Alien and Sedition Acts

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Text of the act

The Alien and Sedition Acts were four laws passed by the United States Congress in 1798 and signed into law by President John Adams. Proponents claimed they were designed to protect the United States from citizens of enemy powers during the turmoil following the French Revolution and to stop seditious factions from weakening the government of the new republic. The Democratic-Republicans attacked the acts as unconstitutional, designed to stifle criticism of the administration, and infringements on the rights of the states.

The most controversial of the four statutes was the Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes, which made it a illegal "to combine and conspire" with the intent of opposing legal measures of the government, or to "write, print, utter, or publish … any false, scandalous and malicious writing" aimed to bring the government, Congress, or the president "into contempt or disrepute, or to excite against them … the hatred of the good people of the United States."

This act was widely seen as an attempt to curb vitriolic political abuse directed particularly at the Adams administration. Popular outrage against the laws helped Thomas Jefferson defeat John Adams election of 1800 secure a Republican majority in the Congress. Adams later came to see his support of the acts as the greatest failure of his administration.

The Alien Enemies Act remains in effect and has frequently been enforced in wartime. The others expired or were repealed by 1802. Thomas Jefferson held them all to be unconstitutional and void, and upon his election in 1800 pardoned and ordered the release of all who had been convicted of violating them.

Component Acts

There were actually four separate laws making up what is commonly referred to as the "Alien and Sedition Acts":

  1. The Naturalization Act (official title: An Act to Establish an Uniform Rule of Naturalization) extended the duration of residence required for aliens to become citizens, from five years to fourteen. Enacted June 18, 1798, with no expiration date, it was repealed in 1802.
  2. The Alien Friends Act (official title: An Act Concerning Aliens) authorized the president to deport any resident alien considered "dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States." Enacted June 25, 1798, with a two year expiration date.
  3. The Alien Enemies Act (official title: An Act Respecting Alien Enemies) authorized the president to apprehend and deport resident aliens if their home countries were at war with the United States. Enacted July 6, 1798, with no expiration date, it remains in effect today as 50 USC Sections 21-24.
  4. The Sedition Act (official title: An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes against the United States) made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against the government or its officials. Enacted July 14, 1798, with an expiration date of March 3, 1801.

Background

The Sedition Act says anyone "opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the President of the United States" could be imprisoned for up to two years. It was also illegal to "write, print, utter, or publish" anything critical of the president or Congress. It was notable that the Act did not prohibit criticism of the Vice-President. Jefferson held the office of Vice-President at the time that the Act was passed, leaving him open to criticism under the new law.

There has been considerable debate over the meaning and interpretation of the Sedition Act. It is clear that American jurisprudence regarding the freedom of speech at some point broke from earlier British law, which held that speech was an act that could be "seditious" regardless of its truth or veracity, and that free speech could be limited based on governmental priorities. For example, the Democratic-Republicans and a number of moderate Federalists successfully added language to the Sedition Act that, by its terms, required "a false, scandalous and malicious writing," pointing to the trial of John Peter Zenger, which established that colonial courts might treat truth as a defense to libel. However, many Federalist judges did not interpret the law consistently with this reading, and there is an ongoing historical debate—highly relevant in particular to originalist interpretations of the First Amendment and to the question of whether the Sedition Act was unconstitutional—as to when and the extent to which the break with British precedent occurred.

Constitutionality

While Jefferson did denounce the Sedition Act as a violation of the First Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights, which protected the right of free speech, his main argument on the unconstitutionality of the act was that it violated the Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." In 1798 when the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed, First Amendment rights did not restrict the states, as they now do. Jefferson argued the Federal Government had overstepped its bounds in the Alien and Sedition Acts by attempting to exercise undelegated powers. Apart from Virginia and Kentucky, the other state legislatures, all of them Federalist, rejected Jefferson's position by resolutions that either supported the acts, or denied that Virginia and Kentucky could denounce it.

The judicial redress for unconstitutional legislation under the doctrine of judicial review was not established until Marbury v. Madison in 1803; the Supreme Court in 1798 was openly hostile to the Federalists' opponents. The Alien and Sedition Acts were not appealed to the Supreme Court for review, although individual Supreme Court Justices, sitting in circuit, heard many of the cases prosecuting opponents of the Federalists.

In order to address the constitutionality of the measures, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison sought to unseat the Federalists, appealing to the people to remedy the constitutional violation, and drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which called on the states to nullify the federal legislation. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions reflect the Compact Theory, which states that the United States are made up of a voluntary union of States that agree to cede some of their authority in order to join the union, but that the states do not, ultimately, surrender their sovereign rights. Therefore, under the Compact Theory, states can determine if the federal government has violated its agreements, including the Constitution, and nullify such violations or even withdraw from the Union. Variations of this theory were also argued at the Hartford Convention at the time of the War of 1812, and by the Southern states during the Nullification crisis during the Jackson administration, and just before the American Civil War.

The Sedition Act was set to expire in 1801, coinciding with the end of the Adams administration. While this prevented its constitutionality from being directly decided by the Supreme Court, subsequent mentions of the Sedition Act in Supreme Court opinions have assumed that it would be unconstitutional today. For example, in the seminal Free Speech case of New York Times v. Sullivan, the Court declared, "Although the Sedition Act was never tested in this Court, the attack upon its validity has carried the day in the court of history." 376 U.S. 254, 276 (1964).

Elections of 1800

Although the Federalists hoped the Act would muffle the opposition, many Democratic-Republicans still "wrote, printed, uttered and published" their criticisms of the Federalists. Indeed, they strongly criticized the act itself, and used it as one of the largest election issues. It also had enormous implications on the Federalist party after that point, and ended up being a major contributing factor of its demise.

Ultimately the Acts backfired against the Federalists; while they prepared lists of aliens for deportation, and many aliens fled the country during the debate over the Alien and Sedition Acts, Adams never signed a deportation order. Twenty-five people, primarily prominent newspaper editors but also Congressman Matthew Lyon, were arrested. Of them, eleven were tried (one died while awaiting trial), and ten were convicted of sedition, often in trials before openly partisan Federalist judges. Federalists at all levels, however, were turned out of power, and, over the following years, Congress repeatedly apologized for, or voted recompense to victims of, the enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Thomas Jefferson, who won the 1800 election, pardoned all of those that were convicted for crimes under the Alien Enemies Act and the Sedition Act.

Full cites

  • An Act to Establish an Uniform Rule of Naturalization (Naturalization Act of 1798), June 181798 ch. 54, 1 Stat. 566
  • An Act Concerning Aliens, June 251798 ch. 58, 1 Stat. 570
  • An Act Respecting Alien Enemies, July 61798 ch. 66, 1 Stat. 577
  • An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes against the United States (Sedition Act), July 141798 ch. 74, 1 Stat. 596

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

  • Elkins, Stanley M., and Eric L. McKitrick. The age of federalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 9780195068900
  • Rehnquist, William H. Grand Inquests: The historic Impeachments of Justice Samuel Chase and President Andrew Johnson. New York: Morrow, 1994. ISBN 9780688051426
  • Rosenfeld, Richard N. American Aurora: A Democratic-Republican Returns: The Suppressed History of Our Nation's Beginnings and the Heroic Newspaper That Tried to Report It. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. ISBN 9780312150525
  • Randolph, J. W. The Virginia Report of 1799-1800, Touching the Alien and Sedition Laws; together with the Virginia Resolutions of December 21, 1798, the Debate and Proceedings thereon in the House of Delegates of Virginia, and several other documents illustrative of the report and resolutions. Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2004. ISBN 9781584773740
  • Stone, Geoffrey R. Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from The Sedition Act of 1798 to The War on Terrorism. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2004. ISBN 9780393058802

External links

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