Sedition Act

Sedition Act

Sources

French Threat . When John Adams became president in 1797, the French were angry that although the United States was officially neutral in the war between France and England, the United States had made a treaty with England in 1795. France began seizing American ships which were trading with England and also tried to arouse American public opinion to favor the French against the English. Many Americans sympathized with the French Revolution, its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity and its attack on monarchy and aristocracy. Many Americans also distrusted England, and so the French had significant support in the United States.

Law of the Land . The Adams administration received dispatches from France in 1798 in which a French agent boasted that France could turn the American people against their own government. This horrified the administration, which came to believe newspapers attacking the Federalists did so out of loyalty to France. Abigail Adams said that Philadelphia Aurora editor Benjamin Franklin Bache “has the malice & falsehood of Satan,” which an “abused and insulted publick cannot tolerate … much longer.…” An ally of Secretary of State Timothy Pickering warned that “Seditions, conspiracies, seductions, and all the Arts which the French use to fraternize and overturn nations, must be guarded against by strong and specific Acts of Congress.” Among the specific acts to prevent sedition, conspiracy, and seduction the Federalist Congress passed the Naturalization Act (18 June 1798), requiring a residence period of fourteen years, rather than five, before an alien could become a citizen; the Alien Friends Act (25 June), allowing the president to deport any alien he thought dangerous to the “peace and safety” of the United States; the Alien Enemies Act (6 July), authorizing the president to deport aliens, dangerous or not, who came from countries at war with the United States; and the Sedition Act (14 July), prohibiting any “false, scandalous, and malicious” statements that were intended to defame the president, Congress, and the government or bring them into contempt or disrepute. Violators of the Sedition Act could be fined up to $2, 000 and jailed for up to two years.

War Fever . These acts passed during a fever of war preparations. As Sen. Stevens T. Mason of Virginia wrote to Vice President Thomas Jefferson, “The drums Trumpets and other martial music which surrounded us, drowned the voices of those who spoke on the Question. The military parade so attracted the attention of the majority that much the greater part of them stood with their bodies out of the windows and could not be kept to order.” The Federalists in Congress were eager to shut down the Republican press and to do so on the grounds of national security. Both President Adams and envoi John Marshall, recently returned from an unsuccessful mission to France, thought the sedition law unwise, but an enthusiastic Federalist Congress pushed the measure through. As Boston’s Columbian Centinel noted, the law made it “patriotism to write in favor of our government,” but “sedition to write against it.”

Free Press . While the Sedition Act was being debated, Philadelphia’s Aurora printed the text of the act, along with the text of the Constitution’s First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition their government for a redress of grievances.” Though it seemed to Republican editors that the Sedition Act did abridge their freedom, the Federalists argued that “the freedom of the press” was a specific legal term, coming from British law, meaning only that the press was free from any restraint on its right to publish. This freedom from prior restraint, for the Federalists, was the defining feature of a free press. Also, the Federalists argued, because the sedition law allowed truth as a defense, it actually was an improvement over English concepts of seditious libel.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH

Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the Republican Philadelphia Aurora, explained his opposition to the Sedition Act of 1795:

The people as well as the government have certain rights prescribed by the constitution, and it is as much the sworn duty of the administration to protect the one as the other. If the government is instituted for the benefit of the people, no law ought to be made to their injury. One of the first rights of a freeman is to speak or 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 the government is the law, and there it is called despotism. Here the voice of the government is likewise the law and here it is called liberty.

Source: James Tagg, Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia Aurora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 375–376.

Pressure to Act . President Adams did not enforce the Alien laws; many aliens left the country willingly before the laws took effect. But Republican editors were indicted even before the Sedition Act became law. Benjamin Franklin Bache, who told Americans to “hold their tongues and make tooth picks of their pens” was charged with sedition under common law and accused of being a French agent. Federalist newspapers called for vigorous enforcement of the Sedition Act, warning that the country was in grave danger from the “long knives of Kentucky, the whiskey boys of the woods of Pennsylvania, [and] the United Irishmen of Virginia” who were all “for insurrection and confusion.” The chief enemy to this insurrection and confusion was Timothy Pickering, who assigned a State Department clerk the task of searching

“the obnoxious papers for suitable matter to cut them up at law.”

Enforcing the Law . Pickering singled out the most influential Republican papers. The smaller papers generally filled their political columns with material from the larger circulating newspapers, the Philadelphia Aurora, the Boston Independent Chronicle, the Richmond Examiner, and the New York Argus. The editors of all these papers were indicted for sedition. If the administration could silence these papers, smaller papers would not have access to their writers; or perhaps the smaller papers would be intimidated into silence. In all, seventeen individuals were charged with sedition, fourteen under the Sedition Act and three others, including Bache, under common law. Bache died of yellow fever before his trial, but the others were convicted and given sentences ranging up to eighteen months in prison and fines of more than $1, 000. The Vermont Gazette was the only paper that continued to publish while its editor was in jail; all the others had some break in service.

Matthew Lyon . Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont, an immigrant from Ireland and one of the few Republicans in New England, predicted that the Federalists would use the Sedition Act against members of Congress. Lyon was already a marked man: he and Connecticut congressman Roger Griswold had gotten into a fist-fight on the House floor after Griswold accused Lyon of military cowardice and Lyon responded by spitting in Griswold’s face. A Boston correspondent was “grieved that the saliva of an Irishman should be left upon the face of an American & He, a New Englandman.” Accusing Lyon of being both a spitting, brawling ruffian and an agent of the United Irishmen, Federalists moved unsuccessfully to expel him from Congress.

Trial . Lyon’s opponent for reelection was also a newspaper publisher, Stanley Williams. When Williams’s paper, the Rutland Herald, refused to print a letter from Lyon, Lyon and his son James, a printer, launched their own paper, the Scourge of Aristocracy and Repository of Important Political Truths, with its first issue appearing on 1 October 1798. Four days later a federal grand jury in Vermont indicted Lyon for sedition. Associate Justice William Paterson of the U.S. Supreme Court presided over Lyon’s trial, with the accused acting as his own attorney. In his defense Lyon offered three points: first, the Sedition Act was unconstitutional; second, Lyon had written his “seditious” essay before the law had been passed. Lyon did not focus on either of these points in his testimony, instead focusing on his final point, that his charges were not libelous because they were true. But Lyon could not prove to the court’s satisfaction that the Adams administration was bent on aggrandizing power or on ridiculous pomp and parade. On 8 October the jury deliberated for an hour before finding Lyon guilty.

Two Verdicts? Judge Paterson was determined to make an example of Lyon, who, as a member of Congress, should have been “well acquainted with the mischiefs which flow from an unlicensed abuse of government.” The judge fined him $1, 000 and sent him to the Vergennes, Vermont, jail for four months. “May the good God grant that this may be the case of every Jacobin,” an Albany newspaper said. While Lyon was in jail he was reelected to Congress, receiving 3, 482 votes to Stanley Williams’s 1, 554. While a judge and twelve jurors had found him guilty, Lyon said, thirty-five hundred freemen ruled him innocent. However, with several other candidates in the race, Lyon came one vote short of a majority, so he faced a runoff election in December. In the runoff Lyon, still in jail, received 4, 476 votes to Williams’s 2, 444, a clear victory and a warning to the Adams administration that the Sedition Act was unpopular.

New London Bee. Secretary of State Pickering regarded the threat of sedition as more grave than the threat of losing an election. Prosecutions continued in 1799. In Connecticut the publishers of the Connecticut Courant provided the district attorney with copies of their rival’s New London Bee, which had criticized, among others, former secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton had been made second-in-command of the provisional army raised to repel a French invasion; the letter to the Bee asked, “Are our young officers and soldiers to learn virtue from general Hamilton? Or like their general are they to be found in the bed of adultery?” Charles Holt, editor of the Bee, published the letter and was charged with sedition, both for trying to discourage enlistments in the army and for being “a wicked, malicious, seditious, and ill-disposed person.” On 12 April 1800 Holt was found guilty, sentenced to four months in jail, and fined $200.

A Little Joke . The Sedition Act made it illegal to criticize the Adams administration in any way. President Adams passed through Newark, New Jersey, on 27 July 1798. The citizens of Newark turned out for the occasion; as president and Mrs. Adams entered Broad Street that morning, the citizens fired a cannon, church bells rang, and a group of young men chanted “Behold the Chief who now commands” and gave three cheers. As Adams and his entourage moved away, the young men fired a sixteen-gun salute. Luther Baldwin was walking past a tavern as the guns were firing. A tavern customer said to him, “There goes the President and they are firing at his a—.” Baldwin, having had a bit to drink himself, said “he did not care if ‘they fired thro’ his a—.’ “The tavern keeper said, “That is seditious,” and a crowd gathered. Some local Federalists, upset that Adams had not stopped in Newark, agreed, and set out to punish Luther Baldwin for sedition. He and two others were indicted, and all of them wound up pleading guilty. Their joke led to a trial in October 1799 and cost Baldwin $150, his accomplices $50 and $40. The trial showed how far the Sedition Act could go. One Republican paper noted that in England a subject may safely speak of the king’s head, but in America one could not speak “of the president’s a—,” and another Republican paper said, “Thank God, we have shown the cursed democrats that we will let none of them speak disrespectfully of any part of that dear man.”

Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions . With no public way to criticize the administration or to challenge the Sedition Act, its opponents turned to the state legislatures. In Virginia James Madison drafted a series of resolutions that declared the Sedition Act to be unconstitutional, as the First Amendment said clearly that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of the press.” Vice President Jefferson secretly drafted a similar series of resolutions adopted by the Kentucky legislature. Virginia called on other states to join the protest; Kentucky declared that a state could “nullify” an unconstitutional law. The other states unanimously rejected Virginia’s and Kentucky’s pleas. Madison in 1800 wrote a long report justifying the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions and arguing that a free press could not be limited by Congress.

Revolution of 1800 . Though other states would not join in opposing the laws, and though the laws did effectively shut down the Republican press, the Republicans managed to mobilize for the election of 1800. A bitterly divided Federalist party, torn between Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, made the Jeffersonians seem a safe and responsible alternative. In the sedition trials the Republicans had appeared as defenders of free exchange of ideas. In October 1800 Hamilton circulated a pamphlet to other Federalists saying that John Adams was unfit to be president. Aaron Burr, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, found a copy and had it published in the New York papers. Nonetheless, Hamilton was not charged with sedition. By May 1800 Adams had fired Pickering and was no longer urging prosecutions. Adams had also decided to seek peace with France, which his administration secured in October 1800. Adams lost the election of 1800, and in March 1801 Thomas Jefferson became president. Jefferson announced a new way to deal with dissenters. “If there should be any among us who would wish to dissolve this union,” he said in his inaugural address, “or change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” The Sedition Act expired the same day, and President Jefferson pardoned all who had been convicted under it. “The reign of the witches,” Jefferson said, was over.

Sources

Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);

James Morton Smith, Freedom’s Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956).