Quote of the Day (John Quincy Adams, on the Deaths of His Father and Thomas Jefferson)

“[Tavernkeeper John] Merrill told me that he had come this morning out from Baltimore, and was informed there that my father died on the fourth of this Month, about five o’clock in the afternoon. From the Letters which I had yesterday received this event was so much expected by me, that it had no sudden and violent effect on my feelings— My father had nearly closed the ninety-first year of his life: A life illustrious in the Annals of his Country, and of the World— He had served to great and useful purpose his Nation, his Age, and his God— He is gone, and may the blessing of Almighty Grace have attended him to his Account— I say not, may my last End be like his! it were presumptuous— The time, the manner, the coincidence with the decease of Jefferson, are visible and palpable marks of divine favour, for which I would humble myself in grateful and silent adoration before the Ruler of the Universe— For myself all that I dare to ask is that I may live the remnant of my days in a manner worthy of him from whom I came, and at the appointed hour of my maker die as my father has died; in peace with God and man, sped to the regions of futurity with the blessings of my fellow men.”—John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), Sixth President of the United States, diary entry for July 9, 1826, in Diaries 1821-1848, edited by David Waldstreicher (2017)

Many Americans felt similarly to John Quincy Adams: that the deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both on the 50^th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, were “visible and palpable marks of divine favour” on the United States.

Many of my readers will know that Jefferson had died at 12:50 pm, and that John Adams—who had reconciled with his longtime friend turned political rival the decade before—passed away later in the afternoon, unaware of what had happened in Virginia, with the words, “Jefferson still survives.”

Fewer people will know that, because of the still-slow state of overland communication in those days, John Quincy Adams, in Washington, was unaware of Jefferson’s death in Charlottesville 117 miles away. And it would not be for another three days when John Quincy learned of his father’s death at the family home in Massachusetts, 447 miles away.

When John Quincy Adams passed 22 years later, the news spread far more quickly, because the first links between major Eastern cities had been established for the telegraph, which Samuel Morse had publicly demonstrated in 1844. (See this 1999 C-Span clip for how the new invention was used so dramatically for what became a true “media event.”)

The younger Adams—who, like his father (and unlike Jefferson), was turned out of the White House after one miserable term—did indeed, as he hoped, “live the remnant of my days in a manner worthy of him from whom I came.” As the last prominent living link to the American Revolution, he lent tremendous prestige to the antislavery cause.

He was, in fact, engaged in another front in his struggle against slavery—a House of Representatives vote related to the Mexican War—when he was felled by a fatal stroke. 

By this time, this former President, after a long public career marked by controversy, was hailed as “Old Man Eloquent” by admirers and even recognized by opponents as a debater and legislator of formidable passion and shrewdness.

In its way, his last words were as memorable as those of his revered father: “This is the last of earth, but I am composed."

(The image accompanying this post is a detail from John Trumbull's 1818 painting of the Committee of Five presenting their draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. From left to right, the figures are: John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.)

Quote of the Day (John Adams, on Threats to the Constitution)

“Avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” —John Adams (1735-1826), signer of the Declaration of Independence and second U.S. President, in a letter to the Officers of the first Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, Oct. 11, 1798, quoted by Maria Campbell, Revolutionary Services and Civil Life of General William Hull (1847)

This Day in Presidential History (Birth of George Washington Adams, Byronic Scion)

Apr. 12, 1801—George Washington Adams, who, though gifted with good looks and a flair for poetry, would stagger under the weight of expectations as the son and grandson of Presidents, was born in Berlin, where his father was serving at the time as U.S. Ambassador to Prussia.

I have to chuckle every time someone brings up the misbehavior of Hunter Biden and the alleged influence exerted on his behalf by his father. Leave aside the convenient amnesia of these critics when it comes to the prior President and the personal and financial misdeeds of his three older children. The fact is that, going back to the founding of the republic, Presidential children (particularly, far more often than not, Presidential sons) have given their parents fits.

Or, as Doug Wead recalled about a 1988 study he did for George W. Bush in his history of this group, All the Presidents' Children: “Research showed that being related to a president brought more problems than opportunities. There seemed to be higher than average rates of divorce and alcoholism and even premature death. Some presidential children seemed bent on self-destruction.”

The biggest case in point: the Adams family. The trouble started with the alcoholic male in-laws of patriarch John Adams. That tendency towards substance abuse, along with a predisposition towards depression, carried over to the following three generations of this American political dynasty.

Say what you want about Hunter Biden, but the grandson of John Adams, George Washington Adams, got there first.  Traumatized by parental separation early in life? Check. A fling with the female darling of one’s brother? Check. Overshadowed not just by a powerful father but a brother of great promise? Check. A major substance abuser for much of his adult life? Check. A headache who gave his father’s political foes plenty of ammunition? Check.

Young Adams’ father, John Quincy Adams, became America’s greatest Secretary of State, then its sixth President. In his post-Presidential career, he became the most relentless congressional foe of slavery and advocate for the constitutional right of petition. But in private life, his personality—anxious, taciturn, dour, and demanding—often darkened the lives of his wife and children. 

Paul Nagel’s superb collective biography of the family was called Descent From Glory. At times, however, I thought it might be better called Descent Into Despair. George epitomized the latter title.

His birth was greeted with joy, relief—but also with trepidation. It came one month after John Adams, the first President to lose a reelection bid, left the White House peevishly rather than witness the inauguration of rival and former friend Thomas Jefferson. A child to continue the family line was seen as balm for the old man’s spirits.

The successful delivery of the baby also soothed, at least for awhile, the anxiety of John Quincy and wife Louisa Johnson Adams, who had already suffered a couple of miscarriages. The new mother and her son were each “fat and rosy,” the diplomat assured concerned relatives and friends.

That jocular tone was uncharacteristic of the ambassador. His wishes for his son were best expressed through the pillar of integrity and restraint he was named for: President Washington, who in his second term had been so impressed by his Vice President's son that he predicted John Quincy would head America’s diplomatic corps in time. “I implore the favour of Almighty God that he [George] might live and never prove unworthy of [his name],” John Quincy wrote after the birth.

It was not to be.

When John Quincy Adams was appointed America’s first envoy to Russia in 1809, he decided to take two-year-old son Charles Francis Adams with him and Louisa to St. Petersburg but to leave eight-year-old George and six-year-old John Adams II in the care of relatives in Massachusetts. The parents were gone for so long—six years—that, upon their return, they did not recognize the now teenage George.

The reports they received in the interim about George—that he was, as Nagel put it in John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life, “hyperactive, erratic, brilliant but undisciplined, effeminate, and lazy”—were not reassuring.

The diplomat father—brilliant but ultra-disciplined—had already been peppering his son with letters advising him about Bible study, good companions, and the necessity to rise before 6 am to learn Greek and Latin. Now he decided to take an even stronger hand in directing his George’s future.

Grandfather John, maybe regretting his own hectoring for driving John Quincy’s brothers Charles and Thomas towards insolvency, alcoholism and despair, delicately tried to warn his son against also exerting too tight a control over his children, writing of the grandson he wished had been named for him, “George is a treasure of diamonds. He has a genius equal to anything, but like all other genius, requires the most delicate management.”

That “genius” was manifested in an area that John Quincy wished he could have indulged more—poetry. George was so good at writing verses that when he attended Harvard, he won the prestigious Boylston Prize over a formidable competitor: Ralph Waldo Emerson.

But whatever pride John Quincy might have felt in his son’s accomplishment was lessened by his otherwise lackluster performance at a school that his father had trained, pushed, and pulled strings for him to enter. With no American until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow more than two decades later making his living solely through poetry, it was necessary that George work at another profession: the law.

Even with excellent mentors—John Quincy and Senator Daniel Webster—George showed little interest in this career, and also underperformed when he followed father and grandfather into politics. Successful races for the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the Boston City Council preceded service in these bodies, where he evinced little interest in his work.

What really interested George were ladies and liquor. Like his literary hero, the Romantic poet Lord Byron, he drew women to him with his good looks. He would be deeply sorry for one of those conquests: the beautiful niece of his mother, Mary Hellen, who took up with him after playing with the affections of the youngest son, Charles Francis Adams—and who, after breaking off her engagement with George, married instead middle brother John Adams II.

From this point onward, George’s downward spiral accelerated. Mounting gambling debts increased the problems caused by lack of career success. Looking at Charles Francis, he saw a paler but unmistakable image of his father: introspective, self-critical, but high-minded and responsible enough to carve out a public niche.

Worse, love-on-the-rebound led George to impregnate the maid of the family’s Boston doctor. The threat of scandal deepened his depression.

With John Quincy having repeated his father’s Presidential electoral loss, he turned his attention again in the spring of 1829 to his oldest child, summoning George to DC to help with the family transition back to Massachusetts.

Being under the thumb of his relentlessly demanding father was more than George could bear. Before leaving for the nation’s capital, he was already confiding in associates his intention to commit suicide. Before dawn on April 30, he either jumped or fell overboard from a passenger liner in New York Harbor. It would be a month before his remains washed ashore.

In pondering in his diary the news that his son was lost, the former President momentarily deluded himself into thinking that the death had been precipitated by “the motion of the Stage and Steamboat in twenty-four hours [which] had produced a fever, with a rushing of the blood to the brain,” but what followed sounded more like soul-crushing guilt over this probable suicide:

“Blessed God! Forgive the repining of mortal flesh, at this dispensation of thy will! Forgive the wanderings of my own mind under its excruciating torture!”

Agony caused by George continued to plague the family for a few years. Charles disposed of his brother's papers, but refused to be blackmailed concerning George's illegitimate child. Two years later, the family had to suffer through the publication of a 44-page pamphlet that divulged all the secrets of the affair.

Over a century later, a more successful President, Franklin Roosevelt, surely thinking of his own children’s struggle in the public eye, observed, “One of the worst things in the world is being the child of a President. It’s a terrible life they lead.” Though a more playful and warm-hearted father than John and John Quincy Adams, even FDR could only pray that his children could survive a life disrupted by parental ambition as best as they could.

This Day in Medical History (Benjamin Rush, Reforming Doctor Who Signed Declaration of Independence, Born)

Dec. 24, 1745—Benjamin Rush, a doctor at the forefront of intellectual and reform movements in the first four decades of the American republic—including signing the Declaration of Independence—was born in Byberry Township, Penn. (The date used here was according to the Julian Calendar that prevailed in England and its colonies at the time.)

Last week, I wrote a post about another underrated Founding Father: John Jay. But, in its way, Rush’s career was more varied, more interesting—and more tragic. After all, how many other figures are considered so crucial to the origins of abolitionism, prison reform, psychiatry, eugenics, and substance abuse treatment—or been forced to put many of his concepts into practice by treating his own mentally ill son?

As a member of the Continental Congress whose activities ranged across multiple fields, Rush may have been surpassed only by two friends who also signed the Declaration, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. He embodied the best notions of the American Enlightenment for his belief in republicanism, toleration, scientific progress, and the elevating impact of education.

Yet, though regarded as the most famous and brilliant American physician of his time, his renown faded somewhat in the two centuries after his death for three reasons: his relatively brief political career, a longtime lack of access to his copious writings, and out-of-context misunderstandings about some of the more controversial aspects of his medical career.

In recent years, Rush has become the focus of some long-overdue scholarly attention. First, Stephen Fried’s highly acclaimed biography of the doctor appeared two years ago. Second, the current COVID-19 pandemic has led scholars to re-examine Rush’s controversial role in a major epidemic of his career: a Yellow Fever outbreak in Philadelphia.

Though not the sole physician who signed the Declaration, Rush was the only one to receive a university education in medicine (the College of Philadelphia, then the University of Edinburgh).

From his late 20s on, he became active in politics: persuading the recent English immigrant Thomas Paine to call his incendiary pro-revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense; discussing how to advance the new movement while dining at Philadelphia’s City Tavern with John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington; and, after signing the Declaration, leaving his pregnant wife behind to serve as physician in chief of the military hospital of the Middle Department of the Continental Army.

In the latter frenetic period, Rush was a trusted confidante and admirer of Washington: witnessing him clutching a page saying “Victory or death” (the watchword for the attack) before crossing the Delaware at the Battle of Trenton; treating the dying Gen. Hugh Mercer at the Battle of Princeton; slipping out of the clutches of the British after being briefly captured at the Battle of Brandywine; and writing an essay on  improving soldiers’ medical care that Washington pressed on his subordinates.

But before long, Rush would also display the habit of caustic, impolitic and sometimes indiscreet writing that attracted a host of enemies. He became appalled by medical treatment of soldiers at the hands of his superior, John Shippen, then at the Continental Congress for clearing him of wrongdoing.

Rush made an even more significant enemy when he penned an anonymous letter to Patrick Henry that was critical of Washington. Henry disregarded Rush’s plea to burn the letter immediately, instead passing it along to the general. Washington was so angry at Rush’s duplicity that the doctor felt compelled to resign his post.

In the 1780s, students rather than soldiers became the primary focus of Rush’s attention. At the University of Pennsylvania, he served in a number of capacities over the years, including professor of chemistry, professor of the theory and practice of medicine, and professor of the institutes of medicine and clinical practice. Unlike many of the other Founding Fathers, Rush was egalitarian in outlook, believing that a good education should be enough to qualify candidates for public office.

All the while he was lecturing to enthralled students (more than 3,000 in his 45-year career), Rush was maintaining a vigorous publication schedule (an estimated 85 significant publications, including the first American chemistry textbook) and becoming what would now be thought of as a public intellectual on health and educational matters:

* He founded Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania (1783), Franklin College (now Franklin and Marshall) at Lancaster (1787), and the College of Physicians (also 1787);

* He sought, at Pennsylvania Hospital, the nation's first hospital, to get better funding for the mentally ill, and to stop the shameful practice of warehousing them;

* He called for treating addiction as a medical problem years before this became standard practice;

* He sought to reconcile two modes of beliefs that he heartily embraced: rationalism and religion;

* He proposed a national system of public education with a federal university to train public servants; and

* He advocated for the education of women.

On top of all these efforts, Rush not only called for an end to slavery but, differing from the conventional wisdom of the time, declared that there was nothing physically different about African-Americans that would prevent them from achieving as much as whites.

Unfortunately, Rush endangered his reputation for being in the vanguard of progressive thought—not to mention his professional credibility—by his role in Philadelphia’s yellow fever epidemic of 1793. (A thorough but critical examination of his role is provided by Robert L. North's "Benjamin Rush, MD: Assassin or Beloved Healer?" in a 2000 article for the Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings.)

At the start of the epidemic, Rush’s standing with the public actually rose, as he was one of the few physicians even to stay in the city to treat patients. But no approach he tried with patients seemed to work.

At this point, recalling a 1744 medical paper, Rush hit on the expedient of bloodletting and purging. Even when that didn’t work, he only resorted to it all the more often. (Ironically, Rush had stumbled onto they key to yellow fever outbreaks—his notes refer at one point to “Moschetoes” that were “uncommonly numerous”—but he never made the connection to the disease’s origin.)

William Safire’s novel Scandalmonger (2000) takes the viewpoint of Rush’s enemies by depicting him as a "murderous quack" and "Dr. Death," but it leaves out an important bit of context: Nobody else at the time had the least idea of what caused the disease. But the damage to the esteemed doctor’s credibility was done. He felt compelled to withdraw from some of his positions, and even his practice suffered for a time.

Adams’ appointment of his old friend as Treasurer of the U.S. Mint enabled Rush to rebuild his reputation even as he re-entered public service. He remained wed, fatally, to his old idea on fever—when stricken with typhus in 1813, he instructed that he be treated through bloodletting and purging—but at his death, a grateful populace turned out en masse to pay tribute to one of Philadelphia’s most honored citizens.

In his 2018 biography, Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father, Stephen Fried explained how the physician-patriot’s intimate connection to the leading lights of his time led to his relative undervaluation by decades of historians. At his death, descendants of several prominent families had reason not to have his correspondence or journal entries cited by biographers--materials that would have confirmed his central in the American Revolution:

*Jefferson’s family did not want airing of his skepticism about the divinity of Christ—opinions that could have been misconstrued to suggest he was an atheist—or his request to the doctor for the best way to treat his hemorrhoids;

*Adams’ descendants were sensitive about revealing the President's anguish over a son’s descent into and death from alcoholism—a pattern that repeated itself with one of the children of John Quincy Adams; and

*Rush’s family was not keen about divulging the reason behind his disrupted friendship with George Washington, now firmly established as the Father of His Country.

Even as he struggled with the personal tragedy of his son John--a physician who, after killing a friend in a duel, became so mentally unstable he needed to be placed under his father's care-- Rush, in his last decade, performed one of his greatest services to posterity by relentlessly urging old friends Adams and Jefferson to repair the breach that had developed because of their competition for the Presidency. 

That reconciliation not only helped heal old wounds between the proud old patriots but led to one of the most extraordinary bursts of correspondents among two ex-Presidents—creating a treasure trove that scholars have used since to better understand the extraordinary generation that produced such revolutionaries as Adams, Jefferson and mutual friend Rush.

Quote of the Day (John Adams, on the U.S. vs. ‘Artifice, Imposture, Hypocrisy, and Superstition’)

“The multitude have always been credulous, and the few are always artful. The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event [the creation of the U.S.] as an era in their history.”—John Adams (1735-1826), signer of the Declaration of Independence and second U.S. President, “A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America” (1778), in The Works of John Adams, Vol. 4 (Novanglus, Thoughts on Government, Defence of the Constitution) [1851]

From his extensive study of law and the classics, John Adams was well aware of the dangers posed to self-government. But it was his hope—at least in the American Revolution—that “The people were universally too enlightened to be imposed on by artifice; and their leaders, or more properly followers, were men of too much honor to attempt it.”

And it was his belief that education and reason would minimize the corruption and misrule he saw all across Europe—even in the England that once commanded his steadfast loyalty.

Unfortunately, the events of the last week have called his optimism into question, because it is more manifestly apparent than ever that an American President and the party on bended knee before him do not have an even elementary concept of “honor.”

They have weaponized the authority of the Oval Office and the dangers of social media in its Wild West stage to exploit the faith of half the American republic—and defy the 220-year tradition of an orderly, peaceful transfer of power between Presidents of opposite parties.

It should be no surprise that Donald Trump, having predicted that the 2016 election would be “rigged” weeks before it even took place, would repeat his claim this year, especially when the results were more or less reversed.

But by this time, I had expected that Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, exhausted by the 24/7 tide of insults, bullying, untruths and chaos that they have had to endure the past four years, would edge away from Trump’s desperate effort to hold onto the Presidency at all costs by refusing to concede to Joe Biden.

Shame on me. After their craven capitulation to him during the impeachment proceedings this past winter, I should have known better. And I should have known, contrary to their assurances then that it was up to the American people, not their lawmakers, to remove the President from office, that in the crunch they would accept no such outcome.

In acquiescing to Trump by refusing to publicly accept the collective decision of the electorate, they countenanced with a straight face the notion that nationwide results that stymied an expected “blue wave” against GOP congressmen, senators and local officials had then magically been jiggered to work against the president.

It was disheartening, especially in the Senate, to see officeholders historically jealous of their privilege and power act with a supine subservience unmatched by counterparts in the decadent Roman Empire.

It was astonishing to witness politicians who once couldn’t wait to rush to a TV camera or microphone walk now with heads bent firmly down, deaf even to shouted questions from reporters wanting their reaction to the latest Presidential outrage.

It was infuriating to hear Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell state, in the absence of any credible evidence, that President Trump was “100 percent within his legal rights” to pursue his multi-state lawsuits over spurious voter fraud.

But it was downright nauseating to hear him claim, with a straight face: “Let’s not have any lectures, no lectures about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election.”

Let it be stated, as it appears that the GOP leader on Capitol Hill has suffered a conveniently catastrophic memory loss, that Hillary Clinton called to congratulate Trump the night of the 2016 election and formally conceded before her supporters the next morning.

And it is disgraceful, whatever his motives, that McConnell allows Trump to continue to launch baseless accusations that undermine the legitimacy of the republic for which Adams and the other signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged “their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.”

Trump supporters must now reckon with the fact that he is more than simply a crybaby, a sore loser, or an aging, petulant poseur who must be humored for just a little while longer.

Something else is suggested by these events of the past 48 hours: McConnell’s spineless Senate speech, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s smug assurance of a transition to a second Trump term, Bill Barr’s authorization of investigations into chimerical massive voter fraud, and especially the removal or resignations in protest of Defense Secretary Mark Esper and the heads of three other agencies at the National Security Agency and the Pentagon.

Trump supporters, do you realize that the President is orchestrating an accelerating coup attempt? Do you understand that he is mobilizing the “artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition” that Adams assailed? Do you recognize what this means for the survival of the republic you profess to love?

Quote of the Day (John Adams, Warning About the Loss of Liberty)

"But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever." —American President John Adams (1735-1826), letter to wife Abigail Adams, July 7, 1775

Quote of the Day (John Adams, Warning Against Fanaticism and Other Dangers to the Republic)

“Our hopes however of Sudden tranquility ought not to be too Sanguine. Fanaticism and Superstition will Still be Selfish, Subtle, intriguing, and at times furious. Despotism will Still Struggle for domination; Monarchy will Still Study to rival nobility in popularity; Aristocracy will continue to envy all above it, and despize and oppress all below it; Democracy will envy all, contend with all, endeavour to pull down all; and when by chance it happens to get the Upper hand for a Short time, it will be revengefull bloody and cruel. These and other Elements of Fanaticism and Anarchy will yet for a long time continue a Fermentation, which will excite alarms and require Vigilance.”—John Adams (1735-1826), signer of the Declaration of Independence and second President of the United States, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, July 16, 1814

On that cautionary note, Happy Fourth of July, Faithful Reader!

This Day in Constitutional History (Alien and Sedition Acts Omen of Later Freedom Threats)

July 14, 1798—As tensions with France verged toward war, President John Adams (pictured) signed the last of four pieces of legislation passed over the past month by the Federalist Party in Congress to crack down on Gallic immigrants and their Irish Catholic and domestic allies. The Alien and Sedition Acts, the first major federal attempt to curtail immigration and press rights, sparked a furious reaction by the Democratic-Republican Party, led by Vice-President Thomas Jefferson.

If you want to know about the evolution of such current controversies as immigration, states’ rights, voter suppression, the role of the press, and resistance to unpopular federal measures, this early wide-ranging attempt to interfere with the Bill of Rights is a good place to start. 

Actually, the Trump Administration’s heavy-handed attempt to label both Muslims and Mexicans as security threats has thrown an unexpected spotlight on a period of history that Americans have conveniently forgotten—or never really learned. 

For years, the passage of these bills and Adams’ signature “were to be rightly judged by history as the most reprehensible acts of his presidency," according to Adams’ keenly appreciative biographer, David McCullough. 

Yet it would appear that, two hundred and eighteen years later, the principles of the Alien and Sedition Acts “have sprung, with surprising vigor, from their resting place in history,” wrote Jelani Cobb in a “Talk of the Town” piece for The New Yorker right after the last Presidential election. The last few weeks have only made that observation even more relevant.

The question of revolutionary France was the great fault line in the decade following adoption of the Constitution. The Democratic-Republicans regarded the new republic as a natural extension of the American Revolution by a nation that had served as our ally in the war, while the more Anglophile Federalists regarded it first with suspicion, then, as the Reign of Terror took hold, with horror.

The execution of Louis XVI plunged France into war with the Bourbon dynasty’s Continental allies, and, in the case of monarchical England, a newly sympathetic force. The possibility of involvement in that conflict compelled President George Washington to issue a Proclamation of Neutrality.

To be sure, there were plenty of domestic issues—notably, the place of the First National Bank in the new nation—to divide the Federalists from the Democratic-Republicans. 

Yet the quarrel with France ensured that the divisions would be relentlessly rancorous. For the argument about the French Revolution was, at bottom, an argument about ours—about what was the true legacy of that struggle, and about which side was the worthier custodian of its legacy.

Additional tensions arose in the Adams administration over France’s seizure of ships by neutral countries such as the United States. Adams’ attempt at negotiations collapsed when the French government demanded bribes. The resulting X, Y, and Z Affair (christened because of the initials standing for redacted names in the correspondence that Congress insisted the President release related to the incident) led to the abrogation of the 1778 treaty of alliance with France, and fiscal authorization of new frigates.

The Federalists also used the opportunity to smite their Democratic-Republican opponents. through four measures: 

*The Naturalization Act, the most dramatic of the measures, increased the period necessary for immigrants to become citizens from five to 14 years.

*The Alien Friends Act authorized the president to deport foreigners deemed "dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States" during peacetime.

*The Alien Enemies Act allowed the president to arrest, imprison, and deport any foreigner subject to an enemy nation.

*The Sedition Act made it a crime to “write, print, utter or publish…any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the Federal government, including the Congress and the preside

The four pieces of legislation collectively christened the Alien and Sedition Acts were the Federalists’ attempt to stem the dissent and anarchy they saw all around. In a time of unrelenting demographic and political change, it found favor among those who wanted to calcify current conditions before they changed again.

The immediate cause of the legislation was the Quasi-War that had erupted between the U.S. and France. The French and their Irish Catholic allies newly arrived on U.S. shores seemed to the Federalists like a fifth column, undermining the U.S. from within. 

But limiting immigration was, for the Federalists, not just a matter of national security; it was also an early—and unusual—attempt at voter suppression. 

Once settled, French immigrants had displayed, by Federalist lights, a dismaying tendency to vote Democratic-Republican. 

More alarmingly, the same phenomenon was occurring with Irish immigrants. What began, in the early 1790s, as a primarily Irish Protestant immigration to the U.S. had shifted, by the end of the decade, toward an Irish-Catholic flood that elected Democratic-Republicans in key urban districts of Philadelphia.

By 1798, “The Year of the French,” a French-aided rebellion by the United Irishmen had raised a threat close to England. Such Federalists as Harrison Gray Otis and Roger Griswold made no secret of their contempt for the new arrivals from this now-revolutionary homeland. 

Reflecting the partisan spirit in which the legislation was framed, the Sedition Act stipulated that "opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the President of the United States" and publishing "any false, scandalous and malicious writing" against the president or the Congress would resist in imprisonment or fines. 

Notice the one official left out among these maligned groups: the Vice-President. As the current occupant of that office was Jefferson, the Federalists had no objection to any criticism lobbed against him. 

Adams had no interest in using the authority handed to him by the Alien Acts to regulate immigration, so he kept Secretary of State Timothy Pickering on a short leash when it came to enforcing that.

But the choleric President was too thin-skinned to ignore insults, and before long journalists and politicians were being locked up or intimidated into silence for running afoul of the Sedition Acts. 

Among those who ran afoul of the new legislation was Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of Philadelphia's Democrat-Republican Aurora and the grandson of Benjamin Franklin, who died of yellow fever before he could be brought to trial, and Matthew Lyon, a Democratic-Republican representative from Vermont, who had said Adams’ foreign policy proved the President should be confined to a "mad house." 

By itself, a prison term would have been enough to make newspaper editors nervous about criticizing the administration. But the financial penalty of $2,000 may have been even more staggering. The sum would have been difficult-to-impossible to pay, forcing the editors into bankruptcy and debtor’s prison.

The Democratic-Republicans did more than register their disapproval at the polls; they also sought to defy federal power at the state level. Jefferson and protégé James Madison crafted the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, passed by those two legislatures not only declaring their opposition to the bills but explaining why they were null and void.

With Jefferson still a member of the federal government, he and Madison had to hide their authorship of the resolutions.(In fact, this would not become known until the 1820s, when both were old men no longer actively involved in electoral politics). 

But the resolutions, by insisting that a single state could nullify federal law, laid the groundwork for the Nullification Crisis 30 years later led by John C. Calhoun. By this time, Madison was insisting that his work and Jefferson’s could not be construed into an implied endorsement of Calhoun’s defiance of federal authority. But the genie had been let loose from the bottle, and Madison and Jefferson were, in effect, the intellectual grandfathers of secession.

Once Jefferson was inaugurated in 1801, the Alien and Sedition Acts became effectively inoperative. The legislation expired the day before he took office, and those jailed under its terms were released. The courts progressively viewed the legislation, as Associate Supreme Court Justice William Brennan noted in Sullivan v. New York Times (1964), and null and void. 

Although the legislation certainly excited and crystallized opposition to the Federalists, it did not by itself ensure their defeat at the polls. Instead, responsibility for their loss in 1800 lay in the feud between Alexander Hamilton, the party’s guiding light, and the Federalist who refused to act on the basis of political faction, Adams.

The President, contemplating the impact of another war on the young republic, authorized peace negotiations in 1799. Hamilton then launched an intemperate attack on Adams, dividing the Federalists and ensuring they would never win another Presidential election.