John Adams, 1798
Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions
The Virginia and Kentucky legislatures issued resolutions in 1798 protesting the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by Federalists in Congress that year. Since Republicans had been unable to block passage of the Acts in Congress, and President Adams had responded to the petitions of concerned citizens by speaking out against divisiveness in American politics, some Republicans looked to state government for a solution. The Virginia and Kentucky legislatures asserted that the Alien and Sedition Acts violated constitutional protections of individual liberty because they restricted the rights of foreigners and forbade criticism of the federal government.
The Resolutions, written by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, raised several important issues: the scope of federal legislative power; the settlement of constitutional disputes; the nature of the Union; and the meaning of free speech. They argued that the regulation of speech fell under state, not federal, control. Additionally, they asserted that the Sedition Act violated the First Amendment, and that states bore the responsibility for rectifying the situation. States retained this responsibility because, the Resolutions held, the Union was a compact of several states, not a single entity. Setting forth the doctrine of state interposition, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions maintained that states could veto acts of Congress that were unconstitutional. Finally, articulating a concept still foreign to American politics, the Republican legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky asserted that not only should a distinction be drawn between critical and inflammatory publications, but that the First Amendment protected political dissent.
The Resolutions called for other states to endorse the doctrine of state interposition and help nullify the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Virginia and Kentucky legislatures received little support, however. Most of the other states maintained that the federal courts, not state legislatures, were the proper arbiters of constitutional disputes. Thus, the short-lived challenge to Adams’s administration dissipated on its own, and the Alien and Sedition Acts remained in force until their expiration in 1801. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions did, however, make clear that the questions of federal power and the nature of the Union that preceded the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and engendered controversy in the ratification debates, had not disappeared. The “principles of ’98” developed into an energetic states’ rights theory advocating a reduced role for the American presidency and the federal government at-large, sharpening the conflict over the nature of the Union.
Sources/Further Reading:
James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 187-207.
Alfred H. Kelly, Winfred A. Harbison, and Herman Belz, The American Constitution: Its Origins and Development, vol. 1, 7th ed., (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), 132-137.
Kermit H. Hall, Major Problems in American Constitutional History, vol. 1 (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1992), 234-274.