original). Ames’s view of the judicial power was much different. Since his Taylor decision is the most important ruling in the history of the Rhode Island judiciary and earned for Ames the soubriquet the “Great Chief Justice,” and because it reveals the Whig ideology at the basis of Rhode Island’s 1843 constitution, it is worthy of extended analysis.

In Taylor, the chief justice was influenced by several predictable factors in singling out the judicial branch for emancipation from legislative control. All these factors were rooted in the work of the Law-and-Order Convention that drafted the state constitution and placed the judiciary on a much different footing than the executive. Although the position of governor was created by the Royal Charter of 1663, until May 1843, the state Supreme Court was purely statutory and a creature of the General Assembly. Clearly, the new Constitution had elevated the status of the high court. Secondly, Ames was aware that the Law-and-Order convention had altered the charter government’s Freemen’s Constitution of March 1842 by deleting from its Article IV, Section 10, the provision that “the general assembly shall continue to exercise the judicial power.” This purposeful omission clearly indicated that the Whig-dominated convention had reservations concerning the legislature’s exercise of revisory or chancery powers in judicial proceedings.

Ames may also have received a cue from the name given to the high court in the Law-and-Order constitution: the “Supreme Court.” From 1798 to 1843, the court operated as the Supreme Judicial Court, which implied that there existed a nonjudicial court—namely, the General Assembly—with review and revisory powers over the judicial court. This, in fact, was how the system worked. Ames also believed that the grant of judicial power was unlimited but that the governor’s power in Article VII, Section I, was qualified by the word “chief” rather than “sole.” He also took judicial notice of the fact that the 1842 convention had used the federal Constitution as a model in crafting Rhode Island’s article on the judiciary. “This pregnant sentence [‘The judicial power of this state shall be vested in one supreme court, and in such inferior courts as the general assembly may, from time to time, ordain and establish’] is copied into our Constitution verbatim from the Constitution of the United States,” where it has “a settled constitutional meaning,” asserted Ames.

Finally, as an orthodox Whig, like the dominant delegates to the Law-and-Order convention, Ames looked to the judiciary as a bulwark against a Jacksonian-style executive and leveling democracy and as a protector of property rights and societal order. Here, he was of one mind with Chancellor James Kent, Justice Joseph Story, and prominent Whig attorneys Daniel Webster and John Whipple. For a Whig constitution to empower the judiciary and enfeeble the executive made perfect sense to Chief Justice Ames. His liberation of the Supreme Court was no leap of faith. In the immediate aftermath of a three-year reign of Dorr

Democrats (1851 to 1854) who had tried to convene a constitutional convention and liberalize suffrage, who had passed a spate of populistic legislation, and who had the boldness to reverse the Supreme Court’s verdict in Dorr’s treason trial, Ames sought refuge. He found it in an independent court— one that could resist the popular tumult that threatened the governmental structure created by his fellow Whigs in the aftermath of the Dorr Rebellion. In that shelter, there was no room for a dynamic Jacksonian executive.

During his ten-year career as Rhode Island’s chief judicial officer, Ames dramatically upgraded the system of reporting court opinions, acting as a court reporter. Although he strongly asserted judicial power, he believed that the judiciary should use that power sparingly whenever it evaluates the constitutionality of legislative acts. He was, therefore, an exponent of judicial restraint. One significant interruption of his judicial duties occurred in early 1861 when he served as one of five Rhode Island delegates to the abortive Virginia Peace Convention, a well-intentioned but futile effort to avoid the Civil War.

Failing health prompted Justice Ames to retire after nine productive years on the bench. He died in Providence on December 20, 1865, shortly after he stepped down. He was survived by his widow, Mary Dorr, four sons and a daughter. Two of his other children had died in infancy.

Samuel Ames was inducted into The Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 2002.

For additional reading:

• The Makers of Moder Rhode Island by Patrick T Conley, History Press, 2012.

• Johnson, Rossiter (1906). . The Biographical Dictionary of America . Vol. 1. Plimpton Press, Printers and Binders.
• Vile, John (2003). Great American Judges: An Encyclopedia, Volume 1. ABC-CLIO. pp. 20–21. ISBN 1576079899.
• “Death of Judge Ames of Rhode Island”. The New York Times. December 21, 1865.