It is now a federal crime to publish "false or malicious" criticism of officials; Adams signs the Sedition Act
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.
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.
