The United States of America, Part 1: 1783-1830

by Edwin Erle Sparks

By a safe majority in the House and a vote of two to one in the Senate, the Federalists placed additional bars to the doors of the United States by raising the time required for national residence prior to naturalisation to fourteen years, with a residence of five years in some one State, and a declaration of intention made five years before admission. All white aliens were required to report to some official register, and get a certificate within forty-eight hours after arrival. By a law, called the "Alien Friends act," Congress gave power to the President to order out of the United States all aliens whom he suspected of being concerned in any treasonable or secret machination against the Government. If he chose, he could give such an alien a license to remain under bond. The duration of the act was limited to two years. A companion measure, called the "Alien Enemies act," contemplated the possibility of an immediate war with France and gave the President and the courts power to arrest, to punish, or remove natives of a hostile country after due proclamation. All courts were authorised to hear complaints against aliens, much in the style of the denunciation system of France a few years before.

The alien writers and the Republican press generally had not been afraid to attack the war measures and the bills for the restraint of foreigners as they were proposed and debated. Upon the sudden rage of naming vessels after the President, Duane in the Aurora sarcastically remarked that the name would be a host of strength in itself and completely protect our extensive commerce. He thought we outstripped the British in this instance.

"In the navy of England, there is only one royal George and one Charlotte; there is to be sure the Sovereign and the Queen; but we shall certainly have, The President, the Lady Adams, or the Lady President, with Squire Quincy and Squire Charley, otherwise the navy of Columbia will be incomplete."

In other papers, the President figured as "Johnny Molasses" from the rum manufacture of Massachusetts. The New York Time-Piece pronounced him "a person without patriotism, without philosophy, and a mock monarch who had been jostled into the chief magistracy by the ominous combination of old Tories with old opinions and old Whigs with new." Addresses were printed begging aliens not to enlist in the provisional army if any laws should be passed against them.

All action taken thus far to ensure the perpetuity and safety of the Government against the strangers within its gates seemed to the Federalists incomplete while this seditious press remained unbridled. The crowning measure of the session of 1798, therefore, took the shape of an addition to the early act defining crimes against the United States. It provided fine and imprisonment for conspiring to oppose measures of the Government, for advising insurrection, and for libelling the Government, either House of Congress, or the President. The duration of the act was limited to the end of the present Administration. As originally introduced into the Senate, this "sedition act" declared that giving aid or comfort to a Frenchman or to France was treason to the United States, punishable by death. It was toned down in this and several other particulars by moderate spirits before being enacted into a law.

The opposition in Congress, called "Republicans" by themselves and "Jacobins" by their enemies, had resisted these famous "alien and sedition laws" at every step. They pleaded that such police regulations had been left by the Constitution to the States; that national citizenship did not exist separate from State citizenship; that Congress could pass uniform laws of naturalisation, but could not control aliens resident in a State; that adequate punishment for sedition was already provided in the laws of the various States; that the crime of treason was taken care of by the Constitution and Federal laws; that existing treaties required notice to be given before foreigners could be sent away, and then only in case of war; and that a dangerous power was placed in the hands of the President. The constitutional amendments guaranteeing trial by jury and freedom of speech were also quoted in vain. When a member from New York declared that the people ought not to submit to such tyrannical legislation and would deserve the chains which these measures were forging for them if they did not resist, such language was declared treasonable by the other side and productive of the insurrectionary spirit they were trying to stamp out.

An analysis of the distribution of the vote on the Alien bill shows that these presses, although located in the Northern and Central States, were supported by the Southern people. Perhaps the sectional tendency of the vote should be considered as indicative of the loss of the Southern States to the Administration and prophetic of the support which individualism was to receive from that section. Not a Senator north of the Mason and Dixon line opposed the measure, and only one from south of the line supported it. Of the Southern members in the House, nine voted for and thirty against sending away dangerous aliens. In the Northern section the vote stood thirty-seven to ten in favour of the punitive action.

Jefferson, presiding over the Senate while these measures, so obnoxious to him, were being passed, deprived of even the pleasure of casting an occasional deciding vote by the overwhelming Federal majority, quietly bided his time until this madness should die out. "War, land tax and stamp tax," said he, "are sedatives which must calm its ardour." To his mind, the people were still essentially republican; they retained unadulterated the principles of '75; they needed only reflection and information to bring themselves and their affairs to rights.

"A little patience," he wrote to a correspondent in Virginia, who mentioned the possibility of separating that State and North Carolina from the tyrannical majority, "and we shall see the reign of the witches pass over, their spells dissolved, and the people recovering their true sight, restoring their government to its true principles. Better keep together as we are, haul off from Europe as soon as we can, and from all attachments to any portions of it."

At the same time, if war should come, he advised all to join for the defence of home on the principle that if one's house is on fire he must try to extinguish it without stopping to inquire whether it was fired from without or within.