Reading 3 of 7 free1776 Club · all 7 storiesTuesday, July 14
From the desk
Start with 1798. Adams signed the Sedition Act to silence French sympathizers, making it a federal crime to criticize federal officials, and within two years the law helped destroy his own party. Worth a longer look: Billy the Kid, shot dead in a dark Fort Sumner bedroom in 1881 after asking his killer, in Spanish, who he was. Also on the page: New Horizons passing Pluto in 2015, carrying Clyde Tombaugh's ashes past the world he discovered eighty-five years before. One law meant to protect power, one bullet that ended a manhunt, one spacecraft that finally arrived.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1798Featured · This day in history
President Adams Signs the Sedition Act, Completing the Alien and Sedition Acts
The United States and France were locked in an undeclared naval conflict, and Federalists in Congress suspected French sympathizers were working to undermine the government from within. Between June 18 and July 14, 1798, a Federalist-controlled Congress passed four laws, and President John Adams signed them. The most sweeping, the Sedition Act, made it a federal crime to publish "false or malicious" criticism of federal officials. Within two years, prosecutions under the act would help topple the party that wrote it.
The Sedition Act produced the first national test of the First Amendment, and the government lost that test in the court of public opinion. Jefferson's Kentucky Resolution and Madison's Virginia Resolution introduced the argument that states could judge the constitutionality of federal law, a claim that would resurface, with far graver consequences, in the run-up to the Civil War.
Did you know
QHow did a jailed congressman get reelected to Congress in 1798?
Matthew Lyon of Vermont was serving a four-month sentence in a Vergennes jail, convicted under the Sedition Act for writing that President Adams showed a "continual grasp for power" and an "unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp," when his constituents voted him back into office anyway. He was the first Congressman to be elected while in jail, and on his release, he returned to the House of Representatives. Lyon had already made history once before the conviction: in 1798 he was involved in the first physical brawl on the House floor, spitting on a Federalist colleague who then attacked him with fire tongs.
QWhat was a liberty pole, and why did it land David Brown eighteen months in prison?
A liberty pole was a tall wooden post, often topped with a cap, that Revolutionary-era Americans planted as a public symbol of resistance to tyranny. In 1798 David Brown helped raise one in Dedham, Massachusetts, painted with slogans denouncing Adams's administration and the Alien and Sedition Acts by name. The display earned him the single harshest sentence handed down under the act: eighteen months in prison and a $480 fine, worse than any newspaper editor received, for what amounted to a piece of political theater on a town green.
QWho argued that American citizenship should belong equally to Jews, Muslims, and 'idolators'?
William Duane, who took over the Philadelphia Aurora after Benjamin Franklin Bache died of yellow fever awaiting his sedition trial, wrote directly to George Washington making the case for a purely civic idea of American belonging. He argued citizenship should extend to "the Jew, the savage, the Mahometan, the idolator, upon all of whom the sun shines equally," rejecting any religious or ethnic test for who counted as American. Duane inherited both Bache's newspaper and his target on the government's back, and though charged twice under the Sedition Act, the prosecutions against him collapsed.
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1881tragedy
Billy the Kid Shot in New Mexico
Two and a half months earlier, Billy the Kid had escaped Lincoln County jail by killing two deputies, dodging the noose a judge had already set for him. On the night of July 14, 1881, Sheriff Pat Garrett sat waiting in the dark bedroom of Pete Maxwell's house in Fort Sumner, New Mexico Territory. Billy walked in without recognizing Garrett in the dark, drawing his revolver and asking twice in Spanish, "¿Quién es?" Garrett fired twice; the first shot struck him just above the heart, and and the Lincoln County War's last fugitive was dead.
Billy the Kid became the only person ever convicted of a crime in the Lincoln County War, a range conflict born of the same frontier lawlessness and commercial rivalry that shaped New Mexico Territory's path to statehood. His death closed that chapter, but his legend opened another: more than 50 films later built the American mythology of the fast-drawing outlaw around an orphaned son of Irish Catholic immigrants from New York City.
Did you know
QHow did Billy the Kid trick a man into shooting an empty chamber?
Six months before his own death, Billy killed a man named Joe Grant in Hargrove's Saloon in Fort Sumner using a trick with the revolver itself. Billy had been warned that Grant intended to kill him. Billy, wary, asked to see Grant's pistol, admired it, and while handling it quietly rotated the cylinder so the next pull of the trigger would land on a spent or empty chamber. When Grant tried to shoot him, the hammer fell on nothing. Billy drew his own gun and shot Grant in the head. A reporter for the Las Vegas Optic later quoted him calling it simply a game of two, and he got there first.
QWhat did Billy the Kid say to the deputy he killed during his jailbreak?
During his April 28, 1881 escape, Billy killed two guards, Deputy Bob Olinger and Deputy James Bell. Olinger, who had reportedly mistreated Billy during his confinement, responded to the sound of gunfire and approached the jail. Billy was waiting at a window with Olinger's own shotgun, which he had taken from Garrett's office. He called down to him, "Look up, old boy, and see what you get," then fired. It was one of the rare moments in the historical record where Billy is quoted taunting a man he was about to kill, rather than joking about his own predicament.
QWhy did a blacksmith's insult end in a killing that started Billy's outlaw career?
Before Lincoln County, before Pat Garrett, there was Francis P. "Windy" Cahill, a blacksmith in Bonita, Arizona Territory, who made a habit of bullying the teenage Billy and had called him a degrading name. In August 1877, the harassment ended in gunfire, and Billy shot Cahill dead. A witness at the time offered a blunt defense: Billy had no choice, he had to use his equalizer. It was the killing that turned a teenage laundry thief and jailbreak artist into a fugitive gunman, more than a year before he ever joined the Regulators in Lincoln County.
1943civil-rights
George Washington Carver National Monument Established
In the summer of 1943, with the country three years into a war fought partly on the promise of American ideals, Franklin Roosevelt signed a proclamation that had no precedent. On July 14, he authorized the George Washington Carver National Monument near Diamond, Missouri, near the site where Carver had been born into slavery around 1864. It was the first national monument built to honor an African American, and the first built to honor anyone who had never held the presidency.
The monument broke two barriers in the same stroke: race and rank. Until 1943, the National Monument system had memorialized presidents and natural wonders, not scientists born enslaved. The precedent it set opened the door to future memorials for minority Americans outside the presidency.
Did you know
QWhy did planners choose Carver's birthplace over his decades-long home at Tuskegee?
Carver spent decades at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, building the agricultural laboratory that made his name. But the monument planners passed over Tuskegee and pointed to a rural Missouri cabin instead, the literal ground where Carver had been born enslaved in 1864. The choice framed the story as one of origin rather than achievement alone, tracing a line from an enslaved infant to a renowned scientist and inventor. The 240 acres selected included not just the birthplace but the burial ground of the family that raised him.
QWho was Moses Carver, and why does his relocated home sit on the monument grounds?
Moses Carver was the Missouri farmer whose 1881 house is preserved on the monument grounds alongside the Carver family cemetery. Their home is preserved on the monument's 240 acres alongside the birthplace cabin itself. The family cemetery on the same grounds holds generations of the Carver household. It's a rare federal site built around a former slaveholding family's own home.
QWhat political figure backed the monument years before becoming president himself?
The grassroots campaign to establish the Carver monument gained traction in Washington a decade before Franklin Roosevelt's proclamation took effect. The monument's establishment during a segregated wartime era marked a notable milestone that would later be followed by increased recognition of Black Americans in federal commemorations. The senator from Missouri and the sharecropper's son from Missouri shared a state, if nothing else, before either reached national prominence.
