July 6, 1798—In the first major instance of how the young American nation would react under war or the threat of war, the Federalist-dominated U.S. Congress passed the Alien Act. The legislation, part of an umbrella series of measures known as the Alien and Sedition Acts, morphed from controlling the activities of foreigners during wartime to crushing dissent against the American government.
The first infringement by the federal government on freedom of speech and press, the Alien and Sedition Acts sparked an equally dangerous reaction—the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, secretly written by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, which introduced the doctrine of states’ rights—the notion used by the South to secede from the Union during the Civil War more than six decades later.
The Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in an atmosphere of rising tensions with France. Both England and France had seized American ships, which were steadfastly neutral in the conflict between the two European powers. President John Adams’ attempt to solve the problem through diplomacy was crudely rebuffed when the three French negotiators (given the names X, Y, and Z in the official accounts of the incident) tried to intimidate and bribe the American peace commission as it sought an audience with French minister Charles Talleyrand.
The resulting furor in the U.S. spurred preparedness attempts, including the establishment of the U.S. Navy and authorized the President to enlist 10,000 men for service in the event of war. More disturbingly, it led the Federalists to try to stamp out dissent against those they viewed as undermining the (quasi-) war effort and the American government.
The Alien Act allowed the U.S. government to deport aliens deemed dangerous during peacetime. It formed a piece with the Alien Enemies Act, which allowed the expulsion or imprisonment of aliens who acted against the interest of the American government during wartime.
The Naturalization Act affected not only the French, but also 60,000 Irish emigrants, many of whom fled that year from Britain’s crushing of a Napoleon-assisted uprising (thereby giving the event the name “The Year of the French”).
Finally, the Sedition Act enabled the government to impose fines or imprison individuals who criticized the government, the President or Congress in speech or in print. The Alien Acts themselves were never enforced, but the Sedition Act was—including against four Irishmen arrested in the graveyard of Philadelphia’s St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church for promoting a petition protesting the Alien Act.
The French-English conflict was conducted with levels of vituperation similar to the culture wars that have plagued America over the past two decades. Both political parties were gravely deficient, to one degree or another, in how they viewed the overseas conflict. The Democratic-Republicans—the party of Jefferson and Madison—were blissfully naïve about the French Revolution’s potential for terror turned against its own citizens. However, the Federalists, taking their cue from Alexander Hamilton, tended to be pro-monarchical. More important for their future as a political party, they overreached and ended up on the road to political extinction.
When newspapers refer to “The Founding Fathers,” they inadvertently feed the impression that they largely agreed on everything essential. Nothing could be further from the truth, especially in the case of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Jefferson and Madison have gotten the better of this argument with historians, but at the time things were not so clear-cut. Adams, Jefferson’s dear friend and colleague in the American Revolution, now his President and chief political rival, signed the measures into law. Another who supported the measures was George Washington, who, in a private letter from to Alexander Spotswood, observed:
“Consider to what lengths a Certain description of men in our Country have already driven and even resolved to further drive matters and then ask themselves if it is not time and expedient to resort to protecting Laws against aliens for Citizens you certainly know are not affected by that law) who acknowledge no allegiance to this Country, and in many instances are sent among us (as there is the best Circumstantial evidence to prove) for the express purpose of poisoning the minds of our people and to sow dissentions among them, in order to alienate their affections from the Government of their Choice, thereby endeavoring to dissolve the Union, and of Course the fair and happy prospects which were unfolding to our view from the Revolution.”
The opposition by Jefferson and Madison to the acts was born as much from self-interest as from promise, since their base included a sizable emigrant population.
The Alien and Sedition Acts produced a fierce reaction in the election of 1800, when voters firmly rejected the government’s constitutional restrictions. But Jefferson and Madison, in opposing the legislative package as unconstitutional, wrote secretly the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, which upheld the states’ authority to reject federal legislation. States rights were not only used to justify the civil war, but in the 1950s and 1960s to support attempts to circumvent federal civil-rights legislation.
(Incidentally, though Jefferson pardoned every person convicted of violating these laws during his Presidency, these laws stayed on the books until 1964, when the Supreme Court finally overturned them.)
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