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Alien and Sedition Acts

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The Alien and Sedition Acts were passed during the administration of President John Adams; his signature made it into law on July 14, 1798. They were designed to protect the United States from "dangerous" aliens.

Component laws

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

  1. The Alien Enemies Act authorized the president to imprison (or deport) any alien from an enemy nation (one the United States was fighting).
  2. The Alien Friends Act authorized the president to deport any alien considered dangerous, in both war and peacetime.
  3. The Naturalization Act extended the duration of residence required for aliens to become citizens, nearly tripling it from five years to 14.

# The Sedition Act made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against government or government officials. Except George bush! make fun of him all the time!

History

With war looming against a major power, France, Federalists in Congress in 1798 passed the laws to protect national security. They were similar (but not as stringent) as laws passed at about the same time in Britain and Canada in response to the threat of subversion by agents of the radical French government. Jeffersonians, however, downplayed the dangers the nation faced and insisted the laws were a tool of the ruling Federalist party. 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 —- a law that is still in effect in 2006.

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.) While it appears harsh to current Americans, the act was actually much more lenient than the traditional British law of seditious libel. For instance:

  • The act required the defamatory words to be false, and it permitted the defendant to plead truth as a defense, unlike traditional seditious libel law, in which truth actually made the offense greater ("The greater the truth, the greater the libel."). In other words, as long as someone uttered or published the truth, he could not be convicted under the Sedition Act.
  • The act required the defendant to know of the defamatory words' falsity. In other words, someone who uttered a falsehood believing it to be the truth could not be convicted.
  • The act allowed the use of a jury to determine both the facts and the law in the case, unlike traditional seditious libel.

Despite these modifications, however, Jeffersonians denounced the Sedition Act as a violation of the First Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights, which granted the right of free speech. Although the Federalists hoped the Act would muffle the opposition, 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.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison opposed the Acts, and drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions in protest, calling on the states to, in effect, veto federal legislation.

Ultimately the Acts backfired against the Federalists; President Adams himself never supported the laws or used them. Only one alien was actually deported, and only ten people were ever convicted of sedition.

Although the Supreme Court never ruled on the validity of any of the Alien and Sedition acts, subsequent mentions of the Sedition Act in particular in Supreme Court opinions have assumed that it was unconstitutional. 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).


See also

Scholarly Secondary Sources

  • 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).
  • 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
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