The Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) and in Response …
The Kentucky (1798) and Virginia Resolutions (1799)
Background:
Alien and Sedition Acts: In 1798, John Adams is President and a member of the Federalist Party BUT Hamilton and the High Federalists want War with France…Adams does not (like GW before him he recognizes the danger) Hamilton and the High Federalists control congress and are feeling the pressures from the growing Democratic-Republican clubs and their newspaper criticisms (Jefferson now VP and Madison are both vocal critics, albeit secretly through anonymous newspaper editorials)….[BUSCH] So the United States stood on the brink of war with France. The Federalists believed that Democratic-Republican criticism of Federalist policies was disloyal and feared that aliens living in the United States would sympathize with the French during a war. As a result, a Federalist-controlled Congress passed four laws, known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. These laws raised the residency requirements for citizenship from 5 to 14 years, authorized the President to deport aliens, and permitted their arrest, imprisonment, and deportation during wartime. The Sedition Act (how is this law Constitutional due to the 1st Amendment?-Busch) made it a crime for American citizens to "print, utter, or publish . . . any false, scandalous, and malicious writing" about the Government.
The laws were directed against Democratic-Republicans, the party typically favored by new citizens, and the only journalists prosecuted under the Sedition Act were editors of Democratic-Republican newspapers. Sedition Act trials, along with the Senate’s use of its contempt powers to suppress dissent, set off a firestorm of criticism against the Federalists and contributed to their defeat in the election of 1800, after which the acts were repealed or allowed to expire. The controversies surrounding them, however, provided for some of the first tests of the limits of freedom of speech and press. (Source: ourdocuments.gov)
Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions:
https://www.docsoffreedom.org/readings/early-challenges-in-the-constitutional-republic
Click on link above to read how the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions had a long term impact on the USA.. as I explained in the Reading Questions…(The Bill of Rights Institute incorporates excerpts from each resolution and does a much better job J )