The next scene was laid in the courtroom in Boston. On the Bench sat the fat, red-faced Chase, like an avenging angel who looked too often on the wine when it was red. It was solemnly proved that Brown had writings of his own hostile to the Administration policies; that he had paid to have the inscription painted for the pole at Dedham; and that in the presence of forty or fifty dangerous farmers he had been seen holding the ladder while another ascended to nail the board on. There was no defense. Chase glowered on the miserable illiterate, and, reminding him that he was at the mercy of the Court, demanded the names of the miscreants who had subscribed to his writings. Brown refused to betray the imaginary men higher up, and Chase fined him four hundred dollars and sent him to jail for a year and a half. Working entirely on his own initiative, the unhappy wretch was buried in a cell and all but forgotten. The Federalist papers recorded his conviction with gusto, albeit with sorrow that such things could be. After sixteen months, he sent a pitiful petition to Adams asking for a pardon, but it was refused. In February, 1801, he sent a second petition, which was ignored. After spending two years in a cell, he was pardoned by Jefferson.[1535] This trial was a farce.
V
Followed then the comedy. Among the desperate characters who had assisted in the pole-raising at Dedham was Richard Fairbanks. A thoroughly decent citizen, he was arrested and dragged tremblingly into court. Most of the victims of the Sedition Law were unrepentant and defiant, but Fairbanks was full of remorse. There may have been a bit of cunning in his confession of past wickedness and his profession of conversion. At any rate, the scene in court was not so threatening. True, the stern-faced Chase looked down from the Bench, but there in the room, ready to plead for mercy, was Fisher Ames. The charge was read, confessed, and up rose Ames. Not, however, as a paid attorney did he appear, but there was something to be said in extenuation for Fairbanks. He realized ‘how heinous an offense it was.’ He had promised to be a good citizen in the future. ‘His character has not been blemished in private life,’ the orator said, ‘and I do not know that he is less a man of integrity and benevolence than others. He is a man of rather warm and irritable temperament, too credulous, too sudden in his impressions.’ He had been seduced by the ‘inflammatory sophistry’ of the illiterate Brown. ‘Besides,’ continued Ames, in his most virtuous tones, ‘men in office have not been wanting to second Brown and to aggravate the bad opinion of the government and the laws.... The men who had Mr. Fairbanks’ confidence and abused it are more blameable than he. A newspaper has also chiefly circulated there which has a pestilent influence.’ Thus he had bad advice. ‘Although Mr. Fairbanks was influenced like the rest and was criminal in the affair of the sedition pole he had no concern in the contrivance. He ... has freely confessed his fault and promised to be in future a good citizen.’ Having attacked the Jeffersonians in Congress and out, and denounced ‘The Aurora’ or ‘Independent Chronicle,’ and implied that Fairbanks would vote and talk right in the future, Ames sat down; and just as solemnly Chase, commenting that ‘one object of punishment, reformation, has been accomplished,’ fined him five dollars and sent him to jail for six hours. Whereupon we may imagine Chase and Ames felicitating themselves on having scared the Democratic and Jeffersonian devils out of one sinner.
This was comedy.
VI
The tragedy in Massachusetts was reserved for a more important person—the editor of the ‘Independent Chronicle,’ Thomas Adams, who was printing one of the most powerful Jeffersonian papers in the country. He had published an attack on the denunciation of the Virginia Resolutions by the Massachusetts Legislature.[1536] The Essex Junto had been seeking a chance at the throat of the editor. His paper had been keenly searched for some excuse for action under the Sedition Law. In the autumn of 1798 he had been arrested and the effect had been provoking. In announcing his arrest, Adams had promised his readers a full report of the trial, and pledged himself to ‘always support the rights of the people and the liberty of the press, agreeable to the sacred charter of the Constitution.’[1537] When, four days later, he reported the postponement of his trial, he was able to ‘thank our new subscribers whose patriotism has led them to support the freedom of the press since the late persecution.’[1538]
The political persecution of Adams had in no wise intimidated him. Every issue of his paper was a clarion call to the faithful. If anything, he raised his banner a little higher. The public, looking upon his arrest as tyrannical and outrageous, rallied around him as never before. Eleven days after his arrest, he reported an ‘unprecedented increase in circulation,’ and pledged himself to carry on the fight. Not without point did he quote, ‘A free press will maintain the majesty of the people,’ for, as he explained, ‘this was originally written by John Adams, President of the United States, for Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette when British Excises, Stamp Acts, Land Taxes, and Arbitrary Power threatened this country with poverty and destruction.’[1539] Courageous though he was, the persecution drained the editor’s weakened vitality, and he was confined to his bed in a country house near Boston when the attack on the Massachusetts Legislature was published. Though too ill to be dragged into court, he was not too ill to announce the second phase of the persecution in the language of defiance. Double-spacing the announcement to make it stand out like a challenge, he said: ‘The Chronicle is destined to persecution.... It will stand or fall with the liberties of America, and nothing shall silence its clarion but the extinction of every principle which leads to the achievement of our independence.’[1540] Because the editor could not be dragged from a sick bed, Abijah Adams, the bookkeeper, was arrested on the ground that he had sold the papers and therefore published the ‘libel.’
Chief Justice Dana presided at the trial—as intolerant, politically, but not as stupid and coarse as Chase. The prosecution based its action on the common law of England, which the defense declared inconsistent with the Constitution of Massachusetts, and hostile to the spirit of the American Government. Dana rose to the occasion, not only attacking Adams’s lawyers from the Bench, but assailing them through the press.[1541] The result was inevitable. A verdict of guilt was promptly reached, and Dana made the most of his opportunity in sentencing the criminal. The defendant’s lawyers were denounced for ‘propagating principles’ as ‘dangerous as those of the article on which the indictment was based.’ Since the editor would not give up the name of the author of the offensive article, Adams would have to suffer, and he was sentenced to jail for thirty days, ordered to pay costs, and to give bond for good behavior for a year. So shocking was the spirit of Dana in passing sentence that he was challenged in the ‘Chronicle’ to publish his speech.[1542] Adams editorially denounced the application of the common law of England as ‘inconsistent with republican principles contemplated and avowed in our Constitution, and inapplicable to the spirit and nature of our institutions,’[1543] and promised ‘a regular supply of the papers.’ ‘The Editor is on a bed of languishment, and the bookkeeper in prison, yet the cause of liberty will be supported amid these distressing circumstances.’
The ‘convict’ was hurried off to jail, and into a damp, unhealthy cell where his feeble constitution threatened to succumb, until an indignant protest from without forced the jailer to transfer him to a better. The friends who flocked to see him were forced to convey their consolations through double-grated doors. Day by day the paper went to press, its spirit not one whit diminished. With the editor sinking under disease and the anticipated wreckage of his property, and the bookkeeper sick in jail and distressed over the condition of his wife and children, the fight was waged with undiminished vigor.[1544] One day old Samuel Adams, his Revolutionary spirit ablaze, flaunted his respect for the editor and his contempt for the persecutors, by stalking to the jail and expressing his admiration through the bars.[1545] That day Adams’s prison doors were opened and he passed out to freedom; and the next day the readers of the ‘Chronicle’ knew that ‘Abijah Adams was discharged from his imprisonment after partaking of an adequate portion of his “birth-right” by a confinement of thirty days under the operation of the common law of England.’[1546] Within three weeks, Thomas Adams, one of the bravest champions of democracy and the freedom of the press, was dead—his end hastened by the persecution to which he had been subjected. Like Benjamin Franklin Bache, he sank into his grave with an indictment under the Sedition Law hanging over him.