Sedition Acts Research Articles

A Republic Goes to War: Federalists, Republicans, and Foreign Influence

AbstractIn the 1790s, the United States faced a series of crises—both domestic and foreign—which many believed threatened the nation’s very existence. These culminated in the Quasi-War with France beginning in 1796. The Federalist majority identified the greatest threats to the Republic as foreigners and their willing or unwitting American allies. Thus, they enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 and other laws to allay these threats. Throughout the ensuing debates, Federalists emphasized the dangers of foreign nations who sought to separate the American people from their government. Republicans challenged Federalists’ fears as overblown and defined the real threat as the Federalists themselves who justified the expansion of the general government’s power and the infringement of individual rights in the name of national security. Americans engaged in their first debate about the meaning and limits of liberty and security.

Sedition Acts Violating Freedom of Speech and Expression

Sedition Acts Violating Freedom of Speech and Expression

Who Must Go?: Drawing the Borders of White Supremacy in the Early Republic

Who Must Go?: Drawing the Borders of White Supremacy in the Early Republic Jeffrey Ostler (bio) Samantha Seeley, Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States. Williamsburg, Va.: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. xi + 354 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $34.95. In this finely crafted, deeply researched, and highly original work, Samantha Seeley makes an important addition to a growing body of scholarship that is revealing essential connections between Indigenous and Black history in the early republic. Much of this work has focused on relations between Indigenous and Black people, especially in the South, where Native nations enslaved and incorporated Black people and where Blacks enslaved to whites crossed paths with Natives.1 Other work has examined evolving ideas and policies concerning the place of Indigenous and Black people in an aggressively expansionist United States.2 Seeley makes a significant contribution to the second area of inquiry, while also providing rich accounts of how Indigenous and Black people contested efforts to remove them beyond the boundaries of national belonging by pursuing what she terms “the right to remain.” When historians think of removal in the early republic what usually comes to mind is the expulsion of Native nations following the 1830 Indian Removal Act. Seeley takes a considerably broader perspective, observing that “removal was a capacious term,” applying, for example, to poor laws which required “self deportation” and the “forced relocation” of people prosecuted under the Alien and Sedition Acts. Most often, however, “state and federal officials . . . directed removal toward free African Americans and Native Americans,” using it to “draw the limits of belonging based on race” (p. 7). Seeley also proposes that removal has a deep history. Rather than seeing Indian removal as emerging in the mid to late 1820s, a commonplace in the scholarship, Seeley contends that it “moved as rapidly and with such devastation in the 1830s because its foundation had been prepared over the preceding decades” (p. 23). Similarly, although the American Colonization Society (ACS), which proposed to colonize (remove) free and emancipated Blacks to Liberia, was organized in 1816, this project “distilled a variety of ideas” that had circulated since the [End Page 382] 1770s (p. 208). The opposition of free Blacks to the ACS also had deep roots, resting on the work of “Black men and women” who had “formed institutions to insist on their right to remain in the United States” in the 1790s (p. 208). Seeley amplifies her argument for a long history of removal in her first chapter, “Removal and the British Empire,” which serves as an extended preface by sketching various initiatives to control populations reaching back to the sixteenth century. One such initiative was the transport of convicts and vagrants, criminalized by poor laws, to Europe and overseas colonies. Mimicking the metropole, North American colonists themselves enacted poor laws. Colonists also needed to eliminate Indigenous people and so in parts of New England and Virginia, they turned to war to remove them, killing some, forcing others to relocate elsewhere, and sending many into slavery. At the same time, to meet labor needs without draining England’s population, the British entered the slave trade, a project that Seeley notes entailed removal of Africans from their native continent. By the late eighteenth century, British policy shifted to controlling migration through restrictions on taking up western lands in the Proclamation of 1763 and, as movements to abolish slavery gained strength, through plans to colonize emancipated slaves, possibly in Florida, possibly in the Caribbean. In this way, Seeley observes, “[r]emoval and abolition were linked from the beginning” (p. 41). The bulk of Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain is divided into two parts. The first of these, consisting of three chapters, focuses on Indigenous removal and begins with the observation that the American Revolution “created a nation dependent on Native land for its own future” and that the Rrevolution “made removal a founding project” (p. 56). Taking the usual meaning of removal, it may appear that Seeley’s chapters will focus on the uprooting of Indigenous communities from their homelands and...

Standing the Ground: The Crises of the 1790s and the Philosophies of the <em>Federalist Papers</em>

The paper provides a unique outlook on the Federalist Papers, a series of eighty- five essays published in 1788, written by John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, as it examines the consistency of the philosophies and opinions presented in the Federalist Papers in light of the numerous crises the nation experienced in the 1790s. The paper compares the political belief presented in the Federalist Papers with the actions undertaken by authors during the Whiskey Tax’s enactment in 1791, the Genet Affair’s crisis of 1793, and the implementation of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. Looking at these testing events that called the nation’s foundation into question, it became clear that the authors of the Federalist Papers’ philosophies and ideologies did not evolve in relation to their original arguments made within their essays, and they remained consistent with their political and philosophical beliefs as seen within their essays.

Virtual Citizenship and Revolutionary Transatlantic Republicanism in the Musical Lives of Exiled United Irishmen

Virtual Citizenship and Revolutionary Transatlantic Republicanism in the Musical Lives of Exiled United Irishmen

Wendell Bird. Criminal Dissent: Persecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.

W<scp>endell</scp> B<scp>ird</scp>. <i>Criminal Dissent: Persecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798</i>.

Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 by Wendell Bird

Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 by Wendell Bird

Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798

Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798

Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions Under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798

Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions Under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798

Tools of Foreign Influence: Albert Gallatin, Geneva, and Federalist Nativism before the Alien and Sedition Acts

Tools of Foreign Influence: Albert Gallatin, Geneva, and Federalist Nativism before the Alien and Sedition Acts

Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 by Wendell Bird

Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 by Wendell Bird

Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. By Wendell Bird (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2020) 560 pp. $55.00

<i>Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798</i>. By Wendell Bird (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2020) 560 pp. $55.00

Lest We Forget: World War I and New Mexico by David V. Holtby

Reviewed by: Lest We Forget: World War I and New Mexico by David V. Holtby Joshua E. Kastenberg Lest We Forget: World War I and New Mexico. By David V. Holtby. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. xi + 548 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $32.95 cloth. The carnage of the "War to End All Wars," or more aptly, World War I, ended over a century ago. Unlike the Civil War sesquicentennial, which resulted in hundreds of books, the century anniversary of the United States' involvement in the first modern global conflict was rather muted. Nonetheless, quality scholarship resulted in studies on the alteration of laws, science, and medicine, as well as economic and social upheaval. And there were a small number of superb localized histories that studied the war's effects on communities. David V. Holtby's' Lest We Forget: World War I and New Mexico falls into this latter category. Holtby presents a thoroughly researched narrative history that brings several New Mexicans to life, through the haze of a century laden by yet another world war, a depression, and various other political, social, and global conflicts. He notes, in a chapter titled "Sleepwalkers," that "the battlefield's casualties reveal ordinary New Mexicans doing extraordinary things," and then adds that "they deserve to be heard." His book succeeds in doing more than that. New Mexico was one of the two newest states when the US went to war against Imperial Germany and its allies. Its demographics were more than a mirror of the nation. There were citizens who traced their lineage to a period before the Spanish Land Grant of 1692; yet, wide sections of the US would not have viewed them as citizens. Holtby's use of original source material explains the patriotism of, and other reasons for, Hispanic New Mexicans as well as Native Americans joining the armed forces. One only need look at the bibliography to learn of Holtby's use of the personal correspondences and governmental records of the state's participants in the war. He brings to life their experience of basic training, journey to the Western Front, and life (and death) in the trenches. This includes the fact that some of the Nuevomexicano soldiers did not read or write [End Page 245] English and had to rely on fellow soldiers to make it through military life. Holtby also provides insight into the role of women during the war, including the importance of their efforts in promoting the war and gaining employment. Women, it has been written, achieved a foothold in the nation's economy and political life as a result of the war, and Holtby provides evidence that this occurred in New Mexico. Yet he also shows how in a population divided by race, ethnicity, and economy, the roles and advances of each group were hardly uniform, and that Anglos socially benefited more than any other group. If there is one shortcoming in the book, and this shortcoming is minimal, it is that he does not spend enough time on how the military's unique disciplinary system or how the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918 affected the state population. New Mexico was, and is, not New York. Its population in 1917 placed it at the bottom of the list of state populations. And its demographics, though hardly homogenous, were unique to it. Yet any scholar who seeks insight into how a global conflict affects a state population should read this book, for it contributes superbly not only to New Mexico history but also to the history of the nation. Joshua E. Kastenberg School of Law University of New Mexico Copyright © 2020 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The Bill of Rights before the Civil War: State Sovereignty, Strict Construction, and the Presumption of Constitutionality

Excerpt from introduction: Anti-establishment at issue in American Legion is one of several First Amendment principles. In other areas of First Amendment jurisprudence, Free Exercise and Free Speech cases, the modern Supreme Court asks whether the government regulation unnecessarily restricts religious liberty or free speech. In a common constitutional query for adjudication of these questions, the Court first asks whether the right at issue is fundamental. For “fundamental guarantees,” of which Free Exercise and Free Speech qualify, the Court applies a heightened level of strict scrutiny against the state or national regulation, permitting only those regulations or actions for which the government proves that a compelling state interest is at issue and that the regulation is narrowly tailored to meet that government interest. As discussed below, the Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence contrasts sharply with the Bill of Right’s design and early interpretation. Matters concerning religion, speech, and press were reserved for the states. Through generations of precedents, the modern Supreme Court has inverted the Bill’s purpose. Below, I discuss the framing of the Bill, state sovereignty, strict construction, and the presumption of constitutionality. In the process, I examine early case law on the Contract Clause and the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts — one of the first major constitutional challenges where these views were examined.

Civil Liberties on the Homefront: Korematsu and the National Security Justification

Throughout much of American history, the national security justification has been a powerful tool of the government in seizing powers that resulted in the curtailment of civil liberties. During the Quasi-War with France, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts to criminalize speech critical of the government. During the Civil War, President Lincoln unilaterally suspended the writ of habeas corpus and authorized the detention of thousands of political prisoners, including dozens of delegates of the Maryland state legislature and several newspaper publishers. During World War I, Congress enacted several laws that severely restricted civil liberties, including widespread censorship of the press. Perhaps the most notorious example of the use of the national security justification that resulted in the deprivation of civil liberties was the internment of over 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry in concentration camps in the western United States during World War II. The exclusion of these people (nearly two-thirds of which were American citizens) from their homes was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States. By itself, this decision was and is widely regarded as one of the nation’s worst. Yet, the Court’s ruling was just the beginning of the story. Information uncovered in the years since revealed that the government knew its national security justification was lacking and yet still misled the Court by withholding, altering, and destroying key evidence. It would not be until 2011 when the government, through the Solicitor General’s office, would acknowledge this error; and not until 2018 for the Supreme Court to formally acknowledge that Korematsu was wrongly decided. Korematsu’s revealed story provides historians and the public alike with key lessons about the trust its citizens place in the government in times of crisis and how Americans' views have shifted over time. The case also raises important and timely questions about how deferential the courts should be to claims of national security by the executive branch when civil liberties are at stake, and whether the courts can fairly adjudicate such claims.

&amp;#x93;Treasonable Expressions&amp;#x94;: James Bell and the Emerging Legal Right to Criticize Government

ABSTRACT James Bell's 1798 prosecution for verbally criticizing government while in his own tavern has been considered a missing Alien and Sedition Acts case. This article challenges that contention. Using previously undiscovered primary sources, it answers integral questions such as: (1) Why was Bell the subject of government prosecution? (2) What prompted Bell to utter his &amp;#x93;treasonable expressions&amp;#x94;? (3) Was Bell's case a Sedition Act prosecution? (4) What was the outcome of this case? His prosecution is set against the backdrop of his role in the Stony Ridge Convention, which some regard as the genesis of the Bill of Rights.

Political Economy of Labor Repression in the United States by Andrew Kolin

Political Economy of Labor Repression in the United States by Andrew Kolin

Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War by Richard D. Brown

Reviewed by: Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War by Richard D. Brown Kevin Butterfield (bio) Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War. By Richard D. Brown. ( New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. 387. Cloth, $40.00.) When John Jay combined his efforts with those of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton to support ratification of the proposed Constitution coming out of the Philadelphia Convention, he devoted his first turn as Publius to an argument as patently untrue in 1787 as it is today: Americans were, wrote Jay in The Federalist, Number 2, "one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government," and so on. Surely a strong national union could be built from a citizenry so similar, Jay suggested. Though there were various "orders and denominations of men among us," which he offhandedly conceded there were, nonetheless "we have uniformly been one people[,] each individual citizen everywhere enjoying the same national rights, privileges, and protection." Even if it was something more asserted than lived, there has been what historian Richard Brown calls a "presumption of equal rights" since the earliest days of this nation's history (27). And what Brown sets out to understand in this wide-ranging, insightful, and utterly readable book are the ways that that presumption of equal rights, in itself, has generated contests, challenges, and consequential change in a nation far more diverse than Jay would ever acknowledge. In many ways, Self-Evident Truths takes the rights talk of the Declaration of Independence as its jumping-off point. And the book does not entirely diverge from the tried-and-true trope of the unfinished Revolution, which, in the standard apologists' version, reads like this: the Founders left many inequalities and injustices unchallenged, but they, sometimes purposefully and sometimes inadvertently, laid the groundwork for those shortcomings to be addressed by future generations. Thomas Jefferson's Declaration did little if anything to confront directly any of a number of forms of persistent inequality—particularly those founded in race and gender—but the use of blanket and inclusive terms in the Revolutionary era's assertions of natural rights and human equality enabled others to expand the scope and scale of the Revolution. Brown's book offers no simple answers along those lines, and it is no apology. He is clear about the ways that white men in the first half of the [End Page 521] nineteenth century "fended off movements to extend equal rights to people of color and to women as they sought exclusive possession of the benefits of the Revolutionary contagion." Those efforts often took the form of deliberate attempts to develop ideas of "natural inequality according to race and sex." Many turned to biology and nature, Brown writes, in their search for "a theory to justify social stratification" (308). Still, Brown agrees with important elements of those who emphasize the idea of the unfinished Revolution, and his reading is persuasive. His account of how ideas of equality had consequences for the American nation between the Revolution and the Civil War is nuanced, deeply informed by recent scholarship, and grounded in many sections in his own research, particularly his work on how judges and juries handled moments where de jure and de facto conceptions of equality did not exactly square up. Indeed, this reads like a senior scholar's meditation on how to grapple with both the failures and the remarkable accomplishments of the American Revolutionary moment—and with the deeds of later generations who sought variously to contain and to extend the radical potential of 1776. Self-Evident Truths covers familiar ground in many places. An early chapter on the emergence of ideas of religious equality, for instance, gives an engaging overview of issues like religious tests for political office and state-level disestablishment in the post-Revolutionary era, with few surprises for anyone familiar with the period. The same can be said regarding sections on the Alien and Sedition Acts, on Dred Scott, on Seneca Falls. One of the reasons Brown is so persuasive in...

Transferring Loyalty

Transferring Loyalty Lindsay M. Chervinsky (bio) Carol Berkin. A Sovereign People: The Crises of the 1790s and the Birth of American Nationalism. New York: Basic Books, 2017. ix + 320 pp. Bibliography, notes, and index. $30.00. In the last decade, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the growth and development of the federal government after the ratification of the Constitution. Max Edling's A Hercules in the Cradle (2014) and Gautham Rao's National Duties (2016) lead other recent work that has showcased the complicated and messy process of state building and demonstrates how the government took years, if not decades, to form. In A Sovereign People, Carol Berkin contributes to this growing field by examining how the American people grew to accept the institutions that the United States Constitution created. She analyzes how the first domestic and international threats to American sovereignty forced citizens to defend the Constitution and the federal government in the decade after ratification. Berkin largely succeeds in showing how the patriotism and nationalism that welled up in response to these crises came to equal support for the government and the Constitution. Berkin explores four key events in 1790s that fostered the growth of American nationalism: the Whiskey Rebellion, the Genet Affair, the XYZ Affair, and the Alien and Sedition Acts. Each section provides a concise and vibrant description of these events and offers valuable arguments about the rise of the American identity or challenges existing scholarly interpretations. In the first section on the Whiskey Rebellion, Berkin focuses on the administration's response to the rebellion in western Pennsylvania. She notes that Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton was quick to advocate a military response when farmers first resisted the excise tax in 1791. Washington initially demurred, electing to issue a proclamation and pursue a diplomatic solution. He acted out of deference for public opinion, fearing that the public would condemn a military response. Berkin observes that historians, with the benefit of hindsight, have approved of President George Washington's patient response to the insurrection—only turning to military enforcement once all diplomatic solutions had failed. But, she argues, had the rebels been better armed and better organized, Hamilton's plan to quash the rebellion in [End Page 371] the early stages would have been prudent. Berkin argues that Washington's unique stature contributed to the public's acceptance of military suppression of the rebellion. The public trusted Washington and therefore transferred some of that trust to the presidency and the federal government. Furthermore, Washington's response showed that the federal government could enforce the rule of law with leniency and could handle domestic rebellion without resorting to tyranny (pp. 78–80). In the section on the Genet Affair, Berkin demonstrates how government loyalty became synonymous with American nationalism. Most Americans cheered Genet's arrival when he landed in Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1793. Yet when Washington requested Genet's recall in August 1793, most Americans supported that decision, too. Genet's flagrant disregard for American policy and disrespect for Washington alienated most of his supporters. Washington's recall request asserted the United States' right to dictate its own foreign policy and to demand that diplomats respect that policy. Many historians have observed that the public vocally defended the president's right to shape foreign policy. Berkin expands on this argument by suggesting that when Congress, Republicans, and the public defended the president's authority over diplomacy, they professed loyalty to the federal government. Furthermore, she asserts that the Genet Affair witnessed the American public transfer additional loyalty from Washington to his office. Americans were outraged by Genet's disrespect toward the office of the presidency, not just his disrespect for Washington. Berkin's description of the XYZ affair offers a brilliant narrative of the botched negotiations between American commissioners, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, John Marshall, and Elbridge Gerry, and the French agents. This section provides valuable insight into why the diplomatic negotiations failed. Unlike other historians who point to French Minister Charles Talleyrand's demands to open the conversation, Berkin emphasizes American factors. First, Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry were horrible choices for peace commissioners. Pinckney had just experienced humiliation at the hands of the French...

The American Media Experience

This essay surveys the history of American media from the colonial era to the present. It focuses on the First Amendment protections of press freedom, the nature and consequences of media bias, and the modern tendency at media consolidation via corporate mergers reducing the number and variety of media voices. Actually, these three elements are intertwined rather than independent. The government tried, without lasting effect, to regulate media through Sedition Acts, libel suits, prior restraint, the Fairness Doctrine, and net neutrality. For most of America’s history, media bias was presented up front by publishers so readers knew exactly what to expect. However, over the past quarter century, mainline national media have become increasingly ideological so that objectivity or the pursuit of truth may be seriously questioned. Media mergers have been about profits yet they effectively concentrate control of news outlets in fewer and fewer hands.