Finding My Mission: Life After the Military

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we returned to our American stories. In 1798, the Sedition Act was passed, part of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Here’s Monty Montgomery with a story.

00:00:24
Speaker 2: It’s the summer of 1798. Our nation is brand new, and our second President, John Adams, has just signed the Alien and Sedition Acts. Here’s Dr. Adam Carrington of Hillsdale College with more on what that meant.

00:00:43
Speaker 3: It’s plural because there were four of them. There were two Alien Acts. One of them was called the Alien Enemies Acts, which gave the President basically unilateral power to remove adult males that were nationals of countries that we were currently at war with. The other was known as just the Alien Act, or sometimes the Alien Friends Act. It said that even without war, a president could deport immigrants from another country if he thought that they posed some sort of threat or danger. The third was the Naturalization Act, which just extended how long someone that immigrated to the United States had to wait before applying for citizenship. It had been five years. This made it fourteen. And then finally, the Sedition Act, which is actually the most famous of the group of acts, said that you could be prosecuted for saying malicious or slanderous things about the Congress or the President of the United States, or also if you were trying to go against the policy and positions of the United States. Broadly understood, but why were they these acts passed?

00:02:02
Speaker 2: It turns out it had a little bit to do with Adams himself and how our nation felt about two countries across the Atlantic Ocean.

00:02:11
Speaker 3: To really understand where he was coming from and doing so, some people will attribute it to his personality. He tended to be a fairly prideful man, struggled with vanity, so maybe he didn’t want to be criticized. But it was actually a lot more than that. Even though you can’t deny that that couldn’t have played a part, you have to understand the broader context in America, and you have to understand the broader context in the world internationally. America was caught in a kind of geopolitical conflict between the two major powers of the time, and the two major powers, if you remember the Cold War, sort of everyone gravitated, it seemed, towards either the United States or Russia. The equivalent or somewhat equivalent at that time: France and England. They were the two big geopolitical powers that faced off, and American politics itself domestically, in many ways, its first divide, the first formation of political parties was based off of should our international policy be more friendly to France or should it be a little more friendly to Great Britain. And much of the policy that France and Great Britain had toward us was depending upon whether we were being friendly to them. And so what starts to happen is the Federalist Party that John Adams was a part of thought that England was a better idea. The other party that was founded by Thomas Jefferson, who had lost to Adams in 1796, said that we need to be more friendly to France because the Federalists are in charge. When the French Revolution happens, they go and start to make treaties with Great Britain. They stop paying debts to the new French government, saying they owed it to the old King of France, not this new revolutionary government. And what they end up doing is siding with England over France. This not only enrages the Jeffersonians, it enrages France when Adams takes over. Something that starts up is what’s called the Quasi War, where we got into a conflict with France that was never declared but involved a lot of French privateers taking out our shipping, all in reaction to the fact that the France thought we were not keeping up our obligations to them and we’re going too much for Great Britain. As tensions heat up with France, the Federalists get more and more worried, not only about immigrants that might be from France or like-minded countries, but they get really nervous about how loyal and how on America’s side are the Jeffersonians. Are they going to be too pro-French? Are they going to subvert the American Republic? And so what they end up doing is implementing first the immigration restrictions and then the Sedition Acts themselves, I think, partly out of fear for the stability of government, fear of foreign influence, and worry that the international scene and the power of France in particular was going to undermine our own system and our own politics.

00:05:23
Speaker 2: The reaction to these laws was fast and negative, at least on the opposite side of the political debate, and two founding fathers won. The sitting Vice President at the time penned two political statements in response to it that were so controversial. George Washington said, “If systematically pursued, they would dissolve the Union or produce coercion.”

00:05:46
Speaker 3: The two most famous documents that come out of this are the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. They were passed by the state legislatures of those two commonwealths. Partly, they’re famous because Jefferson ghostwrote the Kentucky Resolution, James Madison cowrote the Virginia Resolution, and that’s one of the arguments, among several others, that they make that this violates the right to free speech that basically would be used and was used to punish dissenting opinion and freedom of the press.

00:06:16
Speaker 2: The reason Washington said these statements could potentially dissolve the Union, well, that was because they also called for states to nullify or not follow federal law that they saw as contrary to the Constitution. But if you’re wondering who some of these people who were prosecuted under the Sedition Act were, here’s some examples of rather colorful commentary. They got politicians and journalists alike arrested in the late 1700s. Matthew Lyon, a sitting Congressman from Vermont who would later become famous for attacking another congressman with a fire poker on the floor of the House, wrote that the Adams administration was marred by ridiculous pomp and selfish average. And Luther Baldwin was indicted, convicted, and fined $100 for a drunken incident that occurred during a visit by President Adams to Newark, New Jersey, upon hearing a gun report during a parade for Adams, yield: “I hope it hits Adams in the butt!”

00:07:19
Speaker 3: You know, you look at what was said, and it really wouldn’t strike us as anything that we wouldn’t see on Twitter or on a blog today, and really wouldn’t come to the level that even outrages us now. As far as discourse, it really was fairly standard, even if the trolic at times critiques of the President and Congress. And they didn’t make it very far in the courts.

00:07:44
Speaker 2: The Jeffersonian sat, is because they didn’t try to take these laws down in them. Instead, they simply waited until 1800, an election year.

00:07:54
Speaker 3: The main opponents to these laws really fought the battle out in the court of public opinion and elections in state legislatures. It ended up being pretty disastrous for the Federalist Party as the reality of these acts settled in, especially this Edition Act; I think it really undermined them. It helped Jefferson to eke out a fairly narrow victory in 1800, but to gain a huge win in Congress. Congress, the Federalist Party really got decimated in 1800, and I think it’s partly as a reaction to this. And what then ended up happening was not only did the Federalists lose the 1800 election, they really ceased after that election to be a viable national party. They limped along for another twelve years or so, but they never came close to winning the White House again. They never really came close to winning the House or Senate. They really became a regional party without much power.

00:08:54
Speaker 2: And as expected, the Sedition Act was allowed to expire when Jefferson took office, followed by the Alien Friends Act. But that doesn’t mean all of the acts were destroyed by the Jeffersonians.

00:09:06
Speaker 3: The one that is still around that’s interesting is a version of the Alien Enemies Act remains, which again, is the law that says that if we are at war with a country, in nationals from that country can be deported basically unilaterally. And this was even used by the FDR administration during World War II. And this is distinct from the internment camps that are infamous now in American history. This was actually used on a variety of nationals to deport them during World War II. So, not only did it that one remain on the book, slightly modified, it was actually used as late as the twentieth century.

00:09:51
Speaker 2: But if there’s one thing that the Alien and Sedition Acts and their failure made clear, it’s that our own rights are important.

00:09:58
Speaker 3: The right to speak and write, for, really, is central to a popular government’s ability to peacefully adjudicate disputes between each other rather than either having a tyranny or having a bloodshed. That you protect speech, to protect peace and to protect the free flow of ideas.

00:10:19
Speaker 1: And great job as always to Monty, and thanks as always to Hillsdale College for all they do; the story of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Here on our American Stories.