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Lesson 2: 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

Students should relate current concerns on national security 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?

Students should 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 the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. A useful feature of this site is that it 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 counterresolutions 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. An online search will also find the text of the Naturalization Act.

Direct your students also to the Library of Congress website, which has 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.

Teaching the Sedition Trials

You will certainly want to consult the National Archives and Records Administration website on the sedition trial of Thomas Cooper.

The full text of United States v. Thomas Cooper can be found in the section of the Founders' Constitution website devoted to the "First Amendment: Speech and the Press," which 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.

Issues of Federalism, States' Rights, and Personal Freedoms

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 website allows 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? The electoral results for the election, including a map and state voting data, might be usefully compared with the counter-resolutions.

Finally, 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 students to compare and contrast these acts with the Bill of Rights.