Repression in the Early Republic
John Adams, the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the Politics of Excusion
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13135/1592-4467/8779Keywords:
the Alien and Sedition Acts, repression, politics of exclusionAbstract
Using recent biographies of John Adams and the acquisition of Redex, Historical American Newspapers online, by the Library of the Università degli Studi di Milano, this essay explores the political history of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the role of the American leadership in the implementation of these laws. Those policies derived from Adams’s experience and political judgment, but at same time they were strongly supported by Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton. Both feared a state of anarchy in the early American republic, but these acts against publishers, congressmen, and simple farmers were seen by the common people as a conspiracy against the young democracy. Considering two examples of people who suffered persecution—Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin, charged with seditious behavior for his activities as a printer, and Congressman Albert Gallatin, a foreign-born French Swiss who settled in western Pennsylvania, charged as an illegal alien – the essay shows clearly the politics of exclusion orchestrated by the Federalist party, as well as the use of force to suppress Fries’s Rebellion in Eastern Pennsylvania, which splintered the Federalist party and fractured the presidential cabinet. In the end the Alien and Sedition Acts misjudged the “genius” of the American people, ushering the Federalists out of power.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
RSAJournal applies a CC BY-NC-ND license to all its contributions. This license enables reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. CC BY-NC-ND includes the following elements:
- BY: credit must be given to the creator.
- NC: Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted.
- ND: No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights for their submissions to the journal.
- Authors grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License that allows others to share unedited work for non-commercial purposes with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
