Adams the Younger--The Son Also Rises Part II

                 

                            John Quincy Adams presidential portrait.

The years of the Monroe Administration were already being called the Era of Good Feelings because following the War of 1812 the Federalists had all but disappeared making the Democratic Republicans the single major political party.  But it was unwieldy and had lost the ideological cohesion of the heady days of the Revolution of 1800 when Thomas Jefferson and the party swept into office, crushing John Adam’s hopes for a second term.

The orderly system of party caucus which anointed the favorite of the sitting President had broken down and the era of Revolutionary Founders had run out.  Despite the advantage of being Monroe’s obvious choice and a distinguished eight years as Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams found himself no more than a regional choice of the New England and Mid-Atlantic states.  Other regionally backed candidates emerged to challenge him—John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, William H. Crawford of Georgia, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. 

Each also represented a nuanced political difference.  Calhoun was a fierce nationalist in those days. Clay was the leader of a faction that wanted western expansion and Federally funded internal improvements like canals and roads.  Crawford was the choice of former Presidents Jefferson and Madison as the logical defender of traditional Republicanism.  And the bellicose Jackson ran as an old conservative favoring limited Federal authority on one hand and western populism on the other.  Adams was left as what we would call today a technocrat who had no independent patronage base.

With no unseemly public campaigning by any of the candidates, the race devolved into complicated jockeying for position in the background.  Calhoun dropped out of the race, presumably in favor of Jackson, but possibly also to benefit his fellow Unitarian Adams—the two were among the co-founders of Washington’s All Souls Church.  At any rate, both Adams and Jackson named him their vice-presidential running mate. Crawford, with strong support across the old South, fell ill and for a while looked like he might also have to drop out.  The popular Jackson swamped Clay in the West.  

After the November election there was no clear Electoral College winner.  Adams carried 7 states with 84 Electoral Votes.  Jackson did even better—12 states with 99 votes, but not enough to carry the day.  Crawford lagged far behind with 2 states and 41 votes.  With the race destined to go to the House of Representatives the odd man out Clay, who carried three states but only 37 votes despite besting Crawford in the popular vote, threw his considerable support in the House to Adams insuring a victory in that body.  Clay’s national program was clearly closer to Adams than any other candidate and he personally distrusted his regional rival Jackson.

Jackson, the leader in both electoral and popular votes was outraged.  That outrage grew when Adams appointed Clay as his Secretary of State.  Jackson furiously charged that the election had been stolen from him by a corrupt bargain between Adams and Clay.  He immediately launched what amounted to a four-year campaign to build a political organization to crush Adams in 1832 and win the Presidency and vindication.

Adams, a stickler for separation of church and state, became the only man to be sworn into the Presidency with his hand on a copy of the Constitution not the Bible.

With most pressing foreign policy issues laid to rest by his own successful eight years as head of the State Department, Adams concentrated on domestic issues, at first with some success.  With the support of Clay, now his most trusted advisor, the President pushed an aggressive program of internal improvements and won funding for such projects as the extension of the Cumberland Road into Ohio, the beginning of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, the construction of the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal and the Louisville & Portland Canal around the falls of the Ohio, the connection of the Great Lakes to the Ohio River system in Ohio and Indiana; and the enlargement and rebuilding of the Dismal Swamp Canal in North Carolina.

He also supported a high protective tariff, popular both in industrializing New England and Mid-Atlantic states and which was a keystone of Clay’s American System.  But as maneuvering for a new, higher tariff bill went forward, Adams’s supporters in Congress, now known as National Republicans, lost control to Jackson’s supporters, now known as Democrats.  In tricky and duplicitous maneuvering designed by Vice President Calhoun, tariffs on raw materials thought to be obnoxious to New England were added to the bill in the hope that many representatives of that region would be forced to abandon their support.  Then the Southern Democrats, who put forth the program, would withdraw their support, dooming the tariff.  But it did not work out that way.  A substantial minority of New Englanders in Congress supported the Tariff as best for the whole nation.  When not enough of them turned against it, the Tariff of 1828 passed. 

Adams signed it in the face of voracious opposition from the South which labeled it the Tariff of Abominations because of the hardships it imposed on the Planter class, which was dependent on cheap imported manufactured goods. Adams knew it was probably the end of his presidency.

In the election of 1828, the careful plans of Jackson and his new Democratic Party came to fruition.  Adams, like his father, was swept out of office by a virtual bloodless revolution.  Jackson conducted the first real popular election campaign for president while Adams sat traditionally above the fray and reluctant to engage in retail politics to shore up support.  

This map shows how overwhelmed John Quincy Adams was in the election of 1828.

Jackson, with Calhoun once again his running mate, won 15 states, 178 Electoral College votes, and carried a landslide 56% of the popular vote.  Adams and new running mate Richard Rush could only garner 83 Electoral votes from 9 states.  Despite not caring much for the job, the rejection stung.  Like his father before him, Adams left town before his enemy’s inauguration.

Adams decided to do what no other former President had ever done, and none has done since—run for election to the House of Representatives.  He was handily elected as a National Republican in 1840 and went on to be returned to the House seven more times until he literally died in his traces.

In his early years in the House, he led opposition to Jackson’s popular Indian Removal policies and defended the Second Bank of The United States, the main target of Jackson’s wrath.

A run for Governor of Massachusetts in 1834 failed when he lost to a Democrat.  But he kept his House seat.

Adams became increasingly concerned with rising sectionalism, and particularly the issue of the expansion of slavery.  He felt that slavery would either destroy the Union or be ended by a blood bath slave insurrection.

In 1836 the House voted for the so-called Gag Rule which immediately tabled any petitions about slavery, banning discussion or debate of the issue.  The crafty Adams found a way to bring the discussion to the fore anyway.  He laid a petition from a Georgia man calling for disunion to support slavery in the South.  Although he did not support the petition, he did so because it violated the Gag Rule.  Infuriated Southerners called for his censure.  But in his defense in a trial before the House, Adams was able to bring up the topics of slavery and the dangers to democracy by the Gag Rule.  He wielded control of the debate for two solid weeks, gaining national attention.  When the Democratic majority realized that they had been trapped, they tried to withdraw the charges.  But Adams would not let them.  He insisted on an up-or-down vote which he won.

Adams would challenge the Gag Rule again and again, proud to “be obnoxious to the faction.”

If he was obnoxious before, he doubled down during the Amistad Case.  A shipload of chained slaves destined for sale in the Caribbean managed to take control of their Spanish slave ship, La Amistad in 1839, killing many of the crew and forcing the survivors to return them to Africa.  The crew tricked the mutineers and instead sailed north into American waters where the ship was intercepted by a Revenue Cutter off the shores of New York. 

The slaves were taken into custody and the Spanish government demanded the return of its “rightful property.”  A Federal District Court, however, ruled that under the terms of a treaty between Great Britain and the United States which outlawed the international slave trade, Spain had no claim on the men.  Moreover, it ruled that they had properly taken action to free themselves from what amounted to an illegal kidnapping.

The decision outraged Southerners and set up a major diplomatic crisis with the Spanish.  President Martin Van Buren ordered the Justice Department to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.  Congressman Adams offered his assistance in arguing the case before the Court.  After Roger Sherman Baldwin, the young lawyer who represented the slaves from the beginning opened with two days of argument, Adams stood before the Court on his own on February 24, 1841.

John Quincy Adams arguing in defense of the Amistad rebels before the Supreme Court.  The skilled and detailed summation of the issues went on for hours and one justice literally died on the bench.

He boldly attacked President Van Buren for inappropriately assuming unconstitutional powers in the case by ordering intervention.  Then as the most experienced diplomat in American history and the actual author of some of the Treaties cited by Attorney General Gilpin who was personally arguing the case for the government, Adams skillfully demolished claims that the treaties demanded the return of the men to Spain.  Adams argued for eight and a half hours during which time Justice Philip Barbour died.  After a recess for the funeral, he concluded his arguments on March 1.

The Court affirmed the lower court’s ruling on March 9 with Justice Joseph Story citing many of Adams’s arguments in the ruling that freed the rebels.

Adams became a hero of the cause of anti-slavery and more of a villain than ever to the South.

Back in Congress he continued to oppose slavery in any way possible and continued his attacks on the Gag Rule.  He led opposition to the Annexation of Texas as a slave state.

His other major contributions in Congress included authoring a compromise on the Tariff of 1828 that he himself had signed ending the Nullification Crisis and the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution with the funds bequeathed to the United States by English millionaire James Smithson for the “increase and diffusion of knowledge.” A lot of hands were out for a slice of that pie, but Adams insisted on the creation of a national academy.  When the bequest was unwisely invested in shaky bonds, Adams argued to immediately accept the money with repayment of the losses.  Congress decided to accept the legacy bequeathed to the nation and pledged the faith of the United States to the charitable trust on July 1, 1836.

John Quincy Adams became the first President ever photographed when he sat for this daguerreotype as a member of the House of Representatives shortly before his death.

Indefatigably, Adams plugged on despite deteriorating health and advaanced age. But on February 28, 1848 Adams rose to speak against a resolution honoring officers who served in the Mexican War, which he had voraciously opposed.  With opponents trying to shout him down, Adams suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage while standing at his desk and collapsed.  He was carried to the Speaker’s Room off the floor of the House where two days later he died after whispering to his wife and son Charles Francis, “This is the last of earth. I am content.”

John Quincy Adams on his death bed in the Speaker's Room of the House of Representatives in a late 19th Century print.

After a brief internment in the Capitol crypt, his remains were returned to Quincy where he was first laid to rest in the church yard of First Parish Church.  Later his remains were moved to a crypt inside the church next to his mother and father.  The resting place can still be viewed at the Unitarian church that came to be called the Church of the Presidents.

Adams the Younger--The Son Also Rises Part I

 

Famous parents and a daunting legacy--John and Abigail Adams.  John Quincy admired and respected his distant father but bitterly resented his mother who was never satisfied with him and whose sharp tongue made it abundantly clear to him.

At the end of his long life John Quincy Adams was revered as Old Man Eloquent by opponents of slavery and reviled in equal measure as a Yankee mad man by the Southern slave-holding aristocracy.  As a boy and young man, he lived in his famous father’s shadow, an errand boy and gopher for the great man on his diplomatic postings for the infant American republic.

In between he lived an eventful life, full of public service, accomplishments, and occasional respect all the while battling what is now evident as severe depression and self-doubt.

The younger Adams was born on July 11, 1767 at the family home in Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts to John and Abigail Adams.  His mother came from prominent local gentry and his father was a rising lawyer with political aspirations who was soon prominent among Patriot leaders including his cousin Samuel Adams, merchant John Hancock, and fellow lawyer James Otis.

In his early childhood the boy’s father was often busy with his law practice and politics in near-by Boston or away from home for extended periods of time as a delegate to the Continental Congress.  His mother constantly reminded him of how important a man his father was.  One summer day in 1777 he learned about the Declaration of Independence, which his father had done so much to bring about, from a letter read to him by his mother.

Just a year later he packed his bags to accompany his father on a critical diplomatic mission to France where he joined Benjamin Franklin in the delicate negotiations to obtain French support for the war effort.  The boy was from the beginning more than a companion, he was something of a cross between a domestic servant to his father and eventually a secretary.  He absorbed the details of the intrigue around him, including his father’s prickly relationship with the famous and beloved Franklin and learned from the elder Adams’ sometimes curt bluster how not to conduct diplomacy.  While on this trip John Quincy began keeping the diary he would maintain for more than 40 years, giving later scholars a priceless insider account of early America and its politics.

                                

                                              John Quincy Adams age 10--his father's aide and errand boy in Europe.

In 1780 he again accompanied his father when he was made Minister to The Netherlands.  On this trip the boy’s duties were more substantial.  He also got an education, matriculating at Leiden University in 1781.  At the tender age of 14 he was considered competent enough to be loaned to another American diplomat, Francis Dana, who he served as official secretary for the mission to the Court of Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg, Russia.  He also traveled in the Scandinavian countries of Finland, Sweden, and Denmark.

During his years abroad he became fluent in French—the court language of much of Europe—and Dutch as well as passable in German and other languages.

When Quincy returned to the now independent United States, he was already one of the most experienced diplomats the country had despite not being out of his teens.  He enrolled, of course, at his father’s alma mater Harvard and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1787.  The same year his father became the first Vice President under George Washington.

From 1787 to ’89 Young Adams read law with Theophilus Parsons in Newburyport, Massachusetts then returned to Harvard to win a Master of Arts degree in 1790. He passed the Bar in 1791 and began to practice law in Boston.

Despite his notable achievements his mother constantly compared him to her husband and found him wanting.  He loved and admired his often distant father, but came to fear the dominating Abigail, who he blamed for his frequent bouts of melancholia.

Young Adams first came to public notice—and earned the esteem and admiration of the President—for penning a series of polemics in support of Washington’s refusal to be drawn into the wars swirling around the French Revolution, despite a treaty of alliance.  It was Washington, not his father, who insisted that the 26-year-old take up duties as Minister to The Netherlands.  But the young man did not want to take the job.  He feared he would never get out from under his father’s shadow if he pursued a career of public service.  His father convinced him that it was his patriotic duty to do so. 

In addition to his duties in Holland, Adams also carried papers and instructions to John Jay who was trying to negotiate a treaty with Britain clearing up many points of contention in the post-revolutionary period.  He shuttled back and forth between capitals.  When Jay concluded his controversial treaty which many considered far too favorable to the British, Adams wrote to his father urging him to support it as the best possible deal.  The elder shared it with the President who incorporated points from the letter in his Farewell Address.

Washington kept the young man in service, appointing him Minister to Portugal and then Legate to Berlin.  Washington was uncharacteristically effusive in his praise calling Adams “the most valuable of America’s officials abroad.”

                                John Quincy Adams 1797 by John Singleton Copley about to leave to become Minister to Prussia.
 

When his father became President, it again was Washington who urged him to name his son Minister to Prussia despite the inevitable charges of nepotism.  He served from 1797 to 1801, his father’s whole single term as President.  He secured a renewal of the Prussian-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce on very liberal terms.

Before returning to the United States, he married Louisa Catherine Johnson, the British-born daughter of an American merchant in London.

                           

                                    Louisa Catherine Adams, a cultured and accomplished wife.

When he returned to Massachusetts with his new wife, he secured an appointment as Commissioner of Monetary Affairs in Boston by a Federal District Judge.  But that sinecure fell victim to the deep personal animosity between two erstwhile old friends and comrades—the elder Adams and newly elected President Thomas Jefferson.  Jefferson wasted no time rescinding the nomination, a slap in the face that did not go unnoticed.

In the end, the offense propelled John Quincy to enter electoral politics as a Federalist, another footstep in his father’s path he has sworn never to undertake. He was elected a member of the Massachusetts State Senate in April 1802 and that fall ran for the United States House of Representatives and lost.  But in March of the next year the Massachusetts General Court elected him to the U.S. Senate where he quickly became a leading voice of the Federalist minority.

But it was during that period when John Quincy engaged in one of the most embarrassing acts of his career.  He penned a series of six satiric ballads in the style common to Harvard undergraduates mocking the Democratic-Republicans and Jefferson.  They were not printed but circulated hand to hand and read with great mirth at Washington taverns where the political elite gathered.  Although written anonymously, it quickly became apparent that they were written by Adams.  One of them, Dusky Sally, a famously lurid ballad about Jefferson’s dalliance with his slave Sally Hemmings was written in 1803 but published anonymously in 1807.  Jefferson was naturally furious.  Some Adams apologists dismiss the work as a schoolboy prank.  It was not.  It was a political dirty trick propagated by a highly sophisticated 40-year-old sitting U.S. Senator.

Despite his service in the Senate, Adams’s expertise in foreign policy and relations caused him to abandon other Federalists and support the President’s Louisiana Purchase and the Embargo Act.  Both of these acts were particularly loathed by Massachusetts Federalists who saw them as a plot to create permanent Southern dominance via new states carved out of the vast land acquisition and whose merchants were badly hurt by the Embargo, a measure meant to keep the U.S. out of the world war between France and Britain.  The General Court met early and stripped Adams of his Senate seat in 1708.  Adams promptly resigned the party of his father and joined his former enemies, the Democratic Republicans.

His new party did not entirely trust its convert.  Instead of seeking a new elected post or political appointment, Adams took the Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard.  From his lofty perch he wrote extensively promoting a neo-classical, Ciceronian ideal of disinterested public discourse based on reason and illuminated by rhetoric.  Despite his best efforts, public discourse in the U.S. was taking a vastly different direction.  Still, he would happily have remained in the academy had not duty called once again.

President James Madison called on him to take the critical diplomatic post of Minister to Russia in 1709.  His wife Louisa and their youngest son Charles Francis Adams accompanied him to the Tsarist court.  After reporting the fall of Moscow to Napoleon and his subsequent disastrous winter retreat, Adams was dispatched to Ghent to serve as to serve as chief negotiator of the U.S. commission to negotiate a treaty to end the War of 1812.  Louisa and Charles had to make a harrowing winter coach ride across war torn Europe, always in danger of being caught up in battle or attacked by roving bands of brigands and deserters to join her husband.

 

John Quincy Adams, center, at the signing of the Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812.

The peace commission succeeded in gaining a remarkably lenient treaty, mostly restoring the status quo ante bellum even though at the time it was negotiated, the British had dominated the war and humiliated American armies.  But the European wars had left the Mother Country bleeding, exhausted, and broke and Adams knew that they had little appetite for an extended war in North America.  America’s biggest victory, which might have justified even better terms, came after the treaty was signed when Andrew Jackson smashed and destroyed a British Army attacking New Orleans.

John Quincy Adams was thus absent from the actual conflicts of his country’s two first wars, making his personal experience vastly different than most other Americans.

After the treaty was concluded, a grateful Madison named Adams Minister to The Court of St. James, the country’s most distinguished diplomatic post.  He served in London from 1814-17.

On his return home from eight years abroad, newly elected President James Monroe named him Secretary of State, a post for which he was manifestly qualified, and which was then widely regarded as the natural steppingstone to the Presidency.  He stood at the President’s side for two terms, his most trusted advisor and master of foreign policy.

Adams racked up impressive achievement after impressive achievement while at the State Department.  First, he had to address the thorny problem of Florida, which was only tenuously held by Spain, weakened by the Napoleonic Wars on its soil and a mere shadow of a once mighty empire.  Southerners long had ambitions in Florida, and various plots and filibustering schemes were constantly afoot.  The British had agents on the ground in Florida—either actually in service to the Crown or merchant/traders functioning de facto—and seemed to have its own plans to snatch the province to hem in expansionist America to the south.  Florida, and particularly the large and powerful Seminole tribe that dominated its interior, was also a haven for escaped slaves.  Large number of Creek warriors, defeated by Andrew Jackson’s western army, also fled into the arms of the Seminole.

Monroe, undoubtedly with the approval of Adams, ordered Jackson to pursue the fugitive Creek into Florida.  The Hero of New Orleans did so with his customary enthusiasm and ruthlessness.  In the process he captured and hanged two British subjects he suspected of arming the natives, precipitating an international crisis.  Monroe’s Cabinet was unanimous in the opinion that Jackson had exceeded his orders and should be court martialed and removed from command.   Adams alone supported the General, arguing that if the Spanish could not police her territories, the United States had the right to do so in self-defense.  His argument carried the day with Monroe, who only issued a reprimand to Jackson.  But the touchy Jackson assumed that Adams was responsible for the “rebuke to my honor,” thus beginning the bad blood between the two.

Adams skillfully advanced the same arguments to injured Britain and Spain.  In the Adams–Onís Treaty Spain ceded Florida to the U.S. and the boundary between the Louisiana Territory and Spanish Tejas (Texas) was cleared up.

At the same time, Adams had to clear up several post-war issues with Britain, including the final evacuation of frontier posts still held by the British on American soil and clearly defining a western boundary.  The terms of the Treaty of Paris which had ended the Revolutionary War assumed that the Mississippi River extended north to Lake-in-The-Woods from which point a line would be drawn to the Pacific coast. The issue had come to a head in the Oregon country where the British Hudson Bay Company and John Jacob Astor’s American Fir Company were in fierce completion for the highly lucrative fur trade. 

Adams could build on the work of Richard Rush, temporary Secretary of State until Adams could come to Washington.  The Rush–Bagot Treaty agreed to in early 1817 demilitarized the border between the US and British North America including naval disarmament on the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain—the traditional invasion routes that had been used by both sides. The US and Britain also agreed to joint control over the Oregon Territory.  Adams successfully helped shepherd the treaty through Senate ratification in 1818 and used it as a springboard for more talks.

The Treaty of 1818, negotiated by Albert Gallatin and Richard Rush under Adams personal supervision, secured a favorable border for the United States along the 49th Parallel including a sizable chunk of Oregon and deep-water ports from which to ship the valuable furs.  Use of the Oregon Territory remained open to both nations and mutual freedom of navigation was guaranteed.  In addition, the treaty formalized the rights of Americans to their traditional fisheries in the Grand Banks offshore from Newfoundland and Labrador.  The result was the longest undefended border in the world and a permanent end to hostility between the two English-speaking powers.

However, the Hudson Bay Company continued to run roughshod over American fur traders for some time, building to a demand by expansionists to seize all of the Oregon territory and the cry of Fifty-Four-Forty or Fight! almost brought the two nations to war again until the Oregon Treaty of 1846 confirmed the 49th Parallel as the boundary and gave American complete jurisdiction of everything south of that line.

Secretary of State John Quincy Adams at the globe presents Monroe Doctrine to President James Monroe, left and the Cabinet in this historic painting by Allyn Cox in Great Experiment Hall in the U.S. Capitol.

Of course, Adam’s biggest accomplishment was enunciating what became known as the Monroe Doctrine in 1823.  This was a response to Spain’s crumbling new world empire. Several countries had declared independence.  Spain was threatening to send armies to reconquer some of what they had lost and other European powers, particularly the British, French, and Russians were making noises about moving into the void.

Many Americans wanted the U.S. to intervene actively on behalf of the newly independent Republics, some dreamed of a Pan American union.  Southern interests were looking for areas into which to expand their plantation and slave culture and carve out new states.  With an audience in Europe in mind Adams delivered a speech on Independence Day 1821 declaring that while the United States supported the new republics, it would not intervene militarily on their behalf unilaterally, declaring that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” but warning of European intervention.

From this nugget grew an official state paper which was presented to Congress on December 2, 1823 declaring that it is the policy of the United States that further efforts by European powers to colonize land or interfere with states in the Americas would be viewed as acts of aggression requiring U.S. intervention.  The Monroe Doctrine became the basis of American foreign policy and remains in force to this day.

Tomorrow—The Presidency and after.

How John Adams Squandered his Legacy in a Snit With The Alien and Sedition Acts

 

John Adams was a brilliant man and arguably the indispensable man in the tricky political maneuvers leading to the Declaration of Independence,  He served diligently in Congress and as a diplomat and was the first Vice President and George Washington's anointed heir.  He was the titular head of the Federalist Party and felt under siege by Thomas Jefferson's pro-French Democratic Republicans.  He was also vain, thin skinned, and bitterly vengeful.  His Alien and Sedition acts became a permanent stain on a lofty reputation and led to his own downfall and his party's ultimate failure.

It may not have been entirely co-incidental that the United States Congress chose July 14, 1798 to pass the Sedition Act, one of a bundle of laws known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts.  It was, after all, also the 10th anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille by the Paris Mob, a symbolic beginning to the French Revolution. 

That Revolution terrified the dominant Federalist Party, staunch defenders of order, authority, and absolute property rights.  In the ten years since the Bastille event, the French Revolution spun out of control—not only was the ancient monarchy deposed and the Royal Family mostly separated from their heads, but a series of new governments unleashed a broader Reign of Terror and an ever more radical agenda. 

The fledgling political parties—the Federalists of Washington, Hamilton, and Adams and the Democratic-Republicans of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had come into existence largely by opposition to the French on one side and general approval and support on the other.

As Washington left office tensions rose.  John Adams was elected President as a Federalist, but his former friend and collaborator Jefferson, the acknowledged leader of the Republicans, was elected Vice-President under the original Constitutional provision that gave those posts to the winner of the majority of votes in the Electoral College and the next highest vote getter respectively.  Federalists also controlled both houses of Congress and comprised virtually the entire federal Judiciary.

Despite calls by the Republicans for even handed neutrality in the war between Revolutionary France and the British and other European powers, Anglophile Federalists tilted heavily toward their old colonial Mother Country and against former ally France.  They also refused to pay the American Revolutionary War debt to France on the grounds that the commitment was to the former monarchy, not the revolutionary Republic.

This enraged French revolutionary authorities.  By 1796 France refused to accept a new American Minister and began raiding American shipping suspected of being in communication with the British.  Tensions mounted further with the XYZ Affair in which French agents demanded a large bribe to with the U.S.

 

This Federalist Cartoon depicts the contempt that party felt for Revolutionary France and their Democratic Republican friends. France is depicted as a hydra-headed monster extorting three American agents. On the right every possible anti-French cliché was crowded in--a headless body on a guillotine, a slatternly revolutionary spirit holding a Liberty Poll topped with a cap.  At the table Republican agent in France Elderbridge Gerry is shown dining at a table on--yes--frog legs with Negroes while a member of the Directorate whispers instructions in his ear. 

As commercial shipping losses mounted, Congress authorized the construction or purchase of a new Navy of up to 12 ships, including modern frigates mounting up to 22 guns.  The so-called Quasi War broke out in earnest when Congress rescinded all of its treaty obligations to France on July 7, 1798 followed a few days later with an authorization for the infant Navy to attack French warships.

all of this The Republicans vigorously objected to all of this.  The highly partisan press on both sides were scathing in their denunciations of each other.  The always thin skinned Adams was wounded and outraged by attacks on him as a British agent, monarchist, aristocrat, and personal insults to his appearance and demeanor.  Members of Congress were hardly less abusive.  Adams called on Congress to act against his tormentors citing them as traitors in the war with France.

 

The official text of the Sedition Act's opening paragraphs as published by Congress. 

The Federalist Congress, over the voracious objection of the Republican minority, was glad to oblige.  The Alien and Sedition Acts were actually four separate measures:

The Naturalization Act extended the duration of residence required for aliens to become citizens of the United States from five years to fourteen years.

The Alien Act authorized the President to personally order the deportation of any alien he determined was “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.”  This provision was set to expire two years after being enacted.

The Enemy Alien Act authorized the President to order the arrest and deportation of any aliens from a nation at war with the United States.  This is the only one of the Alien and Sedition Acts still in full force today and was cited in the internment of Japanese, German, and Italian nationals during World War II.  Right wing commentators have argued that it could and should be used against Arab and other Islamic minorities as part of the War on Terrorism and Donald Trump cited it as justification for his anti-immigrant and Islamic policies.

The Sedition Act made it a Federal crime to “publish false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government or individual officials.  By extension it was expected to bar similar verbal speech.  It had a sunset provision, set to expire on Adams’s last day in office in March of 1801.  This was obviously so that if Adam’s lost re-election a Republican president could not turn the law’s provisions against Federalists.

Adams was so distraught by criticism that he did not wait for the Sedition Act to pass Congress before ordering the arrest of Republican editor Benjamin Franklin Bache, the grandson of his superior in the Mission to France during the Revolutionary War, Benjamin Franklin.  Bache, in his newspaper The Aurora had criticized George Washington’s administration and attacked Adams as “blind, bald, crippled, toothless, querulous,” and a nepotistic aristocrat.  Bache was arrested on common law libel two weeks before the new law was enacted and then recharged when it came into effect.  The unfortunate journalist died of Yellow Fever later that year while awaiting trial.  Before a partisan Federalist judiciary he faced certain conviction, a hefty fine, and long sentence.

 

 

 

                                                        Editor Benjamin Franklin Bache, first victim of the Sedition Act.
 

In all twenty-five men were arrested under the Sedition Act and 11 came to trial.  All who faced Federalist judges were convicted.  Among the more noteworthy victims of the law were:

 

James Thomson Callender, a Scottish citizen exiled from home for his radical writings.  He was charged for his book The Prospect Before Us.  Tried before Associate Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, the most voracious partisan of Federalist judges, presiding in Circuit Court and as was then the custom.  Callender was not allowed to argue that the Sedition Act was unconstitutional.  He was convicted, fined $200, and sentenced to nine months in prison.  Like the others convicted, he was pardoned by Jefferson when he assumed the Presidency after the Revolution of 1800

     Congressman Mathew Lyon of Vermont was arrested for an article published in the Vermont Journal insulting Adams.  After his arrest the defiant Irish born Congressman began his own publication, Lyon’s Republican Magazine.  He was convicted, fined $1,000, and sentenced to four months in prison.  While in jail he was re-elected to Congress in 1800.  He cast the deciding vote for Thomas Jefferson in the House of Representatives when the presidential election resulted in an Electoral College tie between Jefferson and Aaron Burr, his Republican running mate.

The greatest miscarriages of justice were the prosecutions of ordinary citizens.  In Newark, New Jersey Luther Baldwin was in the crowd watching President Adams being welcomed to town.  When cannon salutes were fired someone joked, “There goes the President and they are firing at his ass,” to which Brown was overheard to reply, “I don’t care if they fire through his ass.”  For this he was arrested and charged with “seditious words tending to defame the President and Government of the United States.”  He was fined $100.

 

But that was mild compared to the fate of David Brown of Dedham, Massachusetts.  In November 1798 he and his friends had the temerity to erect one of the symbols of the French Revolution, a Liberty Pole emblazoned with the words “No Stamp Act, No Sedition Act, No Alien Bills, No Land Tax, downfall to the Tyrants of America; peace and retirement to the President; Long Live the Vice President.”  Arrested and unable to stand bail of $4,000—a then astronomical sum that even the richest Americans would have had trouble raising in cash—he was taken to Salem, a Federalist stronghold.  He was held until his trial the following June.  When he refused to name those who assisted him in erecting the Liberty Pole, he was convicted, fined $480 and sentenced to eighteen months in prison—the longest sentence given to any victim of the law.

 

During the entire period in which the Sedition Act was in place, no charges were brought against Federalist journalists or speakers who attacked the Vice President and Republican law makers with every bit as much vigor and vitriol as Republicans did against the President.  Enforcement was clearly political.

 

 

Democratic Republican leaders Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were appalled at the Alien and Sedition Acts but powerless to stop them in view of the total domination of the Federalist in all three branches of government.  In desperation they authored the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, which although no enacted by either state, became the ideological basis for latter claims of state nullification and secession.  Jefferson might have approved.  The more nationalist minded Madison would have been shocked that their political maneuver would be used to destroy the Union.
 

Republican leaders Jefferson and Madison struggled to find a way to counter the obvious tyranny of the law.  Despite Madison’s preferences for a stronger central government than Jefferson would have preferred they jointly drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions which denounced the Act as an attack on Constitutionally protected freedom of press, speech, and assembly and asserted the right of individual states to retain their natural rights which they had voluntarily ceded to the Federal Government and to nullify Federal laws which breeched those rights.  Although the Resolutions were never enacted, they became the philosophical foundation of subsequent Southern claims of state sovereignty and what became known as the Doctrine of Nullification.

 

Naturally, the Sedition Act became one of the hot button issues of the Election of 1800.  Most Americans, including many moderate Federalists, were aghast at the overt attack on hard-won liberties of speech and press.  The Republicans were swept to power by large majorities.  Not only did Jefferson ascend to the Presidency, but Republicans took both the House of Representatives and the Senate and won several governorships and control of state legislatures.  The Federalists were dealt a blow from which they never recovered.  Soon they were reduced to a New England regional rump party and they disappeared entirely after the War of 1812.

 

In office, Jefferson pardoned those convicted under the act.  He personally contributed to several of the victims who were financially ruined by persecution.  But he could not repeal the Act, because it expired with the Adams’ administration.

 

The Sedition Act was never ruled unconstitutional.  Federal courts did not assert the right to make such a ruling until Chief Justice John Marshall in the case of Marbury v. Madison in 1803.  Which is probably a good thing because the overwhelmingly Federalist Judiciary would have undoubtedly upheld the act.

 

Various later Supreme Court decisions mentioned the Act and assumed that it was unconstitutional.  As Justice William O. Douglas wrote in an opinion in 1964, “The Alien and Sedition Laws constituted one of our sorriest chapters; and I had thought we had done with them forever...Suppression of speech as an effective police measure is an old, old device, outlawed by our Constitution.”

 

 

The Sedition Act was used as justification for Japanese internment during World War II.
 

Unfortunately the ghost of the Sedition Act will not stay still. It was cited in the complete breakdown of civil liberties and wide-spread persecutions, prosecutions, jailing, and deportations by the Wilson Administration during World War I and the Red Scare that followed.  It was the justification for the mass round-up and detention in concentration camps of immigrants and Japanese/American citizens alike in World War II.  In the McCarthy Era Red Scare reboot Congress authorized the construction of the McCarran Act Camps for Communists, Socialists, and so called Fellow Travelers.  Although the camps were never used other possible targets have been proposed to fill them from Black Panthers and Hippy anti-war protestors in the ‘60s to American Muslims after 9/11.  Most recently it has been suggested that the camps could be used to hold illegal immigrants after a vast martial law type national sweep.

 

Neo-con intellectuals resurrected it as part of their theory of the Unitary Power of the Executive during the dismal reign of George W. Bush.  They asserted that in matters of “national security”  the President has virtually unlimited power in time of war or “emergency” to take whatever measures he deems necessary, including superseding “ordinary” Constitutional restraints, in the “protection of the homeland.” 

 

 

 

There is no small irony that Trump  condoned the Siege of the Capitol in his name--an overt act of rebellion against the government--but was not charged under the Sedition Act.
 

Many features of the Alien and Sedition Acts, including criminalizing certain speech and associations, were incorporated into the massive and complex Patriot Act hastily adopted after the 9/11 attacks and extended by subsequent Congresses.

 

The besieged former Resident President with even thinner skin than old John Adams waged his verbal war with on the press over so-called fake news and openly shared is admiration for strongmen and brutal dictators.  Many feared that with noose of public indignation and legal peril tightening around his neck, Trump might turn to the Sedition Act in desperation.

 

He did not.  First he lost an election he could not steal and fostered the January 6 Capitol insurrection and failed coup d’etat.

There have been no brakes on his most authoritarian and tyrannical aspirations.  The Sedition Act has often been cited as a justification.  With no checks on his whims by a slavishly compliant Republican Congress and damned few from a Supreme Court packed with MAGA loyalists has gone farther, faster than feared asserting his right to simply ignore judicial orders with which he disagrees, targeting citizens for harassment and arrest, and using the military against civilians in mass immigration raids. 

The clock is ticking and I think even old John Adams would be worried.