On a hot July day in 1798, Luther Baldwin spent the afternoon in his local tavern in Newark, New Jersey, tossing back mugs of hard cider.
Suddenly there was a commotion outside—shouts and cannon fire. Baldwin stumbled out of the tavern to see a parade making its way down the main thoroughfare. It was led by President John Adams and his wife Abigail, who were passing through Newark on their way home to Massachusetts from the capital in Philadelphia. A crowd had gathered to cheer the president, but not Baldwin.
Adams was a Federalist, and Baldwin—a veteran of the Continental Army who worked on a garbage dinghy—was a Democratic-Republican, the opposition party led by Vice President Thomas Jefferson. Adams had just signed into law the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts, including a law that made it a crime to criticize the federal government.
As 16 cannons sounded another salute, one of Baldwin’s drinking buddies joked that the cannons should be aimed at Adams. Baldwin loudly replied that he “did not care if they fired thro’ his arse!”
The tavern owner, John Burnet, reported Baldwin’s drunken comment to the authorities, and before he knew it Baldwin was charged and convicted for speaking “seditious words.” He was fined $150 (a small fortune today) and jailed until he could pay it.
“This drunk guy was actually jailed for sedition for making a bad joke about the president,” says Terri Halperin, author of The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798: Testing the Constitution. Baldwin’s case sparked national uproar against the Alien and Sedition Acts, unconstitutional laws that restricted free speech in the name of national security.
War Between England and France Threatens the U.S.
In 1793, England declared war against France, and the young United States desperately wanted to stay out of the conflict. In 1794, the U.S. and England signed the Jay Treaty, which cemented peaceful relations between the nations a decade after the end of the Revolutionary War. This angered the French, who had given the Americans tremendous financial and military support to defeat the British.
“This was a time when there were two world powers and it was not clear which was going to prevail,” says Wendell Bird, author of Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. “Each wanted to have the United States’ support and each said they would attack U.S. shipping if they didn’t get that support.”
When John Adams took office in 1797, he sent a delegation to France to negotiate a treaty, but the three French envoys—referred to in U.S. documents as X, Y and Z—demanded millions of dollars in bribes and loans. The so-called “XYZ Affair” scuttled the chance for peace and led to a series of naval skirmishes known as the Quasi-War with France.
For Adams and the Federalist-controlled Congress, there was tremendous anxiety about how to maintain America’s neutrality as Europe descended into war. There were legitimate fears that British or French operatives, working with state officials, could divide the new nation into warring confederations of states loyal to different European powers.
“The question is how best to protect Americans from the chaos that’s happening in Europe and potentially compromising or destroying their own independence,” says Halperin.
Alien and Sedition Acts Target Foreign Spies and Political Critics
In the 1790s, roughly 10 percent of the population of Philadelphia was French. In the chaos following the French Revolution, many French emigres settled in the new American republic, where foreigners could become citizens after just five years of residency.
“In Philadelphia, you could go to a French dancing school, get your hair done at a French hairdresser or drop into a French bookshop,” says Halperin. “And so there’s a question, if the Quasi-War with France expanded from a naval conflict to a land war, which side would people be on?”
Adams and the Federalists had good reason to believe that French spies—as well as British and Spanish operatives—were busy collecting intelligence inside the U.S. and striking secret alliances with American officials.
“You have very porous and unsecured borders in the Western United States,” says Halperin, “and there are any number of conspiracies and plots by the English, the Spanish and the French to sort of lop off the Western part of the United States and make it their own.”
Adams prepared for all-out war with France by levying taxes to build more naval ships and buy more guns for the army. But Adams also needed a way to protect the nation against what he perceived as domestic threats, namely foreign spies and their American conspirators.
In the summer of 1798, Adams and the Federalist-controlled Congress passed four laws to protect national security from foreign and domestic threats:
- The “Naturalization Act” raised the residency requirement for U.S. citizenship from 5 years to 14 years
- The “Alien Friends Act” empowered the president to deport any non-citizen suspected of “treasonable or secret machinations against the government”
- The “Alien Enemies Act” said that in time of war, the president had the power to deport all “natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation”
- The “Sedition Act” made it a federal crime to publish or utter “false, scandalous and malicious… writings against the government of the United States… or to aid, encourage or abet any hostile designs of any foreign nation against the United States.”
What Is ‘Seditious Libel’?
A lot of foreign nationals chose “self-deportation” and returned to France and other countries. As for forced deportations by the Federal government, only three official deportation orders were actually signed, says Bird.
The Adams administration kept close watch on a handful of prominent Frenchmen in the U.S. including Georges-Henri-Victor Collot, a mapmaker. Collot was on assignment by the French government to survey the interior of the nation, especially territories around the Mississippi River, in case the U.S. sided with England and war broke out. Deportation orders were prepared for Collot and others, but never signed.
The Adams administration was far less concerned with deporting “aliens” than with prosecuting its American critics—printers, newspaper publishers, even Democratic-Republican congressmen—for “seditious libel.”
“Under English Common Law, ‘seditious libel’ was any criticism of government officials in a way that undermined their authority or affected their reputation,” says Bird. Under the Sedition Act, a jury would determine if libelous statements made against the government were true or false, but since most criticism was opinion, the decision to convict someone of sedition was highly subjective.
Free speech is enshrined in the Bill of Rights, which was ratified by the states in 1791. How could Congress, just seven years later, pass a law criminalizing speech that’s critical of the government? The Federalists justified the Sedition Act by claiming that seditious libel was not protected speech.
“Some of the pressing questions that Americans struggled with during this period were: How do you dissent in a republic? Are there limits to dissent? Are there limits to political debate? And when does dissent become dangerous?” says Halperin. “The Federalists were really trying to define this line between what was complaint and protest, and when did it become treason. They were trying to define that by law.”
Convictions Under the Sedition Act
After Baldwin’s arrest for drunkenly insulting Adams, the next high-profile prosecution under the Sedition Act was a Democratic-Republican congressman from Vermont named Matthew Lyon, who had published letters criticizing Adams as a power-seeking demagogue. On October 6, 1798, Lyon was arrested by Vermont Federalists and charged with being “a malicious and seditious person, and of a depraved mind and a wicked and diabolical disposition.”
“Lyon was treated cruelly,” says Bird. “He was thrown in jail during the Vermont winter with an open window and no fireplace. But not only was Lyon imprisoned, he was the first federal official to run his re-election campaign from jail.” Lyon won in a landslide and returned to Congress after serving a four-month sentence.
James Thompson Callender was an anti-Federalist newspaperman and pamphleteer who fled Philadelphia to escape prosecution under the Sedition Act, but the feds arrested him in Virginia. The indictment quoted Callender as writing such “libelous” words as, “The reign of Mr. Adams has been one continued tempest of malignant passions. As president, he has never opened his lips, or lifted his pen without threatening and scolding; the grand object of his administration has been to exasperate the rage of contending parties, to culminate and destroy every man who differs from his opinions.”
“That was sufficient to have Callender indicted, convicted and sentenced,” says Halperin.
Even Thomas Jefferson, the vice president, was trailed by Federalist operatives hoping to find libelous words in his private correspondence and to jail Jefferson ahead of the 1800 election.
“It’s an outrageous thought that the second highest official in the country would be treated that way,” says Bird.
In total, there were 51 federal prosecutions under the Sedition Act involving 126 defendants, mostly Democratic-Republican newspaper editors and politicians.
What Happened to the Alien and Sedition Acts?
There was widespread outrage over the Alien and Sedition Acts. Jefferson and fellow anti-Federalist James Madison voiced their concerns in two important documents known as the Virginia Resolution and the Kentucky Resolution. By using the state legislatures as a vehicle of protest, Jefferson and Madison side-stepped prosecution under the Sedition Act.
In the Kentucky Resolution, Jefferson warned that laws like the Alien and Sedition Acts threatened to divide the nation into two warring factions that would end in violence and secession.
“[T]hat the friendless alien has indeed been selected as the safest subject of a first experiment,” wrote Jefferson, “but the citizen will soon follow, or rather, has already followed, for already has a sedition act marked him as its prey: that these and successive acts of the same character, unless arrested at the threshold, necessarily drive these States into revolution and blood.”
Ultimately, a constitutional crisis over the Alien and Sedition Acts was averted. Adams avoided war with the French by reopening diplomatic channels and negotiating a settlement. Most of the Alien and Sedition Acts expired on the last day of Adam’s term, and the Federalists were voted out of Congress.
The Alien Enemies Act, however, was never repealed and is one of the oldest federal criminal statutes still on the books, says Bird. It was last used during World War II to justify the forced relocation and imprisonment of Japanese Americans.
