Alien and Sedition Acts

Alien and Sedition Acts (1798).The term “Alien and Sedition Acts” refers to four controversial laws enacted by the Federalist‐controlled Congress in 1798 in response to fears about imminent war with France and about the loyalty of pro‐French Irish immigrants. The Alien Enemies Act empowered the President to restrain or expel any “alien enemy” immigrant from a nation with which the United States was at war; the Alien Act authorized expulsion of any alien, without a hearing, considered “dangerous to the peace and safety” of the United States; and the Naturalization Act extended to fourteen years (from five) the waiting time required for immigrants to become citizens. The passing of the war scare rendered the first measure meaningless; President John Adams never invoked the second; and the third only encouraged many Irish immigrants, eager to vote for the Federalists' Jeffersonian‐Republican opponents, to become citizens before the fourteen‐year requirement went into effect.

The fourth of these measures, the Sedition Act, a national seditious libel law that was to expire automatically in 1800, targeted supporters of the Jeffersonian‐Republican party by declaring it a crime to make defamatory statements about the government or the President. Although it permitted persons charged to plead truth as a defense and allowed juries to determine if a statement was actually seditious, these safeguards proved meaningless when Jeffersonian critics appeared before Federalist judges and juries in more than a dozen libel prosecutions.

The Alien and Sedition Acts deepened partisan political passions. While Federalists defended them as a measured, appropriate response to legitimate concerns about how disloyal aliens and licentious criticism might endanger the nation's safety, Jeffersonians claimed that all four laws exceeded the limited constitutional powers delegated to the national government. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions (1798–1779), secretly drafted by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson and passed by their respective state legislatures, contended that these acts upset the balance of power between the states and the national government and argued that the national union rested on a compact among the states. Jefferson's Kentucky Resolution even vaguely implied that an individual state could decide if a national law invaded its sovereign rights.

Jeffersonians also charged that the Sedition Act muzzled legitimate political dissent in violation of the First Amendment. Government rightly rested on the opinion of the citizenry, they argued, and public discussion could not proceed in the face of the kind of legal obstructions posed by libel prosecutions such as those conducted under the Sedition Act. The Alien and Sedition Acts rebounded against the Federalists. Prosecutions for seditious libel failed to silence their Jeffersonian critics, and Adams lost the presidency to Jefferson in 1800. A decade later, the Jeffersonian‐Republicans dominated national politics, and the Federalist party was moribund.

Although the political passions of the late 1790s soon cooled, the Alien and Sedition Acts episode raised issues that would reappear over the course of U.S. history, including the regulation of immigration, determining the balance of power between the national and state governments, and drawing the constitutional limits of political dissent.
See also Bill of Rights; Censorship; Early Republic, Era of the; Immigration Law; Nullification; Quasi‐War with France; Sedition; States' Rights.

Bibliography

Norman Rosenberg , Protecting the “Best Men”: An Interpretive History of the Law of Libel, 1986.
Stanley Elkins and and Eric McKitrick , The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800, 1993.
Saul Cornell , The Other Founders: Anti‐Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788–1828, 1999.

Norman L. Rosenberg