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.
