We see how modern courts twist and distort original intent according to their own preferences, so a court may or may not get something right, but one thing we know for sure is *THEY* didn't create the law. Legislatures did.
That is where an effort to understand the meaning must start. Not with courts, and especially not with courts over 100 years later. Contemporary courts would know better, so I would see more value in courts around the 1800s than the 1890s.
I don't regard courts as sources of information about what legislators did.
Scalia and Tribe disagree, and a couple of centuries of U.S. Supreme Court precedent disagree. Your claimed source is explicitly rejected as unusable.