Sedition Acts Research Articles

The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery (review)

The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery. By Rachel Hope Cleves. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 296. Cloth $82.00.)Reviewed by Todd EstesSeveral years ago, Rachel Hope Cleves wrote eloquently in these pages about how violence had affected her life personally and shaped her as a scholar intellectually (On Writing History of Violence, JER 24 [Winter 2004]). In some ways, this book is a fuller, more developed rumination on those same themes. But it is also much more: a provocative, resonant first book about significant topics both timely and timeless.While scholars have long noted impact of French Revolution on U.S. politics in 1790s, Cleves argues that, from first decade of new government through end of Civil War, a French Revolutionary discourse dominated American politics and religion and was reflected in newspapers, letters, periodicals, poetry, fiction, drama, and pedagogical materials. Propounded mainly by New England Federalists and Calviniste, this strain produced numerous denunciations of Jacobinism (2), an imprecise, catch-all term of opprobrium that provided basis for a deep and long-lasting anti-Jacobin persuasion that lingered long after French Revolution played itself out. In short, she tracks growth of the anti-Jacobin sensibility (234) and its surprising but powerful effect on antebellum American life and culture. Her book traces the vital role that fear of democratic violence played in genesis of abolitionism, antiwar movement, and support for public education (9). As a fascinating subtheme, work also interrogates power of words, specifically links between violent language and violent acts. Indeed, Cleves writes that the power of violent words as an instrument of battle is what drives her book (13).While some welcomed democratizing potential of French Revolution in 1790s, American conservatives reacted with horror. From Federalist podiums and Calvinist pulpits across New England came potent, visceral counterattacks on destabilizing democratic excesses in France. Cleves argues that to anti-Jacobins violence and bloodshed of French Revolution suggested how quickly a republic could devolve into anarchy, and it galvanized them into action. Anti-Jacobinism arose as a warning that violence by individual citizens and by state could destabilize social order in United States.Calvinists and Federalists tended toward pessimism about future and believed in man's fundamental depravity; hence, their skepticism about democracy and their support for strong institutions and use of force to check democratic passions and violence. When news of horrific violence reached United States, anti-Jacobins emphasized bloodthirsty and grisly in their denunciations of French excesses, connecting them to democracy run amok. They turned their animosity toward American democrats who they believed spoke same French democratic language of bloodshed. In process, they decoupled American and French Revolutions but then linked American and French democrats, attacking them through language of bloodshed and displacing anti-Jacobinism from external to internal enemies. Federalists, Alien and Sedition Acts of 1 798 seemed vital national security measures when viewed through these lenses.But even as they denounced violence, Federalists and their Calvinist supporters did so in an expressive language of violence that curiously, for a movement decrying riotousness, was dripping in blood. Anti-Jacobins developed a vocabulary and rhetoric of sensationalism to shock readers emotionally, emphasizing most horrific, depraved, and bloody scenes they could. Early American literature reflected this Gothic strain also, as Cleves shows in a close reading of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland. And she reminds us, To pick up pen and write in lines of blood is a violent act (103). …

Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive , America, and the Blind Man of Philosophy

Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive, America, and the Blind Man of Philosophy Matthew Pangborn (bio) Royall Tyler's early-republic barbary-hostage tale, The Algerine Captive (1797), owns the distinction of being one of America's first novels and one of its least effective abolitionist texts. The story of a white American's enslavement by African pirates, based on historical events during the Washington presidency, Tyler's narrative has challenged readers desiring to rescue a compelling indictment of slavery's practice in the "Barbary states of America" from a satire that just as enthusiastically targets dueling, medical quackery, and classical education. 1 The work's reception has reflected its uneven focus. Hailed as the emergence of a "tough-minded realism" in the American imaginary and as proof the national character developed from sensibility, the novel has been criticized for its irreligion and its piety, for its didacticism as well as for its failure to sustain a "moral imperative." And it has been condemned as derivative of Roderick Random, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Rabelais, Candide, Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative, and Montesquieu's Persian Letters, while lauded for its "intertextuality." 2 Some have suggested The Algerine Captive is not a novel at all, a suggestion I want to resist with the claim the text engages period philosophical issues that had great importance for the former colonies, ones the novel as a genre was particularly well suited to address. 3 If Tyler's text suffers from an identity crisis, in other words, it only too accurately mirrors the new nation's struggle to make a place for itself on the world stage. The Algerine Captive appeared, after all, at a desperate time in American history. Fearing contagion from the French Revolution, [End Page 1] re-absorption into the British Empire, and scalping-parties from the natives, Americans also faced internal revolutions, such as the Whiskey Revolt and Shays' Rebellion, which Tyler claimed to have played a role in ending (Tanselle 19-23). In the years leading up to and following the oppressive Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the American experiment seemed at any moment to come undone, especially along the growing fault-line of slavery. It was in this divisive atmosphere that Barbary-captive narratives, whether factual or fictional (like Tyler's), seized the public imagination like no other subject, supplying a badly needed political cohesion. Indeed, public outcry over Muslim raiders' repeated snatching of American seamen led eventually to the Tripolitan expedition of 1801-05, America's first war against terrorism and an event that catapulted it into the first ranks of global naval powers. Tyler's tale of a young man who grows up during the War of Independence only to become enslaved on Africa's northern coast, published as the "true" story of one Updike Underhill, has been read quite rightly as trading on Americans' concern for their countrymen's distant sufferings. 4 In its examination of its audience's unifying interest in viewing such spectacle, however, the novel also explores the consequences of philosophy's and early science's own fascination with distanced seeing, one that has had an inestimable impact on American culture. Just exactly how early science's techniques of "ocular demonstration" helped shape modern Anglophone society has been the subject of continuing fruitful exchanges between the history of science and literary studies. John Barrell has shown, for example, how the seventeenth-century drive for an "equal, wide survey" of England's population resulted not merely in censuses or art conceived from a "prospect view," but a ruling class that deemed this commanding perspective its political birthright. Likewise, Mary Poovey has traced the way in which the "surveillance system" of double-entry bookkeeping contributed to a British political economy in which an ethical or theological conception of truth and value slowly gave way to an episto-factual one, which subsequent histories have identified as inherently expansionist. 5 Further studies have suggested that the creation of a spectatorial subjectivity helped develop an circum-Atlantic bourgeoisie trained in "a universal yet disinterested sympathy" (Baucom 207). According to such a formulation, repeated investment in images of suffering others in sentimental literature as well as visual and...

Carroll Smith‐Rosenberg . This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity . Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture . 2010 . Pp. xxii, 484. $45.00.

In the run‐up to the 2008 presidential election, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen lamented that American exceptionalism “has taken an ugly twist of late.” Once an inspiring (if “flawed”) expression of America's unique role in the world, American exceptionalism “has morphed into the fortress of those who see themselves threatened by ‘one‐worlders’ (read Barack Obama) and who believe it's more important to know how to dress a moose than find Mumbai” (“Palin's American Exception,” New York Times, September 25, 2008). Two years and a rousing Tea Party later, the contest no longer seems to entail a showdown between “ugly” and uplifting exceptionalisms, in Cohen's terms, but between exceptionalism and no exceptionalism at all. Among the popular mandates claimed by triumphant Tea Partiers in the 2010 mid‐term election was a call to “restore American exceptionalism,” as if exceptionalism has become a thing of the past. Has it indeed? Carroll Smith‐Rosenberg's new book, suggests that American exceptionalism is alive and if not exactly well, then by all means kicking. The ghosts of Frederick Jackson Turner, Daniel Boorstin, and David Potter, among others, stalk this book, though their triumphalism has been emphatically turned on its head. The violence, paranoia, and demonization of unfamiliar peoples and cultures that characterize post 9/11 America, according to Smith‐Rosenberg, are not new. Violence constituted the nation: “The fear of alien attacks, the need to violently exclude Others seen as dangerous or polluting has formed a critical component of the United States' national identity from the Alien and Sedition Acts of the 1790s through Joseph McCarthy's war on domestic Communists to the present” (p. x). What does it mean to be American? It means “to fear and dehumanize alien Others, to ruthlessly hunt them down.” The source of this violence? The “instability of Americans' national sense of self.” An “uncertain amalgam of diverse peoples, religions, cultures, and languages,” the United States is knit together, Smith‐Rosenberg contends, only by the “murderous usurpation” of a continent (p. x).

The Deadlocked Election of 1800: Jefferson, Burr, and the Union in the Balance (review)

Reviewed by: The Deadlocked Election of 1800: Jefferson, Burr, and the Union in the Balance Kristofer Ray (bio) The Deadlocked Election of 1800: Jefferson, Burr, and the Union in the Balance. By James Roger Sharp. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010. Pp. ix, 239. $34.95 cloth) The election of 1800 has received a lot of attention since the Bush-Gore deadlock of 2000. James Roger Sharp's book is a strong addition to this literature. Although the title indicates otherwise, Sharp focuses more on the context of the election than the contest itself. He reminds readers of the newness of the Constitution and of government institutions, emphasizes that no one was sure whether or for how long the Republic would survive, and shows how Federalist and Republican coalitions had emerged in this milieu. Although sometimes referred to as parties, these groups argued that their raison d'etre was to protect the legacy of the Revolution, the Constitution, and the Republic itself from the dangerous illegitimacy of the other. Such a position made 1800 more than just an election. Political maneuvering threatened to hijack the process. A tie between Republican candidates in the electoral college led to intrigue on an alarming scale (Federalists, after all, controlled the Congress in which the election would be decided). Militias threatened to mobilize in support of their candidate. In short, argues Sharp, 1800 and its aftermath stands alongside 1860 as one of the most potent political and constitutional crises in American history. [End Page 213] Sharp explores particularly the problems of the late 1790s. He explains how the XYZ Affair, the quasi-war with France, the direct tax of 1798, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, and Fries's Rebellion widened the political gap between Federalists and Republicans. He also makes clear that these issues, along with rumors of a Republican military assault on the federal government, deeply affected the relationship between Federalists. Personal animosities further influenced Federalist divisions. Quite simply, President John Adams and Alexander Hamilton despised one another, and their antagonism shook the entire coalition. By 1800, when Adams sought a separate peace with France despite Hamilton's desires for military glory, an unbridgeable gulf between Federalist factions had become fixed. Sharp's focus on dissension in the Federalist ranks reminds us of its importance to the motivations of several players in the drama. At times, however, it threatens to overwhelm the narrative. It almost seems that the Federalist breakdown accounted for the crisis of 1800. And a curious side effect is that Aaron Burr is never fully fleshed out, while a less-than-nuanced Thomas Jefferson shows up only at key moments. Moreover, because it follows events from the perspective of those at the highest end of the political spectrum, readers do not get a sense of ordinary Americans and how their public activity set the parameters of debate. Even if Federalists seemed to have hegemonic control in 1798-99, the politics of the street would indicate that Jefferson was right in his assessment that time was on the side of the Republicans. More broadly, Sharp describes Republicanism and Federalism as sectional movements rather than as groups coalescing around different notions of constitutionalism. In such a formulation, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions are indicative of an extreme southern position of states' rights. Nullification and secession were not just southern, however, as Hamilton's concern over a New England departure in 1791, New England responses to the 1808 embargo, and the Hartford Convention of 1814 make clear. Certainly, there is a strong current of "southern rights," but in this period people were [End Page 214] more attuned to the future of the Republic. As such, coalitions were not merely sectional. Sharp's evidence reflects this point. His report of voting maneuvering for the purposes of making New England Federalist in 1800, for example, shows widespread Republicanism. Similarly, his descriptions of Virginia and South Carolina Federalism suggest the need for more nuanced analysis. The "dangerous sectionalism" of the 1800 electoral tally is actually far more ambiguous than it would appear (p. 126). In-depth explanations of these issues, of course, would require more detail than could fit into a...

Opinión pública. El tránsito hacia el oeste : Los Estados Unidos. Una introducción (1787-1800)

Este ensayo examina la génesis del concepto de opinión pública entre 1887 y 1800 en Estados Unidos. Resume el marco de privilegios y clientelismo político en el que floreció la prensa de partido. Las consecuencias de la 1ª Enmienda y las reacciones a las Leyes de extranjería y sedición. La batalla partidista entre Federalistas y Republicanos es el marco político en que se contempla la contribución de Madison al concepto de opinión pública.

Introduction

Introduction Melvin I. Urofsky The other day I was looking at the Court’s docket for this year, and realized that while the specifics may have changed—there are more cases dealing with technology, for example— the heart of the docket is what it has been for more than eight decades: important ques­ tions of constitutional and statutory interpre­ tation. In the course of recent research, I read through some volumes of U.S. Reports for the mid-1920s, before the Judges’ Bill of 1925 took force and reoriented the Court. While one would run across the occasional case that would have been important in any Term, a vast majority of the cases involved matters of pri­ vate law or obscure state regulation. ChiefJus­ tice William Howard Taft wanted to make the Court primarily a constitutional tribunal, and he succeeded brilliantly. It is hard to believe that a historian reading about the cases during the Rehnquist and Roberts eras would dismiss the vast majority ofthem as “unimportant.” The Court itself, of course, since the founding of the nation, has been critical to the successful operation of the great experi­ ment, and this issue looks at some of those events in which the Court played a part. In some instances, it did so through expound­ ing principles in a decision, and Thomas Cox examines one of the most important of those cases, Gibbons v. Ogden. Moreover, as histo­ rians have understood for a long time, it is not only the jurisprudential issue that counts, but also how that decision plays out against the context of changing economic and social conditions. Mr. Cox does an admirable job of explicating this. The Supreme Court never ruled on the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, but mat­ ters arising under America’s first “internal se­ curity act” did come up before some of the lower courts. Given how active the judiciary is regarding current security measures, Arthur Garrison’s examination of how judges treated the early laws is instructive. In the last issue of the Journal, we ran the first part of Theodore Vestal’s exami­ nation of how the Court during the Warren years engaged in public diplomacy, a role then somewhat alien to the Justices. Since then, of course, members of our High Court have be­ come familiar figures as they travel overseas during the summer recess and speak to jurists v vi JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY and legal academics in other countries. In this issue, we have the conclusion of Mr. Vestal’s study. A few years ago, the Supreme Court His­ torical Society’s annual lecture series dealt with advocacy before the High Court. At the time, we heard from many people who wanted to know why we did not include this person or someone else who was a great advocate. (One was reminded of Justice Brandeis’s comment that Robert H. Jackson ought to be made So­ licitor General for life!) There were, ofcourse, many other lawyers who practiced before the Supreme Court who were very good, but in a series one can only deal with a few. Here we make up for at least one omission, as Jeremy McLaughlin examines the role of one of the great orators ofthe nineteenth century, Henry Clay, in his Supreme Court practice. Todd C. Peppers has graced the pages of the Journal before. In this issue, he looks at a topic very close to my own heart: the relation­ ship between Justice Louis Brandeis and his clerks. It was far different from those of say Holmes, Frankfurter, or Brennan, but when I interviewed several of his clerks many years ago, all spoke of their year with Brandeis in terms ofawe. Finally, as ever, we are indebted to Grier Stephenson for keeping us up to date on recent historiography. The interest in the Court never seems to wane—which is fortunate for all of us—and Grier performs an invaluable service in his efforts to sort out the books in front of us. As always, enjoy! ...

A Clamor in the Public Mind: Opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts

AT the height of their success in the spring of 1798, as the Federalists in Congress were designing a new naturalization bill, an act to regulate aliens, a new law to criminalize seditious writing, talk, and behavior, and various taxes and war measures to prepare for conflict with France, they claimed repeatedly that all Americans were united in support of the administration. President John Adams encouraged such sentiments, asserting that all America appears to declare, with one heart and one voice, its determination to vindicate . . . the honor of our nation. Adams and his allies were enthusiastic and triumphal as hun dreds of memorials of support poured into Philadelphia. As one news paper declared, the wide support for Adams an enthusiastic Americanism that will prove the salvation of the country. As another noted, unanimity would be key in any attempt to fix the country in a settled and positive state by immediately declaring war.1 The claims of unanimity were wishful thinking. Even on the day of President Adams's national fast, a day when twelve hundred youth of Philadelphia presented him with a patriotic memorial, a fray created confusion in the capital during which it was dangerous going out. On the same day, Adams was hanged and burned in effigy in front of the meetinghouse in North Stamford, Connecticut, deep in the Federalist

“A Second Bounaparty?”: A Reexamination of Alexander Hamilton during the Franco–American Crisis, 1796–1801

Writing to her husband in summer of 1798, Abigail Adams, first lady of United States, believed she noticed something particular in eyes of Alexander Hamilton. Oh, I have read his heart in his wicked eyes, she wrote, the very devil is in them. On another occasion, Mrs. Adams noted Hamilton, already possessed by Devil and overweening ambition, had potential of becoming a second Bounaparty. Although it is easy to dismiss these invectives as an overreaction based on personal animus, an extensive histonographical tradition has echoed First Lady's sentiments toward Hamilton, considering him a bogeyman of early republic. Nowhere is this interpretation of Hamilton more prevalent than in studies of Quasi-War with France.1Arguments over Hamilton's motivations during Quasi-War rest on rather basic dichotomy was manipulating crisis to establish a European-style standing army for purpose of crushing domestic opposition, while zealously supporting passage and enforcement of Alien and Sedition Acts. Hamilton, according to his critics, also controlled Adams's cabinet as well as former president George Washington, thus forcing president to place him in de facto command of military, and thereby fulfilling his all-consuming desire for military glory. Although other scholars posit Hamilton was one of few Americans who really understood situation his actions were designed to fit, a commonly accepted argument accuses Hamilton of menacing designs for established army.The historian most skeptical of Hamilton during Quasi-War is Richard Kohn. His work, Eagle and Sword., which examines creation of American military establishment through to early years of Jefferson presidency, criticizes Hamilton during Franco-American crisis, arguing nationalists of 1780s and, later, Federalist party, led by Hamilton, craved a standing army. The Quasi-War and establishment of a large standing army with Hamilton at helm would be in their interests. As Kohn notes, Hamiltomans wanted army precisely for reasons most Americans rejected it: its ability to suppress dissent and intimidate population. Hamilton's personal ambition for military glory, coupled with his desire for a peacetime standing army, causes Kohn to label him most dangerous man in early America. Kohn is representative of many unsympathetic interpretations of Hamilton: Stanley Kurtz, Manning Dauer, Adnenne Koch, James Morton Smith, and others have seconded his view. Kurtz offers one of harshest critiques of Federalist leader. [TJhere is excellent reason to conclude wrote, that Hamilton contemplated necessity of using his military machine. Civil War would certainly have followed attempt to realize his reactionary program. Even historians who balk at such outright condemnation of Hamilton, in particular Alexander DeConde and Lawrence Kaplan, disparage Hamilton's words and actions during Quasi-War. DeConde, in only book-length treatment of Quasi-War, posits Hamilton and other High Federalists viewed military as a political instrument for maintaining power. Kaplan, in his recent work, argues Hamilton was concerned with making United States a dominant world power, but criticizes Hamilton during Quasi-War, condemning his actions regarding Spanish America as rash and foolhardy.2Not all historians accept this negative view of Hamilton. Forrest McDonald, Jacob Cooke, and Gilbert Lycan have seen Hamilton as both an advocate of moderation during crisis and one of few leaders who understood situation facing United States. In his sympathetic biography, McDonald notes Hamilton was often too busy with his law practice to pay close attention to crisis, but when responded to situation, particularly during hysteria following XYZ Affair, he was one of few voices calling for moderation in land. …

Who Belongs in America? Presidents, Rhetoric, and Immigration (review)

Reviewed by: Who Belongs in America? Presidents, Rhetoric, and Immigration John S. W. Park Who Belongs in America? Presidents, Rhetoric, and Immigration. Edited by Vanessa B. Beasley . College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006; pp viii + 294. $39.95. The two most useful chapters of this edited collection are both by the editor herself, Vanessa B. Beasley, because her introduction frames the central question and her afterword provides helpful summaries of all the other pieces in the collection. Unlike Beasley's two essays, the ten other pieces were prepared for an annual conference on presidential rhetoric hosted at Texas A&M in 2001. One piece, by Michael Novak, seems to be the keynote address, as it's the first of the collection, and yet it's obviously the least thematically connected to the rest of the volume. It begins with an extensive meditation about the greatness of the American presidency and it ends with a sober warning about the dangers of leftist intellectuals in American public life. It's an odd piece, and one might just as well skip it. In any case, at the outset, Beasley describes a paradox that many scholars have long noted: leading politicians and other influential leaders have often embraced images of immigrants as pioneers and noble strivers, and yet they have also displayed intense xenophobia and hostility to many different kinds of newcomers. Presidents and presidential candidates have been prone to these contradictions, welcoming and celebratory in some contexts, racist and nativist in others. This collection of essays examines their words (and their policies) in some detail. As Beasley describes it, "This book asks what has happened when such concerns have collided with the situated, pragmatic realm of political communication in general and presidential rhetoric in particular. To explore this question via case studies, the authors in this volume have examined select moments in U.S. immigration history by paying special attention to the interplay between immigration history and presidential discourse, broadly conceived" (3–4). Almost all of the essays are well written and interesting, although some cover material already discussed elsewhere, often by the authors themselves. Roger Daniels provides a summary of the Chinese Exclusion period, for example, and he is certainly one of the leading experts of that period. But much of his essay doesn't deal directly with presidential rhetoric per se, even though he does illuminate how both Roosevelts dealt politically with the aftermath of Asian exclusion. The first President Roosevelt extended the Chinese Exclusion principle to other Asians, even though he publicly suggested that the Japanese were different; the second Roosevelt pleaded for Congress to repeal Chinese Exclusion, largely for foreign policy reasons. [End Page 747] Daniels's essay is useful for students unfamiliar with his work, but he and other scholars have provided much more extensive histories of this period in other books and articles. A few other essays also tend to summarize familiar material. Craig R. Smith's essay on the Alien and Sedition Acts, as well as the subsequent implosion of the Federalists after 1799, covers a period of American history that has been thoroughly examined. The Federalist attack on free speech, their willingness to squash legitimate political dissent, and then the rise of Thomas Jefferson as a staunch critic of Hamiltonian elitism, as presidential candidate, and as president—these are all topics that have received extensive scholarly attention elsewhere. Smith himself has published a book on these topics, set in that era. In the same way, Charles Stewart's essay on religion and tolerance in the nineteenth century covers much of what has already been explored in this field. The first half of his essay deals with how the early American presidents referred to "God" in a pluralist religious context, the second half deals with emergent concerns about Mormons and Catholics in the late nineteenth century. Mostly, presidents tended to avoid addressing religious controversies directly, according to Stewart: they were "strangely silent during the last third of the century when a great many immigrants (particularly Eastern and Southern Europeans and Jews) did not look or act like immigrants of previous times. Rampant prejudice in American society was a non-issue in presidential addresses" (84...

Justice Brennan and Civil Liberty in Times of Crisis

It has been forty years since I had the privilege of serving Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. as a law clerk during the 1966 Term. That was a year of intellectual excitement mixed with warmth and friendship. Our reunions then were relatively intimate, as the Justice had fewer clerks. Brennan home in Georgetown left many good memories, none more vivid than the charm, intelligence, and good humor of Justice and Mrs. Brennan. Over the years, I continued to interact with Justice Brennan; once in this law school when I spoke at an event in his honor.' In December 1987, he asked me to attend a conference on Free Speech and National at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. trip was especially memorable for the Christmas mass we attended at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, accompanied by the mayors of Jerusalem and Bethlehem-Teddy Kollek and Elias Freij. It turned out to be one of the last such events prior to the first intifada. Justice Brennan delivered a speech at that conference entitled The Quest to Develop a Jurisprudence of Civil Liberties in Times of Security Crises.2 It was characteristically insightful and courageous. He surveyed the security crises of U.S. history-from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, to the Civil War period of 1861 to 1865, the Espionage Act and its amendments during World War I, the Japanese American intemments during World War II, and the laws and investigations launched to combat the Communist threat during the 1950s. He concluded that security crises in the United States often led to exaggerated claims of danger and unnecessary deprivations of civil liberties. In reaching this conclusion the Justice was not questioning the seriousness of

Lincoln's Refutation of Secession

All seem to agree that Abraham Lincoln was indefatigably de voted to preserving the Union, but were his means those of a hero or those of a tyrant? The debate on the constitutionality of his various actions as president: his suspension ofhabeas corpus, the shutting down of proslavery newspapers in the North, all rest on what was truly the most monumental constitutional issue he would face: the legality of secession and the nature of the Constitution itself. Indeed, since the Constitution was first ratified, the threat of se cession?exaggerated though it might have been?had dogged the national government. Georgia and South Carolina responded to an anti-slavery petition to Congress by intimating that they would secede if Congress attempted to free the slaves. In response to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson denied the obligation of states to honor unconstitutional federal laws; these arguments were later resurrected by John C. Calhoun in support of the right of secession. Secession plots by the Federalists (including the Hartford Convention) abounded in the early nineteenth century. But no state had ever followed through on a threat to secede until Lincoln was elected president. Lincoln had no choice but to confront the question of the constitutionality of secession. In December, soon after Lincoln's election, South Carolina seceded from the Union, and six more states followed within the next two months. As Lincoln took

Minority Report: John Marshall and the Defense of the Alien and Sedition Acts

In 1799, the Federalist minority of the Virginia House of Delegates produced an extended defense of the Alien and Sedition Acts. This Minority Report responded to Madison's famous Virginia Resolutions and efforts by Virginia Republicans to tar the Adams Administration with having exceeded its powers under the federal Constitution. Originally attributed to John Marshall by biographer Albert Beveridge, recent biographies of Marshall have omitted the episode or rejected Beveridge's claim. The current editors of the Papers of John Marshall omitted the Minority Report from their multi-volume collection of Marshall's work and have successfully lobbied editors of similar collections to remove Marshall's name from the Report. What was once an assumed (if controversial) episode in Marshall's career has disappeared from otherwise exhaustive accounts of his life and work. As in Philip K. Dick's story, Minority Report, an alternate view of events has been unceremoniously erased from the official record. The authors of this article challenge the decision to remove Marshall's name from the Minority Report. Marshall was the only person named at the time as the probable author, and Marshall had both reason and opportunity to draft the Address. The arguments of the Report not only track Marshall's views on the Constitution, they utilize constitutional arguments that were wholly unique at the time and would appear again, almost verbatim, in the future-Chief Justice's constitutional opinions. If Marshall penned this defense of the Acts, then this not only reveals the views of federal power he brought with him to the Supreme Court, it also helps illuminate public reaction to Chief Justice Marshall's nationalist jurisprudence. To his critics, Marshall's construction of federal power in McCulloch echoed the same arguments put forward to defend the hated Alien and Sedition Acts. The historical evidence suggests that not only were the arguments similar, they had flowed from the same pen.

"Has Your Courage Rusted?": National Security and the Contested Rhetorical Norms of Republicanism in Post-Revolutionary America, 1798-1801

By considering the XYZ Affair and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the presidential campaign of 1800, and the post-election public address of 1801, this essay examines how the contested rhetorical norms of post-Revolutionary republicanism were influenced by threats—some real, others manufactured—to national security. Interweaving the challenges of rising international capitalism, the communicative opportunities created by mass-produced media, and the fallout from local political feuds, this essay offers an interdisciplinary analysis of a foundational moment in American history, when our forebears negotiated the relationships among free speech, national security, party allegiance, and commerce while trying to define republicanism as both a daily practice and a guiding political philosophy.

After the Election

Thomas Jefferson's comments on the 1798 passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts apply just as well to the 2004 election.

Toward a History of Statelessness in America

Browsing through an electronic card catalog not long ago, I found a new edition of Edward Everett Hale's A Man Without a Country.1 First published during the Civil War, the novella is a frightening cautionary tale. The fiction begins in 1805, when a young naval officer is seduced (Hale's word, not mine) by Aaron Burr, and drawn into the former vice president's conspiracy to detach the Southwest and reconfigure the United States. The voice of the narrator moves between fact and fiction; many readers are still convinced that they are reading history. In the story, the young officer, Philip Nolan, is tried for treason in a regional imitation of Aaron Burr's trial in Richmond, Virginia. When the chief judge asks him whether he has anything to say that will prove his loyalty to the United States, Nolan blurts out, "Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!" The shocked court, composed of Revolutionary War veterans, grants his wish. Nolan is condemned to perpetual exile, sailing around the globe on American ships for the rest of his life, doomed never to return and never to hear talk of home. He does not question his punishment. Late in life, he cautions another young officer, the narrator, to avoid his fate: "And for your country, boy . . . and for that flag . . . never dream a dream but of serving her as she bids you." The punch line is absolute and uncritical. The tale is a densely layered fable. Philip Nolan himself may not step on the earth over which his nation's flag waves or claim his nation's protection, but he lives out his life on a floating nation, a ship that flies the American flag and freely moves across the globe, conveying American claims to authority and influence, and in that way constructing the new nation as a player in an international contest for space and power. Aaron Burr figures in the narrative in only one dimension of his many-dimensioned career: only in the guise of the Devil, whispering temptation, the Aaron Burr who killed the hero Alexander Hamilton in a duel. There is no hint of the Aaron Burr who admired Mary Wollstonecraft, the Aaron Burr who raised his daughter, Theodosia, to be an intellectual (as Thomas Jefferson most assuredly did not raise his daughter, [End Page 727] Martha). There is certainly no hint of the Aaron Burr who eloquently opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts and who called on America to be "an asylum to the oppressed of every nation."2 Edward Everett Hale intended simply to make an intervention into the politics of his own time, hoping to undermine Confederate sympathizer Clement Vallandigham's race for governor in Ohio.3 But Hale's novella has had an extraordinarily long life. Reaching back to the founding era for its setting, published as a patriotic narrative in the midst of the Civil War and as a support to Abraham Lincoln's suspension of civil liberties, it was reprinted steadily throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with flurries of new editions during World War I and again during World War II. During World War I several dramatic versions were staged; shortly after World War II a radio adaptation was broadcast, with voice-over narration by Bing Crosby, and in 1973 a sympathetic made-for-TV version appeared, echoing the anxieties of the Vietnam War, starring Cliff Robertson. And then no more reprints until after 9/11. A roughly similar drift in the pace of attention paid to the issue of statelessness can be traced in the lineage of nonfiction books and articles, tracking with chilling accuracy the rise and fall of the threat of statelessness throughout the world. Thus a number of legal and political monographs were published in the aftermath of World War I, then their numbers receded. They reemerged in the 1930s; among them the rare monograph on the subject, published a little...

Trading Civil Liberties for National Security: Warnings from a World War II Internment Program

A recurring theme in American political discourse is how to strike the appropriate balance between protecting the nation against threats to its security without eroding the liberty that is at the heart of its democratic character. Civil liberties versus national security is a choice apparently to be made in every crisis and every war, whether hot or cold. We can trace the debate from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 through Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, to the Red Scares that followed both world wars. The classic case of going too far, and the most widely repudiated example, is the illegal mass internment of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, most of them U.S. citizens, without charge, during World War II. Today, in what is commonly called the war on terrorism, hawks and doves take up their customary positions on opposing sides of the old argument as they debate the U.S.A Patriot Act, the imprisonment of foreigners at Camp Delta on Guantánamo Bay, and the indefinite detention of American citizens by presidential order.

Charles Brockden Brown and the Philadelphia Germans

Charles Brockden Brown and the Philadelphia Germans Sydney J. Krause (bio) If Charles Brockden Brown's major novels may be broadly identified by geography, it is apparent that they all gravitate around Philadelphia, though with varying degrees of focus on the city per se. Arthur Mervyn (referred to as "his Phila. Novel" [Smith, Diary 290]) obviously maintains this focus most completely, save for scant involvement of the hinterlands of Chester County. Edgar Huntly, on the other hand, is set mostly on the near frontier, domain of Native Americans, with a reminder of Old World complications that fester in the psyche of an Irish immigrant. Ormond savors of French and internationalist motifs, with its Monrose (transplanted De Moivre) family, Ormond's adventures in the East of Europe, and the fabled exploits of his sister, Martinette De Beavais, in the French Revolution. But Wieland, Brown's first published novel—designated "An American Tale"—is remarkably German, so indicated by the names of persons and places, along with a variety of circumstances linked to Germany's history and culture. At the earliest stage of composition, Brown even contemplated shipping his Wielands back to Germany to claim their Saxon inheritance1—a thought likely abandoned as his interest was in the American, not the European, Germans, they being a better subject here and one he was acquainted with. In the entire novel, Philadelphia, where events are environed, gets mentioned by name only three times, twice in the beginning and once toward the end (one of which references has nothing to do with the Wielands), while Germany and matters German are referred to by name 30 times—a far from peripheral presence, the extent and ramifications of which point to a subtext that indexes social concerns. Indeed, if one wants to get the full thematic impact of Wieland, it is helpful to think German, as, at the outset, the very application of the titular German name and its relation to the implied Abraham and Isaac motif dealt [End Page 85] with by a leading German writer of that name (Christ of Martin Wieland) are among the most commonly unanswered—and equally unaddressed—questions regarding the novel. By an interesting twist, the Germanness of Wieland is actually anti-German,2 having its ultimate basis in Brown's chauvinist Americanness, backed by an emerging Federalist bias on his part, and, more than that, a reflected antipathy for Otherness. It was an antipathy called for by the times, that being a good way to be amidst the anti foreigner frenzy of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, a mechanism for the expulsion of undesirable foreigners—as most of them suddenly became. Though long-lasting, the Germanophobia, so great in early and mid-eighteenth-century Philadelphia, gained so little real exposure beyond those times, it is not entirely surprising that one has to find it brought to light in a work of fiction. That Brown gave prior consideration to the German element in Wieland is apparent from the fact that national origin was a choice quite deliberately made on his part. For, as has been observed, the reference in the Wieland "Advertisement" to the "authentic case, remarkably similar to that of Wieland," which Brown tells us "most readers will probably recollect" (Wieland 3), was the sensational James Yates murder case written up in 1796.3 This occurrence in key particulars parallels the situation Brown would employ, as both Yates and Wieland are "imbued," as Alexander Cowie puts it, "with a conviction that they have a divine injunction to kill their families—a wife and four children, [and] neither man, when arraigned, evinces the least sign of remorse for his acts. Both also set about attacking their sisters—unsuccessfully; both escape more than once from their places of confinement and both are retaken and tried" ("Historical Essay," Wieland 324). So Brown has from a major source this person with an Irish name (Yates, likely so rendered from Yeats) and an incident quite distant from Philadelphia (Tomhanick, in the extreme western corner of New York State). If he wanted a person capable of outrageous violence, surely, with the great anti-Irish sentiment in Philadelphia of 1798 (the Irish being the...

Democratic-Republican Societies, Subversion, and the Limits of Legitimate Political Dissent in the Early Republic

Political liberties and the needs of security have clashed often in American history. When asked to identify the seminal incident in this cycle, many if not most of us are inclined to look to the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts and the series of federal seditious libel prosecutions which took place beginning in 1798. But this overlooks the events of 1794, when Federalists first made a concerted effort to assert the illegitimacy of political criticism of the government. The effort did not take the form of prosecution or legislation, but nonetheless presented a significant challenge to constitutional values. The moment came in the tense, patriotic aftermath of the Whiskey Rebellion, and was directed at the Democratic-Republican societies - a loosely-affiliated network of voluntary associations engaged in sharp criticism of Federalist policy. From the Federalist perspective, the societies were inherently illegitimate because the tendency of their speech - indeed, of their very existence - was to foment insurrection and to undermine representative government. Federalists also feared the societies were influenced by, if not subject to the direction and control of, a subversive foreign power - Revolutionary France. Building on these perceptions, President Washington used his annual address to Congress to denounce the existence of the societies. The censure produced an immediate echo in the Senate, and a fierce debate in both the House and the partisan press. Republicans insisted upon the right of private citizens to organize and to criticize the actions of elected officials, while Federalists branded political criticism from private groups as inherently disloyal and seditious. It was America's first sustained debate concerning freedoms of expression, assembly, and the press, but ultimately the decentralized nature of the debate prevented it from reaching a clear resolution. James Madison wrote at the time of his concern that the public failed to appreciate that the principle advanced by the Federalists could as well be applied in support of more direct intrusions on political liberties. This, of course, is precisely what happened just a few years later during the Sedition Act controversy.

Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787-1845

Master Plots: Race and the Founding an American Literature, 1787-- 1845. By Jared Gardner. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Pp. xvii, 238. Illustrations. $45.00.) Nat Turner Before the Bar Judgment. Fictional Treatments the Southampton Slave Insurrection. By Mary Kemp Davis. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv, 298. $30.00.) Both Jared Gardner in Master Plots and Mary Kemp Davis in Nat Turner Before the Bar Judgment portray narrative as a crucial site struggle over and representation, a site staging, in Davis's felicitous phrasing, a words and a for the word, and both reach similar conclusions: in American narratives, the battle to define sameness and otherness is never fully won or even concluded (17). Gardner's concern is with the converging discourses on racial science, national identity, and American fiction in the early republic, while Davis's is with a novelistic tradition about the Nat Turner revolt. However, but both insist literature serves as a central arena where the country's most pronounced fears and anxieties about whiteness and blackness are endlessly exposed, debated, half-exorcized, and refought. Both authors make valuable and original contributions to the ongoing study American literature's entanglement with the discourse and racism, but the two studies, Gardner's volume ultimately offers the more disturbing and far-reaching perspective on American literature's capacity to shape our political discourse. With the exception a concluding chapter on Frederick Douglass, Gardner's study focuses primarily on early canonical American texts: Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive (1797); Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs a Sleepwalker (1799); James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers (1823) and The Prairie (1827); and Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). These are texts, Gardner argues, outlining master narratives that helped defend and define national identity for white Americans while proscribing those who did not `belong' (xi). Those narratives, in turn, were anchored in racial science as it was emerging first in the writings Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Stanhope Smith and later in the works polygenesis theorists like Charles Caldwell and Samuel George Morton and proslavery apologists like Thomas R. Dew. Accordingly, early novels like Tyler's The Algerine Captive and Brown's Edgar Huntly responded, in part, to contemporary crises like the French Revolution, Santo Domingo, factionalism, and the Alien and Sedition Acts by posing plots attempted to define Americans by what they were not-Native Americans and treacherous European aliens-and writers who followed, like James Fenimore Cooper and Edgar Allan Poe, later evoked fantasies of a nation without racial difference when the controversy over slavery began to dominate political discussion (116). The result is a study covers some the same issues in early American literature and as Dana P. Nelson's groundbreaking 1992 study, The Word in Black and White, but nonetheless offers an original and disturbing argument for the intertwining racial and national discourses with the emergence a national literature acutely absorbed in the task drawing lines between same and other. This was an ongoing task, Gardner implies, requiring the presence others to envision sameness, but it was nonetheless subject to contradictions and failures Frederick Douglass was able to exploit in his struggle to articulate a language for rewriting the founding fictions American race (182). …

The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions Reconsidered: "An Appeal to the Real Laws of Our Country"

IN 1798, AFTER A DECADE OF POLITICAL DEFEATS, VIRGINIA REPUBLICANS faced gravest scenario contemplated in their ideology: federal government, no longer headed by a Virginian Cincinnatus who had proven himself willing to relinquish power, stood on a war footing. Despite what Republicans understood as nation's moral obligation, Federalists finally had taken sides in European wars in opposition to republican France. This decision had led them also to expand American army and augment American navy. In addition, as Republican thought predicted. Federalists had taken drastic measures aimed at tamping down domestic dissent. With passage of Alien and Sedition Acts, it seemed that Federalist majority in Congress might guarantee itself a permanent domination. The Sedition Act prohibited all criticism of the government of United States, or either house of Congress ... or (but did not specifically exempt from criticism vice president--who, of course, was Thomas Jefferson), while Alien Friends Act subjected friendly foreigners--including Representative Albert Gallatin, a leading Republican--to government's arbitrary control. President John Adams, Jefferson's onetime revolutionary colleague, seemed a happy convert to cause of monarchism. Jefferson, recognized leader of Republican opposition, decided to forgo candid expression of his sentiments even in letters to bosom friends lest Federalist postmasters, whom he suspected of rifling through his mail, expose him to prosecution. At end of their collective rope (or at least imagining a gallows in intermediate future) Republican high command lit upon a strategy: it would have Virginia General Assembly and legislature of a sympathetic state (Jefferson thought it should be North Carolina's, but influence of members of Nicholas family--which included prominent Kentucky and Virginia Republicans--in Kentucky meant that its legislature served purpose in end) adopt a statement of Republican constitutional principles. Americans at large would thus be offered an alternative political standard to which they could repair, and Federalist government would receive a tacit dare to initiate sedition prosecutions against an unsympathetic state legislature.(1) The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 should not be understood as invention of distraught minds faced with extraordinary circumstances. Although situation faced by Virginia Republican leaders at end of 1790s was urgent, twin enunciations of their constitutional position adopted by Virginia and Kentucky legislatures corresponded closely to explication of Constitution offered by Federalists in Richmond Ratification Convention of 1788. By time matters came to a head in 1798, Virginians had been insisting on holding Federalists to their vows of 1788 for a full decade. From almost minute they were promulgated, Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 came to be seen as touchstone of Virginia's constitutionalism. When identities of their main authors, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, became known more than a decade after fact, resolutions took on additional luster, and sectionalist and particularist southerners based their arguments on them up to 1861 and after.(2) The standard accounts of events of 1798 have Jefferson and Madison teaming to concoct a constitutional doctrine that might be useful in defense of civil liberties. According to these accounts, two eminent Virginians directed their salvo against what was seemingly an endless string of Federalist victories in federal politics--what Jefferson called the reign of witches--that finally drove many Republicans to desperation.(3) Examined solely from perspective of Virginia, however, that standard account is simply mistaken. …