The Alien and Sedition Acts
With the rise of political parties in the new nation,
partisan conflict intensified over issues of economics,
foreign policy, law, and domestic policy. The passage
of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 amid fears of
war with France exacerbated the growing rift between
Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. At the center
were fundamental differences over the Constitution:
whether its authority was based on broad, implied powers
or limited in scope under strict interpretation. The
prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts brought
these conflicts into the realm of everyday, practical—and
increasingly partisan—politics. Democratic-Republicans
charged that enforcement of the Sedition Act was intended
to suppress the Republican opposition, and freedom of
the press became an issue. The debate over the acts
also bore the beginnings of the contest over federalism
and states’ rights.
Objectives
1. To understand the
provisions of the Alien and Sedition Acts within their
political and constitutional contexts.
2. To explore the issues raised by the prosecutions
under these acts and the larger constitutional issues
they raised.
3. To explore the ways in which the issues raised by
the Alien and Sedition Acts were instrumental in antebellum
political conflicts, as well as today’s issues.
Understanding the Issues and Context
In
the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon, a debate has begun over augmented security
and surveillance, versus safeguards for personal freedoms.
This debate is certain to occupy our attention for several
years. Students should relate these current concerns
with the fierce debates that raged in the early national
period. What are the parallels with the controversy
over the Alien and Sedition Acts? Does understanding
what happened in 1798 help us make informed decisions
today?
The National History standards expect
students to be able to explain why the Alien and Sedition
Acts were passed and to appraise their significance.
Students should be able to explain the context of events
and the constitutional theory that surrounded their
passage. How did the Federalist party justify the need
for the acts? Why did the Federalists feel the acts
did not violate the Bill of rights? Students should
be able to assess the arrest and imprisonment of critics
of the Adams administration such as Benjamin Franklin
Bache, Thomas Cooper, and Matthew Lyon. Were these violations
of the First Amendment or were they justified by the
crises confronting the new nation?
Several sites provide texts and documents to prepare
students for these assignments. The
Avalon Project at Yale University contains the texts
of the Alien Act, the Sedition Act, and Virginia and
Kentucky Resolutions. A useful feature of this site
is that is allows a side-by-side comparison of draft
and final versions of the resolutions, with changes
highlighted. The Virginia
Report, the full text of an 1850 publication by
J. W. Randolph, has the full texts of the Alien Act
and the Sedition Act. It also contains the debates and
resolutions of the Virginia and Kentucky legislatures,
as well as the counter-resolutions of Delaware, Rhode
Island, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire,
and Vermont. Finally, it contains the Virginia Report
of 1799, along with Madison’s report, instructions
to Virginia senators, and letters written in the 1830s
by Madison on the bank question and the 1798 resolution.
The Reference
Library of Political Documents contains the text
of the Naturalization Act. The Early
America website provides both original and modern
versions of the acts. Direct your students also to the
Library of Congress website with facsimiles of the Annals
of Congress so that students can read the contemporary
debate over the Alien and Sedition laws, Alien Enemies,
Seditious Practices, and Seditious Writers. The Annals
are searchable. For an assignment, students might look
at the competing
viewpoints of Albert Gallatin and Harrison Gray
Otis in the Annals, 5th Congress,
2d session, pp. 2107, 2109, 2156-60, 2162, 2145-48.
Teaching the Sedition Trials
The Historic
Trials website has some limited resources for trials
associated with the Alien and Sedition Acts, chiefly
images of original versions of the acts in the Columbian
Centinel, summaries of the cases brought under the
acts, and identifications of major figures involved
in the sedition trials.
Teachers will certainly want to consult the National
Archives and Records Administration website on the sedition
trial of Thomas Cooper. This site follows objectives
correlated with National History Standards, provides
relevant documents (a newspaper broadside, the warrant
for Cooper’s arrest, his indictment and plea,
subpoenas, the verdict, and sentence), and outlines
some teaching activities. The site also has links to
other NARA teaching packets. The full text of United
States vs. Thomas Cooper can be found in the section
of "The Founders’ Constitution website devoted
to the "First
Amendment: Speech and the Press" annotates
the Constitution in detail and has supporting documents.
The site also contains St.
George Tucker’s essay on the British concept
of seditious libel and its application to American jurisprudence.
For a class activity, students might stage the Cooper
trial, which by far has the most complete coverage on
the web, as a means to understand how contemporaries
perceived and framed the issues.
Addressing Issues of Federalism, States’ Rights,
and Personal Freedoms
The National History Standards also
require students to analyze the impact of the Virginia
and Kentucky Resolutions on evolving theories of federalism
and states’ rights. They direct students to evaluate
the extent to which the issues raised by the Acts became
defined in terms of federalism and states’ rights
because judicial review had not yet been established?
Ask your students how reaction might differed had there
been a judicial forum for such issues already in place.
The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions—and the
counter-resolutions later made by the legislatures of
Delaware, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut,
New Hampshire, and Vermont—in part occurred because
the principle of judicial review had not been developed
at that time. Of these states opposed to Virginia and
Kentucky, only Rhode Island framed its response to the
Virginia and Kentucky resolutions in terms of judicial
review, stating that such power "vests in the federal
courts exclusively, and in the Supreme Court of the
United States ultimately, the authority of deciding
on the constitutionality of any act or law of the Congress
of the United States." The Avalon
Project and the Virginia
Report website allow students to follow the stages
of the debates in the Virginia and Kentucky legislatures.
Students might be asked to evaluate Thomas Jefferson’s
treatment of the conflict in his First
Inaugural Address. To what extent did the election
of 1800 heal the wounds opened by the partisan conflicts
of the 1790s? As a good practice for the DBQ-style charts
and maps, students might examine the Election of 1800;
the electoral
results for the election, including a map and state
voting data, might be usefully compared with the counter-resolutions.
Finally, the National History Standards
ask students to what extent the Alien and Sedition Acts
were a violation of the Bill of Rights. Was the more
important legacy of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions
that they vouchsafed individual rights or that they
broached the issue of states’ rights? Ask them
to compare and contrast these acts with the Bill
of Rights. The United States government maintains
a site dealing with British
seditious libel. This site deals mostly with twentieth-century
developments; it might be useful if students wanted
to study the movement of American concept of free, unhindered
freedom of the press away from British common-law precepts
of seditious libel. In this regard, students might also
want to look at Freedom Papers No. 6, "Public
Access to Government Information," which deals
with censorship, prior restraint, and seditious libel.
For more on the free speech clause, students might visit
"Exploring
First Amendment Law" and the ACLU Briefing
Paper No. 10 on "Freedom
of Expression: The First Amendment."
A DBQ
sample set on the Alien and Sedition Acts is available.
The Electronic
Text Center maintained by the University of Virginia
contains K. R. Constantine Gutzman’s
article, "From Interposition to Nullification: Peripheries
and Center in the Thought of James Madison." An argument
for enshrining the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions
alongside John C. Calhoun’s constitutional theory
in modern interpretations of the Constitution is made
by William
J. Watkins, Jr., "The Kentucky and Virginia
Resolutions: Guideposts of Limited Government." |
