Passed 14 July 1798 at the height of anti‐French sentiment following the embarrassing XYZ affair, the Sedition Act of 1798 was an attempt by the administration of John Adams to quiet subversion and dissent, which it believed to be caused in large part by unscrupulous English, Irish, and French immigrants to America. This act, which provided for the punishment of persons conspiring to oppose or obstruct measures of the federal government and for the punishment of some writings critical of the government, is usually portrayed in standard American histories as an outrageous infringement on free speech and comparable to the roughly contemporary French Terror. In retrospect it does appear that the act was the product of paranoia on the part of the Federalists, but the statute was not without the provocation of some mendacious publications, and, viewed in its proper historical context, the act was not really an illiberal measure. The act reflected fear that the sort of instability of life and liberty that prevailed in revolutionary France might be brought to the shores of America, and the prevalence of frankly francophiliac Democratic societies all over the new American states gave some substance to the fear, as did reports that some of the participants in the Whiskey Rebellion, who stymied the collection of federal revenues in 1794, wore the French tricolor.
The most important provision of the act codified the English common law of seditious libel and made it a crime punishable by fine or imprisonment to speak disparagingly of the national government or government officials in a manner intending to hold them up to public ridicule and erode their authority. Still, the act liberalized the English common law insofar as it allowed evidence of the truth of a charge against the government to be entered into the defense at a trial and insofar as it allowed the jury to be the judge not only of the fact of publication, but also of the allegedly seditious character of the published matter. Both of these reforms were also part of the roughly contemporaneous English Fox's Libel Act of 1792, widely viewed as a triumph for English liberals.
The act resulted in several important trials for seditious libel in the late 1790s, most notably those of Matthew Lyon, Thomas Cooper, and James Thompson Callender. Lyon was a feisty Irish Vermont congressman who had made intemperate remarks about the unnecessary pomp displayed by President Adams. An unsympathetic Federalist judge, William Paterson, presided over his trial (United States v. Matthew Lyon, 1798), and although Paterson instructed the jury that they must find Lyon guilty of having made his seditiously libelous statements beyond a reasonable doubt, he was still convicted, fined one thousand dollars and costs, and sentenced to imprisonment for four months.
Thomas Cooper was a transplanted British social critic who allied himself with Thomas Jefferson against John Adams in the presidential election of 1800. Cooper had published remarks critical of Adams, notably that he had borrowed money at too high a rate during peacetime, that he had maintained a standing army and navy, and that he had interfered with the independence of the judiciary in a matter involving extradition of a British murder suspect. Cooper's statements were probably matters of opinion rather than fact, and though they were arguably more false than true, the presiding justice, Samuel Chase, in his jury instructions, required Cooper to prove the truth of his assertions “beyond a marrow” before he could be acquitted (United States v. Thomas Cooper, 1800). This was in stark contrast to Paterson's standards in the Lyon trial, and probably flowed from some understandable confusion in Chase's mind over whether he should apply the standards from English private libel law (which he did), or liberalize the standards in keeping with emerging American ideas about the value of free speech (which he did not). Cooper was found guilty and sentenced to pay a fine of four hundred dollars and to be imprisoned for six months. Like the other seditious libel defendants he was later pardoned by Thomas Jefferson, but he refused his pardon, with what one historian later called “commendable perversity,” and insisted on serving out his sentence.
The most famous seditious libel trial, however, was probably that of James Thompson Callender (United States v. James Thompson Callender, 1800), a particularly rebarbative Scottish immigrant and Jeffersonian party scribbler, who published a whole book of calumny about Adams. Callender was once ejected from the Virginia House of Representatives for being covered with lice and filth, and he later turned on Jefferson and proceeded to publish scurrilous gossip about him.
Justice Chase presided over the Callender trial, and appears to have been convinced that the author of Callender's book ought to have been punished, having read the book on the way to the trial on the Virginia circuit. Callender's counsel, however, made almost no effort to defend their client, preferring instead to goad Justice Chase into some of the outbursts for which he was already becoming famous and to score political and rhetorical points against the Adams administration. Callender's lawyers unsuccessfully sought to argue that the jury should be allowed to reject the Sedition Act as unconstitutional and to enter partial evidence in order to demonstrate the truth of only one of the nineteen libelous statements charged against their client. As their defense collapsed in the face of adverse and incredulous rulings from Chase, Callender's counsel gave up the argument, and Callender was then convicted, fined two hundred dollars, and sentenced to an imprisonment of nine months.
Chase's actions, which were probably not unreasonable given the obviously political nature of Callender's defense, were severely and unfairly excoriated in the Republican press and were magnified into more spectacular charges that the Federalist judiciary was bent on silencing all dissenters and depriving hapless Republican defendants of their rights to speech and jury trials (see Trial by Jury). Chase's conduct in the Callender trial was later made the centerpiece of the impeachment trial against him.
Jefferson or his party appear to have paid Cooper's and Callender's fines, and, as indicated, the new president, shortly after his inauguration, pardoned all defendants convicted under the Sedition Act, which had, by its terms, already expired.
While the act was at odds with emerging Jeffersonian and Madisonian thought on free expression, it was meliorative of the common law. While the act appears to have enjoyed popular support when it was passed in 1798, after the threat of French invasion collapsed with Napoleon's defeat in Egypt in late 1798, public sympathy shifted away from the Federalists. Eventual public revulsion, fostered by the Jeffersonian press, at the act's enforcement in the Lyons, Cooper, and Callender trials, and Justice Chase's conduct in particular, accounted in large part for the loss of the presidency and the Congress by the Federalists in 1800.
See also Speech and the Press.
Bibliography
- Stephen Presser and Jamil Zainaldin, Law and Jurisprudence in American History: Cases and Materials,
2d ed. (1989). - James Morton Smith, Freedom's Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties (1956)
— Stephen B. Presser
