In 1796, John Adams won the presidential election by three electoral college votes over his nearest competitor, Thomas Jefferson. Failing to envision a two- or even three-party system, the Constitution dictated that the man who received the most votes would become president, and the second highest vote getter would become vice president. However, by 1796 political parties had become a reality and Adams was faced with the consequences of a political split in the executive branch.
John Adams was a member of the Federalist Party that believed in a strong central government and the fiscal policies of Alexander Hamilton. As a result of the 1796 election, they controlled both chambers of Congress as well as the White House. Jefferson led the Democratic-Republican Party, which wanted more power to rest in the hands of the state governments under a stricter interpretation of the Constitution.
The two parties also differed in their views of foreign policy, which was highlighted by their respective responses to the French Revolution. The Democratic-Republicans tended to feel sympathy for the French people while the Federalists were more concerned with preserving the French monarchy. The French Revolution caused a wave of immigration into the new nation. According to Jack Lynch’s writings for the Colonial Williamsburg Journal, the Federalists were concerned about the political leanings of the immigrants.
They looked at the demographics of the immigrant population, and did not like what they saw: recent immigrants overwhelmingly supported the Democratic-Republicans.
And so, within a few years of our birth, a political party used national security to suppress voices it did not want to hear. Its a suppression which has been widely imitated by Republicans in states across the nation today.
Adams appeared to go out of his way to capitalize on the threat that he felt the French posed. After the XYZ Affair was exposed, George Washington was called out of retirement to head the American Army and money was appropriated to building up our armed forces, including the Navy.
Federalist fears deepened as they watched the new French republican government encourage wars of liberation and conquest in Belgium, Switzerland, Holland, and the Italian peninsula. Rumors were rampant in 1798 about a possible French invasion of America, one that allegedly would be supported by American traitors and a population of French émigrés that had grown to more than 20,000.
Using this rumor and other immigrant-related fears, the Naturalization Act was passed in the summer of 1798, increasing the residency requirement from five years to 14 before naturalization could be obtained.
Two more acts followed quickly on the first. "An Act concerning Aliens," or Alien Friends Act, authorized the president to deport foreigners deemed "dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States" during peacetime. A companion law, "An Act respecting Alien enemies" or Alien Enemies Act, allowed the president to arrest, imprison, and deport any foreigner subject to an enemy nation.
While it could be (and has been) argued that there might be some national security interest in the Alien Acts, the Naturalization Act and the Sedition Act were clearly political. The Naturalization Act was designed to slow the ability of immigrants to cast a vote in support of the Democratic-Republicans and the Sedition Act, or "An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes Against the United States," aimed to eliminate all criticism as it made opposition to the government a crime—in no uncertain terms:
That if any persons shall unlawfully combine or conspire together, with intent to oppose any measure or measures of the government of the United States … he or they shall be deemed guilty of a high misdemeanor...
And, in Section 2:
That if any person shall write, print, utter or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition within the United States, or to excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the President of the United States...
Most notable in the above paragraph are the protections extended specifically to the president, the government and both chambers of Congress. Absent is any mention of the vice president, who happened to belong to the opposition party. It’s doubtful that this was an oversight, as clarified by Section 4:
That this act shall continue and be in force until the third day of March, one thousand eight hundred and one, and no longer...
March 3, 1801 would be the Inauguration Day of a new president, and since the Federalists had not figured out a way to guarantee their continued occupancy of the White House, they wanted to make sure that their voices were not restrained. With good cause, according to HistoryNet:
At the same time, Federalists were hardly models of decorum when describing Republicans. Their opponents were, one Federalist wrote, ‘democrats, mobocrats and all other kinds of rats.’ Federalist Noah Webster characterized Republicans as ‘the refuse, the sweepings of the most depraved part of mankind from the most corrupt nations on earth.’
The Federalists wasted no time in applying the Sedition Act—in all there were 17 prosecutions and 10 convictions, perhaps the most prominent among them that of Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont. The fierce Irish immigrant, known for his temper and disdain for Adams, had already engaged in a brawl with Rep. Roger Griswold on the floor of the House, and believed that he would be a target of the new law. Sure enough, he was the first to be prosecuted.
The first count of the indictment cited a published letter that Lyon wrote before passage of the Sedition Act. In this critique of the Adams administration, Lyon asserted that he had seen “every consideration of public welfare swallowed up in a continual grasp for power, in an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, or selfish avarice.” Two other counts accused Lyon of further promoting sedition through his role in publicizing a letter in which the poet Joel Barlow blamed Adams and the Senate for the diplomatic crisis with France.
He was convicted and while in prison he wrote a widely-read account of his trial. He was then re-elected to his position as representative by the voters of Vermont.
Of course, the real objective of the Sedition Act was to shut down the press attacks on Adams and the Congress, but time was also found to convict a drunk:
Incredibly, even an inebriated Republican, Luther Baldwin of Newark, New Jersey, became a victim. Following the adjournment of Congress in July 1798, President Adams and his wife were traveling through Newark on their way to their home in Quincy, Massachusetts. Residents lined the streets as church bells rang, and ceremonial cannon fire greeted the party. As the procession made its way past a local tavern owned by John Burnet, one of the patrons remarked, ‘There goes the President and they are firing at his a__.’ According to the Newark Centinel of Freedom, Baldwin added that, ‘he did not care if they fired thro’ his a__.’ Burnet overheard the exchange and exclaimed, ‘That is seditious.’ Baldwin was arrested and later convicted of speaking ’seditious words tending to defame the President and Government of the United States.’ He was fined $150, assessed court costs and expenses, and sent to jail until he paid the fine and fees.
Among the journalists charged under the Sedition Act was the most prominent Republican newspaper publisher of the time, Benjamin Bache. The grandson of Benjamin Franklin, Bache founded the Philadelphia Aurora, which was critical of the Federalists, especially John Adams. He was arrested on June 26—before the Sedition Act had even been signed into law, which would lead one to believe that he was a major target of the legislation. Sadly, yellow fever ended his life before he could be prosecuted. It would have been an interesting trial targeting a man who wrote this about the Sedition Act:
One of the first rights of a freeman is to speak or to publish his sentiments; if any government founded upon the will of the people passes any ordinance to abridge this right, it is as much a crime as if the people were, in an unconstitutional way, to curtail the government of one of the powers delegated to it. Were the people to do this, would it not be called anarchy? What name shall then be given to an unconstitutional exercise of power over the people? In Turkey the voice of government is the law, and there it is called despotism. Here the voice of government is likewise the law and here it is called liberty.
While Bache was the most prominent, there were other journalists prosecuted as well, including William Duane who continued Bache’s work at the Aurora and reporter James Callender who also worked for the Aurora before moving to Richmond where he wrote for the Examiner. John Daly Burk was arrested a brief two weeks after Bache’s arrest, for making ‘seditious and libelous’ statements against the president as editor of the New York Time Piece. Burk escaped imprisonment by agreeing to deportation but managed to flee to Virginia where he lived under an assumed name.
After his inauguration, Thomas Jefferson pardoned all who were convicted under the Sedition Act, and the Naturalization, Sedition and Alien Friends Acts were all either repealed or allowed to expire. However:
The laws are usually regarded as the biggest stain on John Adams' reputation. In his monumental biography, historian David McCullough says of the Alien and Sedition Acts, "Their passage and his signature on them were to be rightly judged by history as the most reprehensible acts of his presidency." Historians have disparaged the legislators who passed the bills: Alan Taylor writes that "probably no American Congress suffers from a worse reputation." The authors of the two most thorough studies of the acts put the case forcefully. John Chester Miller writes that, "by yielding to the temptation to proscribe, under cover of a war emergency, their political opponents as enemies of the country, the Federalist party in effect confessed its unworthiness to lead the nation at a time of tension and peril." James Morton Smith makes the case even more vigorously:
The Federalists were so interested in providing for the security of the state, which they identified with their administration, that they were willing to run the risk of suppressing the liberties of the individual. Arguing that unusual circumstances called for unusual measures, they moved to penalize verbal opposition as well as forcible opposition to the nation's laws. Wishing to eliminate political heresy, they decided to stamp out any criticism which had even a remote tendency to undermine the authority of their administration.
Our history since then includes incidents when the Enemy Aliens Act has been used, most notably during World War II. During the World War I, President Wilson signed the Sedition Act of 1918 which:
made it a crime to "willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States" or to "willfully urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of the production" of the things "necessary or essential to the prosecution of the war."
This act was often used against pacifists, socialists, and labor organizers like Eugene Debs, who was charged and convicted to 10 years in prison under the Act after a speech he made criticizing the war in 1918. He was released in 1921 when the law was repealed.
And while national security can sometimes justify a certain curtailment of the press during wartime, it is clear that these acts were purely political. The Federalists wanted to eliminate any other political faction from the nation. They wanted single-party rule and were determined, with control of both Houses and the presidency, to get it—even if it meant destroying the very democracy they were trying to establish.
And even though our mainstream press does a piss-poor job of providing the information that the public requires in order to make informed political decisions, it is not the “enemy of the people.” As hard as it is to defend those who felt chasing a phantom email scandal was more important than examining the interference of a foreign power in our electoral system, they are still the only eyes and ears we have. As such, it is imperative that they be allowed to accompany public officials as they travel abroad, and that they be given access to those at home.
Or at a golf course.