It is February 19th. Welcome to Episode 50 of History in a Year. Today, the United States government declares war on the First Amendment. As the Quasi-War rages at sea, paranoia grips the capital. Terrified of French spies, radical immigrants, and political opposition, the Federalist Congress passes the Alien and Sedition Acts. We watch as President John Adams makes it a literal federal crime to criticize him. Newspaper editors are thrown into freezing prison cells, a sitting US Congressman is jailed for writing a letter, and Thomas Jefferson secretly drafts documents that threaten to tear the nation apart.
STEPHEN:
Welcome to History in a Year: America’s First 250 Years.
LEAH:
Join us every single day as we journey from the Revolution of 1776 to the 250th anniversary of the United States.
STEPHEN:
You can find every episode and join the discussion at PointedWords.com. I’m Stephen.
LEAH:
And I’m Leah.
STEPHEN:
It is February 19th. Welcome to Episode 50. Yesterday, we watched the United States Navy finally hit back against France in the Quasi-War.
LEAH:
The new frigates were winning battles in the Caribbean, and Alexander Hamilton was building a massive provisional army at home. The country was in a state of full-blown war fever.
STEPHEN:
But the Federalists—Hamilton’s party—weren’t just focused on the French Navy. They were looking at the enemy within.
LEAH:
Paranoia had completely consumed Philadelphia. The Federalists had watched the French Revolution descend into the Reign of Terror, and they were convinced that Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans wanted to bring the guillotine to America.
STEPHEN:
They genuinely believed there was a massive conspiracy to overthrow the US government. Federalist preachers were giving sermons warning that a secret society—the Illuminati—had infiltrated the country to destroy Christianity.
LEAH:
And they were deeply suspicious of the immigrants pouring into the country. Thousands of French refugees and Irish rebels were arriving on American shores, fleeing war and oppression in Europe.
STEPHEN:
The Federalists looked at these immigrants and saw a threat. Why? Because when these poor, working-class immigrants arrived and got the right to vote, they almost universally voted for Jefferson’s party.
LEAH:
So, in the summer of 1798, the Federalist Congress decided to use the cover of national security to permanently crush their political enemies.
STEPHEN:
They passed a series of four laws that are collectively known as the Alien and Sedition Acts.
LEAH:
These laws are a massive stain on the Adams administration. John Adams didn’t write them, and Alexander Hamilton actually thought they went a little too far, but Adams signed them into law anyway. And his wife Abigail strongly encouraged him to do it, because she was terrified of the Republican press.
STEPHEN:
Let’s break these laws down, starting with the three “Alien” Acts.
LEAH:
First was the Naturalization Act. This law took the waiting period for an immigrant to become a US citizen and extended it from five years to fourteen years.
STEPHEN:
The goal here was blatant voter suppression. They knew immigrants voted for the Republicans, so they just made it mathematically impossible for any new immigrant to vote in the upcoming Presidential Election of 1800.
LEAH:
Next were the Alien Friends Act and the Alien Enemies Act. These gave the President the unilateral power to arrest, imprison, or deport any non-citizen he deemed “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.”
STEPHEN:
No trial. No jury. No due process. If the President thought you were a threat, you were put on a boat.
LEAH:
Adams actually never officially used the deportation power, but he didn’t have to. The threat alone was enough. Hundreds of French immigrants saw the writing on the wall, packed their bags, and fled the country before the government could arrest them.
STEPHEN:
But as bad as the Alien Acts were, the fourth law was the real constitutional nightmare. The Sedition Act. LEAH:
The Sedition Act made it a federal crime to write, print, utter, or publish any “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the government, the Congress, or the President of the United States.
STEPHEN:
If you criticized John Adams in a newspaper, or even just said something mean about him in a tavern, you could be fined $2,000 and thrown in a rat-infested prison for up to two years.
LEAH:
Now, listen to the specific wording of that law. It protected the government, the Congress, and the President. Do you notice who is conspicuously missing from that list?
STEPHEN:
The Vice President! Thomas Jefferson!
LEAH:
Exactly. The Federalists specifically wrote the law so that it was illegal to criticize John Adams, but it was perfectly legal—and encouraged!—to relentlessly mock Thomas Jefferson.
STEPHEN:
It was a blatant, shocking violation of the First Amendment. The ink on the Bill of Rights was barely dry! It had only been ratified seven years earlier, and already, the government was completely ignoring the guarantee of free speech and a free press.
LEAH:
And the Federalists didn’t just pass the law; they aggressively enforced it. Adams’s Secretary of State, Timothy Pickering, scoured Republican newspapers looking for anyone who insulted the President.
STEPHEN:
Over two dozen Republican newspaper editors and writers were arrested and charged.
LEAH:
One of the first targets was Benjamin Franklin Bache. Yes, the grandson of Benjamin Franklin. He was the editor of the Aurora, the most powerful Republican paper in the country. He had been calling Adams a “blind, bald, crippled, toothless, querulous Adams.”
STEPHEN:
Bache was arrested for sedition. But tragically, before his trial could begin, the yellow fever epidemic swept through Philadelphia again, and Bache caught it and died at the age of 29.
LEAH:
Another famous case was Matthew Lyon. He was a Democratic-Republican Congressman from Vermont. He was a fiery Irish immigrant, and the Federalists absolutely hated him.
STEPHEN:
Earlier that year, Matthew Lyon had actually gotten into a physical brawl on the floor of the House of Representatives! A Federalist congressman named Roger Griswold insulted Lyon’s military record, so Lyon spit directly in his face.
LEAH:
Griswold responded by beating Lyon with a wooden cane, and Lyon grabbed a pair of fire tongs from the fireplace to fight back! Right there on the floor of Congress!
STEPHEN:
So, when the Sedition Act passed, Matthew Lyon was a prime target. He wrote a letter to a newspaper accusing President Adams of having an “unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp” and a “foolish adulation.”
LEAH:
For writing those words, a sitting United States Congressman was arrested, dragged out of his home, and thrown into a 16-by-12-foot prison cell that didn’t even have a glass window to keep out the winter cold.
STEPHEN:
But the Federalists’ plan completely backfired. They thought arresting Matthew Lyon would silence him and intimidate the opposition. Instead, it made him a national martyr.
LEAH:
While sitting in his freezing jail cell, Lyon ran for re-election to Congress. And he won! He is the only person in American history to be elected to Congress while serving a federal prison sentence.
STEPHEN:
Another target was a journalist named James Callender. He had written a pamphlet calling the Adams administration a “continual tempest of malignant passions.” He was fined $200 and thrown in jail for nine months.
LEAH:
The American people were disgusted by the Sedition Act. They realized that the Federalists hadn’t just gone too far; they had become the very tyrants they fought against in the Revolution.
STEPHEN:
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison saw an opportunity to strike back. But they knew they couldn’t challenge the law in the Supreme Court. All the federal judges were Federalists who fully supported the Sedition Act!
LEAH:
So, Jefferson and Madison did something incredibly dangerous. They secretly drafted two documents known as the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions.
STEPHEN:
Because it was illegal to criticize the government, they had to write these resolutions anonymously, and they had the state legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky pass them.
LEAH:
In these resolutions, Jefferson and Madison argued a radical new theory. They said the United States was just a “compact”—a voluntary agreement—between individual states.
STEPHEN:
And if the federal government passed an unconstitutional law, like the Sedition Act, the individual states had the right to judge that law for themselves. They argued that a state could simply “nullify” the law and refuse to obey the federal government.
LEAH:
This was a massive escalation. George Washington, who was watching all of this from his farm at Mount Vernon, read these resolutions and was horrified.
STEPHEN:
Washington warned that Jefferson was laying the groundwork for a civil war. If states could just ignore federal laws they didn’t like, the United States wouldn’t be a nation at all. It would just be a loose collection of squabbling territories.
LEAH:
And Washington was right to be terrified. Sixty years later, the Southern states would use Jefferson’s exact argument of “states’ rights” and “nullification” to justify seceding from the Union and starting the Civil War.
STEPHEN:
The country was tearing itself apart. The Navy was fighting the French at sea, the President was jailing journalists at home, and the Vice President was secretly encouraging the states to rebel against federal law.
LEAH:
The grand experiment of the United States was on the verge of total collapse.
STEPHEN:
The climax was rapidly approaching. The Presidential Election of 1800 was on the horizon. It would be a bitter, ugly rematch between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
LEAH:
Join us tomorrow for Episode 51. The Revolution of 1800. We witness the most venomous political campaign in American history. We’ll see how Alexander Hamilton finally destroys his own party out of sheer spite, and how a bizarre tie in the Electoral College nearly breaks the United States forever.
STEPHEN:
I’m Stephen.
LEAH:
And I’m Leah.
STEPHEN:
You can find every episode at PointedWords.com. And this… is our story.