Mud-slinging is one thing; criminalizing free speech is altogether different, as Wendell Bird writes in Criminal Dissent, an exhaustive taxonomy of the prosecutions that took place under these high-handed laws. Doggedly scouring federal court records as well as the papers of such notorious partisans as Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, Bird persuasively argues that the Federalists’ attempt to squash opposition and the free flow of ideas was even more nefarious than we thought. He counts not the usual fourteen confirmed Sedition Act prosecutions (and anticipated prosecutions) but fifty-one, and not fourteen defendants but 126. This means there were many more victims of this legislation than we knew, including newspapers, editors, and ordinary people.
Since Bird is mainly concerned with the enforcement of these draconian acts and their clear violation of civil rights, he is at pains to report on every case he uncovered. Unfortunately, though each was of enormous consequence to specific individuals, the encyclopedic and repetitive nature of Bird’s book tends to dull the awful force of the legislation and its near-fanatical execution. Nonetheless, his compendium of prosecutions offers other historians and critics a comprehensive, reliable index to the people hounded by these laws and the newspapers that shut down because of them.
And Bird effectively sketches the circumstances that gave rise to these acts. George Washington may have kept the nation free of foreign entanglements, particularly the war between Britain and revolutionary France, but after the US signed the Jay Treaty in 1794 to ensure peace with Britain, the French, who felt betrayed, began capturing American ships. Hoping to avert an outright conflict but eager to protect American vessels, President Adams dispatched three commissioners to Paris to come to a peaceful solution. But the French envoys (known only as X, Y, and Z) solicited bribes from the Americans in exchange for a meeting with French officials, and when news of this was leaked (the “XYZ affair”), war hysteria gripped the nation. It especially gripped the extremists in Adams’s cabinet and in Congress, so much so that Vice President Jefferson worried that “the madness of our government” might prevent “whatever chance was left us, of escaping war.”
Actually, the country was more or less primed for the hysteria, especially when the envoy known as Y alleged the existence of a “French party in America.” Many Federalists believed that the French were plotting an American reign of terror with the assistance of domestic “Jacobins.” Secretary of State Pickering, among others, was grimly convinced that the French were fomenting a slave insurrection in the South, and former secretary of war Henry Knox thought the French might bring 10,000 “blacks and people of color” to incite a rebellion. Passions ran high. So did paranoia.
Out of this unpleasant cauldron, clear distinctions between the two main political parties emerged—so clear, in fact, that each often defined itself in hostile opposition to the other. Many Republicans considered Federalists, who believed in a strong central government, to be a “Monarchical party,” as James Madison branded it, in cahoots with Britain and prepared to betray the principles of the American Revolution. Federalists frequently considered Republicans, who favored a decentralized democracy, as the party of anarchy, in league with the excesses of the French Revolution.