Friends Divided
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Rumors spread everywhere that a conspiracy was afoot to burn Philadelphia on May 9, 1798, the day Adams had designated for fasting and prayer. On the eve of that day, riots and brawling erupted in the capital between supporters of Britain and backers of France, and mobs attacked Republican newspaper editors. Many years later the events of that night were still vivid in Adams’s memory. “What think you of Terrorism, Mr. Jefferson?” asked Adams, in one of his many letters to Jefferson written in retirement. “I have no doubt You was fast asleep in philosophical Tranquility,” he sarcastically reminded Jefferson, “when ten thousand People, and perhaps many more, were parading the Streets of Philadelphia.”73
Adams had been scared. The governor of Pennsylvania had to order patrols of horse and foot to preserve the peace. Crowds—numbering ten thousand persons, said Abigail—were everywhere. “Market Street was as full as Men could stand by one another.” A mob of over a thousand even came to the president’s door, so close that some of his servants, who were in a “Phrenzy,” said Adams, offered “to sacrifice their Lives in my defence.” His “Domesticks” were about to make “a desperate Sally among the multitude,” when others, “with difficulty and danger,” dragged them back. Adams himself had ordered “Chests and Arms” to be brought surreptitiously to his house, which he was determined to defend “at the expense of my Life, and the lives of the few, very few Domesticks and Friends within it.”74
John and Abigail both blamed the terrorism on the Republican newspaper editors, such as Benjamin Franklin Bache, the grandson of Benjamin Franklin; William Duane, who succeeded Bache as editor of the Philadelphia Aurora; and the notorious James Thomson Callender, who had vilified the president and other Federalist officials in the years leading up to 1798. “The vile incendiaries” in the Republican newspapers, exclaimed Abigail in April 1798, were filled with “the most wicked and base, violent & caluminiating abuse” of Federalist officeholders. “But,” she said, “nothing will have an effect until congress pass a Sedition bill.” Indeed, there was no stronger advocate for limiting the scurrility of the press than Mrs. Adams. She and many other Federalists thought that all authority was under attack, with French sympathizers everywhere and a French army on the verge of invading the country.75
John Randolph, Jefferson’s brilliant but eccentric second cousin, later claimed in the Congress that “the grand Army of Richmond was intended to put down the Yankee Administration.” Adams later said that he had no doubt that this was true, and “Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison were privy to the design.”76
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THESE WERE INDEED FRIGHTENING TIMES, perhaps the most frightening moment in all of American history—something most historians have not appreciated. The only comparable period of terror might be the months following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, when the country, worried over possible Japanese espionage and an invasion of the West Coast, interned well over a hundred thousand people of Japanese ancestry, 60 percent of whom were American citizens. Bad as the situation was in 1941–1942, 1798–1799 seems scarier because the nation then was so new and so militarily weak and the enemy that threatened to invade was the strongest land power in the world.
A French invasion of America was not far-fetched. French armies were dominating Europe. Not only had France annexed Belgium and parts of Germany outright, but, more alarming, it had also used native collaborators to create puppet republics in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and much of Italy. It might do the same in America. France after all had sent a huge army across the Atlantic two decades earlier. And there were large numbers of Americans and recent immigrants, both French and Irish, who were sympathetic to the French Revolution and who might welcome a French invasion. So strong was the French influence in the capital that one historian has called Philadelphia in the 1790s “an American Paris.”77
Jefferson, of course, was right when he said that the Federalists were mistaken in presuming that the Republicans’ attachment to France and their hatred of the Federalist monarchists trumped their love of their own country.78 At the time, however, that was not at all clear to the Federalists. All they could see were the Republican expressions of sympathy for France and the threat of a French invasion; and, of course, they, like everyone else, did not know the future. Even Jefferson realized that he had expressed enough affection for France and support of the French Revolution that his loyalty might be suspect. In fact, the Federalist press was calling him “that traitor to his country.”79 When the French philosophe the Comte de Volney left America to return to France, Jefferson asked him not to write to him, fearing that letters from any Frenchmen at this critical time were bound to arouse suspicion.80
Because none of the Federalists’ fears actually materialized and no invasion occurred, historians have never been able to fully appreciate the Federalists’ apprehensions. Yet if the Federalists’ actions during the crisis of 1798–1799 are to be understood, their fears, which were genuine and deeply felt, must be taken seriously, however wrongheaded they turned out to be.
The most devout Federalists in Congress began enacting measures to prepare the county for war with France. In the absence of a formal declaration of war, they sanctioned a Quasi-War, or what Adams called “the half-war with France.”81 Congress formally abrogated all treaties with France and laid an embargo on all French trade. It authorized American naval vessels to attack armed French ships that were seizing American merchant vessels. In addition to levying new taxes, providing for loans, and making plans for beefing up the army, Congress approved the building of fifteen warships. To supervise the new fleet Congress created an independent Navy Department—one of Adams’s proudest accomplishments. The “one thing wanting,” said Abigail, was a formal declaration of war. It “ought undoubtedly to have been made,” except for Elbridge Gerry’s “unaccountable Stay” in France. The people wanted war, but their representatives in Congress, she said, were too timid, too full of “party spirit, and Jacobinism.” Apparently, Adams himself, at least at this moment, was equally bent on a declaration of war.82
At the same time the Federalists in Congress thought they had to do something about what they believed were the sources of Jacobin influence in America—the increasing number of foreign immigrants and the scurrilous behavior of the Republican press. In response, in the summer of 1798 they passed and President Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, measures that turned out to be a horrendous mistake. In fact, more than anything else, these acts have so tarnished the historical reputation of Adams and the Federalists that it can probably never be recovered. Yet it is important to put these acts in context and explain why they made sense to the Adamses and to the Federalists.
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AT THE OUTSET OF THE NEW GOVERNMENT in 1789, the Federalists, especially the big land speculators, had been very eager to receive foreign immigrants, and in 1790 they had passed a fairly liberal naturalization measure that required only two years of residency for free white persons to become citizens. By contrast, Jefferson and the Republicans were not initially as welcoming to immigrants. Believing in a more active hands-on role for the people in politics, they had worried that European immigrants might lack a proper appreciation of liberty and self-government to become good citizens. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson had thought that too many European immigrants might come to America with monarchical principles “imbibed in their early youth” and would pass these principles on to their children and infuse into American culture “their spirit, warp and bias its direction,” ultimately turning America into “a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”83
In the subsequent years, however, the Federalists and the Republicans changed their minds. In the 1790s alone, nearly one hundred thousand immigrants came to the United States. Many of these were political or religious refugees, driven from Britain and Ireland because of their dissenting beliefs, and they tended to support the Republican Party. A disproportionate number of them
became newspaper editors, usually writing on behalf of the Republican cause.
At the same time, thousands of Frenchmen in the 1790s, escaping the convulsions in their homeland and in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti), entered the United States, and these French immigrants naturally made many Federalists uneasy. It has been estimated that as much as 10 percent of the population of Philadelphia in the mid-1790s was French, with French shops, French craftsmen, and French newspapers everywhere in the city. Jefferson’s French friend the Comte de Volney, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1795, thought the city had “a penchant for our arts, our manners, our language.”84 By 1798 the Federalists were frightened enough by the presence of all these foreigners that they were prepared to limit their ability to influence American politics.
The Naturalization Act of June 18, 1798, extended the period of residence required before an alien could become a citizen to fourteen years, and prevented aliens who were citizens or subjects of a nation with which the United States was at war from becoming citizens. This legislation was followed a week later by the Alien Friends Act, which allowed the government to restrain aliens even in peacetime.
Although the United States had not actually declared war on France, nevertheless, “in times like the present,” Abigail told her sister, “a more careful and attentive watch ought to be kept over foreigners.”85 John Adams much later justified his signing the Alien Friends bill as president on the grounds that “we were then at War with France: French Spies then swarmed in our Cities and in the Country. . . . To check them was the design of this law. Was there ever a Government,” he asked Jefferson, “which had not Authority to defend itself against Spies in its own Bosom?” Jefferson vehemently opposed the act and scorned it as “a most detestable thing,” something “worthy of the 8th or 9th century.”86
Following the passage of the Alien Friends Act, more than a dozen shiploads of frightened Frenchmen sailed for France or Santo Domingo, the former Spanish colony adjoining Saint-Domingue that France had acquired in 1795. Adams wanted no more Frenchmen, no matter how enlightened, to enter the United States. “We have had too many French Philosophers already,” he told Secretary of State Pickering in September 1798; “and I really begin to think or to suspect, that learned academics not under the immediate Inspection and Control of Government have disorganised the World and are incompatible with social order.” When Médéric Louis Elie Moreau de St. Méry, a refugee from the Reign of Terror who in 1794 had established a bookstore in Philadelphia, asked why he was on the president’s list for deportation, he was told of President Adams’s blunt reply: “Nothing in particular, but he’s too French.”87
In the end, however, because so many foreigners left before the act was enforced and because of Adams’s strict interpretation of the statute, the Federalist government never actually deported a single alien under the Alien Friends Act.
But it was the Sedition Act of July 14, 1798, that aroused the most Republican anger. It made it a crime to “write, print, utter or publish . . . false, scandalous, and malicious” writings that brought the president or members of either house of Congress “into contempt or disrepute.” (Significantly, the vice president was not protected by the act.) It was designed, said Jefferson, for “the suppression of the whig presses,” especially the Philadelphia Aurora. If the Republican papers were silenced, he said, “republicanism will be entirely brow-beaten.”88
The partisan newspapers were truly scandalous. Indeed, never in American history has the press been more vitriolic and more scurrilous than it was in the 1790s. Although the Federalist press had its own share of malicious charges against the Republicans, it was the growing number of Republican newspapers that filled the air with vicious attacks on the president and Federalist officeholders. Federalist officials were denounced for being “Tory monarchists” and “British-loving aristocrats.” Adams was singled out for being “a mock Monarch” who was “blind, bald, toothless, and querulous” and “a ruffian deserving of the curses of mankind.”89
By the early nineteenth century, all Adams could recall of the press during his presidency was that it was full of “the most envious malignity, the most base, vulgar, sordid, fishwoman scurrility, and the most palpable lies.” Indeed, based on what the pamphlets and newspapers of both parties had said about him, he had to be judged nothing less than “the meanest villain in the world.”90
The traditional common law of seditious libel that ran in most state courts was designed to protect authority and promote order in this still premodern world. In a society that lacked police forces and modern mechanisms for maintaining order, magistrates and rulers, it was thought, had to rely on their inherent social authority—their wealth, their learning, and their social respectability—to command the obedience of those below them. If that social respectability was brought into question by scurrilous charges in the press, then the capacity of these magistrates and rulers to maintain order would be endangered. As Adams’s Harvard classmate Jonathan Sewall had put it in 1766, “the person and the office are so connected in the minds of the greatest part of mankind, that a contempt of the former and a veneration for the latter are totally incompatible.”91 This was the rationale behind the common law of seditious libel.
Americans believed in freedom of the press and had written that freedom into their Bill of Rights. But they believed in it as Englishmen did.92 Indeed, the English had celebrated freedom of the press since the seventeenth century, but they meant by it, in contrast with the French, no prior restraint or censorship of what was published. Under English law, people were nevertheless held responsible for what they published. If a person’s publications were calumnious enough to bring public officials into disrespect, then under the common law the publisher could be prosecuted for seditious libel. The truth of what was published was no defense; indeed, it even aggravated the offense. Furthermore, under the common law, judges, not juries, had the responsibility to decide whether or not a publication was seditious. Although this common-law view of seditious libel had been challenged and seriously weakened by John Peter Zenger’s trial in New York in 1735, it had never been fully eradicated from American thinking or practice in the state courts.
In this regard the Sedition Act passed by Congress in 1798 was a liberalization of the common law. It said the statements had to be true in order to be libelous, and it allowed for juries to decide whether a piece was seditious. Unlike Madison and many other of his fellow Republicans, who were more libertarian than he, Jefferson objected to the Sedition Act solely on federalist grounds—that is, that the national Congress had no constitutional right to enact such a law. But he fully accepted the right of the state courts to use the traditional common law of seditious libel in order to punish scurrilous writers who attacked government officials.
Not only did he dislike the press nearly as much as Adams—“nothing in a newspaper,” he said, “is to be believed”—but when he became president he wrote to Republican governors and attorneys general in the states and urged them to prosecute some scandalmongering Federalist editors for seditious libel under the common law. In 1803 he told Thomas McKean, by then governor of Pennsylvania (“what I say must be entirely confidential”), that “a few prosecutions of the most eminent offenders would have a wholesome effect in restoring the integrity of the presses—not a general prosecution, for that would look like persecution: but a selected one.” Although Jefferson did allow for truth to be a defense in these trials of seditious libel, his efforts to go after Federalist editors surreptitiously have not endeared him to some later historians.93
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EXPELLING ALIENS and stifling the scurrility of the Republican press were only parts of the Federalist program designed to save the nation from the evils of Jacobinism. Many Federalists remained convinced that a French army would sooner or later invade the United States and the country had to be prepared. Consequently, in the summer of 1798, Congress immediat
ely enlarged the army to twelve thousand men and authorized ten thousand more in case of an actual invasion. Adams, who doubted the possibility of a French invasion, had never called for these increases in the army. They were pushed by Hamilton and other Federalists, and the president felt himself carried along. In fact, sometimes Adams acted as if he were not the chief executive at all and someone else was making the decisions.
In the summer of 1798, Adams confessed to his predecessor his sense of helplessness in the face of the crisis. If the country was to be saved, he told Washington, it had to “depend upon Heaven, and very little on any thing in my Power.” Since he had no martial experience, he wished the Constitution would allow him to change places with Washington or permit him to become vice president once again under his leadership. Without getting Washington’s final permission, Adams went ahead and commissioned the former president as the commander in chief of all the armies. Washington, however, declared that he would serve only if Hamilton was second in command and the de facto commander. Adams wanted Henry Knox as second in command, because he had outranked Hamilton in the Revolutionary War. Under pressure from Washington and his cabinet, Adams finally gave way. He was furious that he had to promote Hamilton, who became for Adams “the most restless, impatient, indefatigable and unprincipled Intriguer in the United States, if not in the world.”94