Alien and Sedition Acts

The Alien and Sedition Acts were acts of Congress passed during the administration of President John Adams; his signature made them into law on July 14, 1798. They were designed to protect the United States from aliens alleged to be dangerous and to muffle internal dissent.

Component laws

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

The Alien Enemies Act authorized the president to imprison (or deport) any alien from an enemy nation (meant for use during any war fought on enemy soil).
The Alien Friends Act authorized the president to deport any alien considered dangerous, in both war and peacetime.
The Naturalization Act extended the duration of residence required for aliens to become citizens, from five years to 14.
The Sedition Act made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against the government or its officials.

Background

With many Federalists advocating war against a major power, France, Federalists in Congress, in 1798, passed the laws which they asserted would protect national security in the United States and which sought to silence internal opposition. They were similar to laws passed at about the same time in the United Kingdom and Canada in response to the perceived threat of subversion by agents of the radical French government.

Jeffersonians, however, recognized that the laws were to be used as a tool of the ruling Federalist party to extend and retain their power, silencing any opposition. Because most immigrants became Democratic-Republicans, the Naturalization Act's longer residency requirement meant that fewer of them could become citizens and vote against the Federalists. Under the Alien and Alien Enemies Acts, the president could deport any "dangerous" or "enemy" alien.

Language and meaning of the Acts

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

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

Constitutionality

Jeffersonians denounced the Sedition Act as a violation of the First Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights, which protected the right of free speech. The First Amendment clearly states that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech."

At the time, the redress for unconstitutional legislation was unclear -- the doctrine of judicial review was not established until Marbury v Madison in 1803 -- and the Supreme Court openly hostile to the Federalists' opponents. The Alien and Sedition Acts were not appealed to the Supreme Court for review, though individual Supreme Court Justices, sitting in circuit, heard many of the cases prosecuting opponents of the Federalists. In order to address the constitutionality of the measures, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison sought to unseat the Federalists, appealing to the people to remedy the constitutional violation, and drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, calling on the states to nullify the federal legislation. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions reflect the Compact Theory, which states that the United States are made up of a voluntary union of States that agree to cede some of their authority in order to join the union, but that the states do not, ultimately, surrender their sovereign rights. Therefore, states can determine if the federal government has violated its agreements, including the Constitution, and nullify such violations or even withdraw from the Union. Variations of this theory were also argued at the Hartford Convention at the time of the War of 1812 and by the southern states at the time of the Civil War.

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

The constitutionality of the Alien acts has also not been contested, with the acts still in effect.

Elections of 1800

Although the Federalists hoped the Act would muffle the opposition, many Democratic-Republicans still "wrote, printed, uttered and published" their criticisms of the Federalists. Indeed, they strongly criticised the act itself, and used it as an election issue. The act expired when the term of President Adams ended in 1801.

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

Full titles

An Act to Establish an Uniform Rule of Naturalization (Naturalization Act of 1798), June 18 1798 ch. 54, 1 Stat.566
An Act Concerning Aliens, June 25 1798 ch. 58, 1 Stat. 570
An Act Respecting Alien Enemies, July 6 1798 ch. 66, 1 Stat. 577
An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes against the United States (Sedition Act), July 14 1798 ch. 74, 1 Stat. 596

References

Elkins, Stanley M. and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (1995), the standard scholarly history of 1790s.
Miller, John Chester. Crisis in Freedom: The Alien and Sedition Acts (1951)
Rehnquist, William H. Grand Inquests: The historic Impeachments of Justice Samual Chase and President Andrew Johnson (1994); Chase was impeached and acquitted for his conduct of a trial under the Sedition act.
Rosenfeld, Richard N. American Aurora: A Democratic-Republican Returns: The Suppressed History of Our Nation's Beginnings and the Heroic Newspaper That Tried to Report It (1997)
Smith, James Morton. Freedom's Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties (1967).
Stone, Geoffrey R.Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from The Sedition Act of 1798 to The War on Terrorism (2004).
Alan Taylor, "The Alien and Sedition Acts" in Julian E. Zelizer, ed. The American Congress (2004) pp 63-76
Wright, Barry. "Migration, Radicalism, and State Security: Legislative Initiatives in the Canadas and the United States c.1794–1804" in Studies in American Political Development, Volume 16, Issue 01, April 2002, pp 48-60

External links

1798 in law | Political repression in the United States | Sedition | United States federal immigration and nationality legislation

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