A Short Narrative
Between 1798 and 1801, in the midst of the threat of war with France, at least twenty-six individuals were prosecuted in U.S. federal courts on charges of publishing false information or speaking in public with the intent to undermine support for the federal government. The accused ranged from the editor of the most influential opposition newspaper in the nation to a New Jersey resident who drunkenly jeered President John Adams. All of the defendants were political opponents of the Adams administration. These prosecutions under the Sedition Act of 1798 provoked debates on the meaning of a free press and the rights of the political opposition. As the first federal trials to attract widespread public attention, the Sedition Act trials also prompted discussions of the political influence of life-tenured judges and of the proper relationship between the judiciary and the elected branches of the federal government.
Federalists and Republicans
The public excitement surrounding the Sedition Act trials reflected the intense animosity between the recently formed Federalist and Republican political parties. Soon after the inauguration of the federal government in 1789, two political coalitions formed amid debates on the balance of federal and state authority and on the nation’s ties to Great Britain and France. Federalists supported the administrations of George Washington and John Adams and were committed to a strong central government. Federalists believed a close alliance with Great Britain would ensure access to financial credit for American trade and manufacturing. Republicans united around Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State and later Vice President, wanted to rely more on state governments, and encouraged greater popular participation in politics. Republicans supported closer ties with France and feared that the pro-British Federalists intended to establish an elitist or even monarchical form of government. Although these groups lacked the formal organization of later political parties, the contest between them was as fierce as any partisan conflict in the nation’s history. Much of that political contest played out in a new kind of newspaper, which was sponsored by party supporters and designed to sway public opinion.
Foreign threats and domestic security
Partisan conflict escalated in 1798 as the recurring hostilities between France and Great Britain threatened to pull the United States into war. After France threatened to intercept any American ships carrying British goods, the Adams administration asked Congress for a dramatic expansion of the army and navy and for new taxes to pay for this national defense. Many Federalists feared that the French posed an additional threat of domestic subversion through their Republican supporters in the United States. To restrain the political activity of the many immigrants who supported the French and the Republicans, the Federalists in Congress won approval for the Alien Acts, which extended the period of residency required for citizenship from five to fourteen years and authorized the President to expel any noncitizen he determined to be a threat to the “safety and peace” of the nation. The Federalists then narrowly won support for an act that provided criminal penalties for public statements critical of the federal government and for conspiracies to oppose federal authority.
The Sedition Act
The Sedition Act of July 1798 provided for the punishment of anyone who made false statements with the intent to “defame” the federal government or “to stir up sedition within the United States.” For many years, English and American courts had prosecuted individuals for this kind of seditious libel using the common law—a collection of court precedents and traditions—rather than acts of a legislature. Some doubted that the federal courts had jurisdiction over common-law crimes, so the Sedition Act provided the statutory authority for federal prosecution of seditious libel. Although early drafts included drastic penalties for even general criticisms of the government, the act incorporated recent liberalizations in American and English practice, such as permitting the truth as a defense and allowing juries to determine whether the law properly applied to the case. Federalist supporters argued that the act embodied a broadly accepted understanding of the freedom of speech, which was necessarily balanced by individual responsibility for false statements. At the same time, Federalists acknowledged that the act was aimed at the Republican printers who had been most critical of the Adams administration.
Free speech or licentious speech?
Republicans in Congress responded to the proposed Sedition Act with the most sweeping defense of free speech yet articulated in the United States. They argued that in a representative government, citizens needed to have unrestricted access to a full range of political opinions if they were to make knowledgeable choices in elections. Federalists cited Republican newspapers and the published statements of members of Congress supporting the French as an apparent conspiracy to thwart the President’s national defense. It would be an “absurdity,” said Representative Robert Goodloe Harper of South Carolina, to suggest that governments did not have the authority to protect themselves against seditious publications. Harper and his allies in Congress insisted that the act would limit only licentious speech—speech or writing that was false and intended to subvert the government.
Although the Constitution said Congress could enact “no law . . . abridging the freedom . . . of the press,” many Federalists argued that this freedom, like the similar freedom recognized by British and colonial law, only protected writers from the government’s restraint of publication. In fact, political and legal practice in the United States in the 1790s reflected a broader understanding of freedom of the press. As the first opposition to emerge under the new form of government, the Republicans, in particular, recognized that the traditional freedom from “prior restraint”—censorship before the fact of publication—was insufficient to protect political dialogue in an elective system. For Republicans, the Sedition Act appeared to be a direct challenge to their ability to build public support. The three most widely publicized trials of seditious libel demonstrated the hazards awaiting opponents of the administration.
The trial of Matthew Lyon
One of the first persons to be indicted and tried under the Sedition Act was a Republican member of Congress. Representative Matthew Lyon of Vermont was campaigning for reelection when a grand jury in October 1798 indicted him for publishing letters with the “intent and design” to defame the government and President Adams. The Irish-born Lyon was one of the most provocative Republicans in the Congress, and his brawl with the Federalist Roger Griswold on the floor of the House chamber came to symbolize a collapse of civility in public affairs.
Justice William Paterson, presiding in the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Vermont, explained to the grand jury that seditious libel was a crime against the people who had elected government officials. The grand jury publicly thanked Paterson for his remarks and agreed that domestic “licentiousness” was a greater threat than “hosts of invading foes.”
The first count of the indictment cited a published letter that Lyon wrote before passage of the Sedition Act. In this critique of the Adams administration, Lyon asserted that he had seen “every consideration of public welfare swallowed up in a continual grasp for power, in an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, or selfish avarice.” Two other counts accused Lyon of further promoting sedition through his role in publicizing a letter in which the poet Joel Barlow blamed Adams and the Senate for the diplomatic crisis with France.
Charles Marsh, the federal district attorney representing the government, called witnesses to establish that Lyon had written the letter and that it had been published after passage of the Sedition Act. Other witnesses testified that Lyon read the Barlow letter at several campaign rallies.
Lyon presented his own defense, arguing that the Sedition Act was unconstitutional and that he had demonstrated no intent to undermine the government. Lyon, in an attempt to prove the truth of his published statements, asked Justice Paterson if he had observed “ridiculous pomp and parade” when he dined at President Adams’s residence in Philadelphia. Paterson answered no but refused to respond when Lyon asked if the President’s house displayed more pomp and servants than at the neighboring tavern in Rutland, Vermont.
Paterson instructed the jury that its deliberations had “nothing whatever to do with the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of the sedition law,” and could only consider whether Lyon published the letters and whether his intent was to stir up sedition. Paterson announced that the fact of publication was certain, so the jury had only to decide if the language could be interpreted as anything other than seditious. Within an hour, the jury returned a verdict of guilty. Paterson thought a member of Congress convicted of seditious libel deserved severe punishment, and he sentenced Lyon to four months in prison and a $1,000 fine.
After initially being denied pen and paper in jail, Lyon wrote a widely publicized account of the trial. While still in jail, Lyon won reelection to the U.S. House of Representatives, and after taking his seat in Philadelphia he survived a Federalist attempt to expel him from the House.
Lyon’s trial was the first of seven seditious libel proceedings in the circuit court of Vermont. Each of these related to Lyon’s publications or to published defenses of the Republican congressman. At its October 1799 term, the court again ordered Lyon’s arrest to answer the district attorney’s charge that Lyon attempted to bring the federal courts into disrepute through his jailhouse writings, which sharply criticized the heavy fine, the jury selection process, and the marshal’s abusive treatment of Lyon in jail. After attempting to carry out the arrest warrant, the deputy marshal reported in May 1800 that Lyon was not to be found in the district of Vermont. Lyon had left Vermont and did not return. Following adjournment of the Sixth Congress in March 1801, Lyon moved to Kentucky, where he won election to Congress in 1802.
The trial of Thomas Cooper
Members of Congress and leading officials of the Adams administration crowded a Philadelphia courtroom for the trial of Thomas Cooper in April 1800. The trial in the nation’s capital arose out of Cooper’s criticism of the President and his suggestion that Adams had assisted in a published attack on Cooper’s character. Cooper’s attempts to call the President as a witness heightened the drama.
Cooper drew the attention of Federalists in the spring of 1799 when he briefly edited a newspaper in central Pennsylvania and joined the growing public criticism of the Adams administration. Federalists were particularly suspicious of the English-born Cooper, who had emigrated in 1794 to avoid the British government’s persecution of supporters of the French Revolution. President Adams informed Secretary of State Timothy Pickering that Cooper’s writings deserved prosecution for sedition.
An anonymous Federalist writer dismissed Cooper as merely a disappointed office seeker who had once applied to Adams for a government position. Yes, Cooper acknowledged in a printed handbill that became the subject of his indictment, he had applied for an appointment from Adams, but he submitted the application when the President was “in the infancy of political mistake.” Cooper’s handbill then outlined the President’s subsequent offenses, including the abolition of the trial by jury in the Alien Act, the imposition of a standing army and a permanent navy, and interference with decisions of the federal courts.
When the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Pennsylvania convened in Philadelphia in April 1800, a grand jury returned an indictment that cited the handbill as evidence of Cooper’s intent to bring the President “into contempt and disrepute and to excite against him the hatred of the good people of the United States.” Cooper served as his own counsel and challenged the premise of the Sedition Act, asserting that citizens could not rationally carry out the vote “if perfect freedom of discussion of public characters be not allowed.” Cooper offered a detailed review of public documents in an attempt to prove the truth of his statements about Adams. U.S. District Attorney William Rawle argued that “all civilized nations have thought it right at all times to punish with severity” a seditious libel. Rawle found Cooper’s “partial extracts” from the public documents and “misrepresentations” to be further evidence of his intent to defame the President.
Justice Samuel Chase, who presided along with District Judge Richard Peters, repeatedly challenged Cooper’s defense. Chase refused to allow a subpoena of the President, even though Cooper insisted that only the President could have known of his application for appointment and thus must have assisted in the publication that prompted the handbill. Chase’s charge to the jury included a strident defense of the Sedition Act, and he characterized one part of Cooper’s defense as “the boldest attempt I have known to poison the minds of the people.” The justice even offered the jury arguments that he thought should have been presented by the prosecutor.
The jury returned a guilty verdict after deliberating for less than an hour at a neighboring tavern. Before sentencing, Chase asked Cooper if other Republicans had agreed in advance to pay any fine. Cooper denied he was a paid party writer, and Judge Peters interjected that “we have nothing to do with parties.” Chase sentenced Cooper to six months' imprisonment and a fine of $400. Chase’s conduct during the trial, according to a Republican observer, had demonstrated “all the zeal and vehemence that might have been expected from a well fee’d lawyer,” and the justice’s undisguised contempt for the defendant magnified Republican mistrust of the judiciary.
The trial of James Callender
Justice Samuel Chase proceeded on his circuit from Philadelphia to the circuit court in Maryland and then to Virginia, a bastion of Republican power, where he presided over the sedition trial of James Callender. Like so many of those indicted, Callender was foreign born, and he had left his native Scotland to avoid prosecution for his radical political writings. In this country, Callender worked as a new type of political writer, dependent for his livelihood on the publication of partisan commentary. The Federalists considered “the vagrant Callender” as a “miserable, ragged vagabond” and a prime target for prosecution under the Sedition Act.
After gaining notoriety for his scathing and personally abusive political writings in Philadelphia’s Republican newspapers, Callender moved to Virginia where he enjoyed the patronage of Republican leaders, including Thomas Jefferson. He wrote for the Richmond Examiner, which Secretary of State Timothy Pickering ordered Virginia’s federal district attorney to inspect for any writings that could be prosecuted under the Sedition Act. Callender also prepared a pamphlet, The Prospect Before Us, in support of Jefferson’s presidential campaign.
The U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Virginia convened in Richmond in May 1800 with Chase sitting alongside the virtually silent district judge, Cyrus Griffin. U.S. District Attorney Thomas Nelson presented a grand jury with an indictment citing twenty passages from The Prospect Before Us, all critical of John Adams and illustrative of Callender’s exaggerated language. The grand jury approved the indictment that accused Callender of “false, scandalous, and malicious writing, against the said President of the United States.”
At trial, Callender’s prominent lawyers included Virginia attorney general Philip Nicholas and other Republicans who volunteered their services. The lawyers defending Callender repeatedly clashed with Chase over rules and procedures, raising fundamental questions about the authority of the federal courts and the degree to which practices in the state courts governed proceedings in federal courts within that state. In disputes over the role of the jury and presentation of evidence, the Republican lawyers sought to limit the discretion of federal judges, whom they increasingly saw as partisan.
Justice Chase proved a formidable and often high-handed opponent to the Republican defense. When attorney William Wirt asserted that juries in Virginia had authority to rule on law and therefore could rule on the constitutionality of the Sedition Act, Chase dismissed the argument as illogical. Chase imposed a nearly impossible standard for submitting evidence to prove the truth of Callender’s statements and refused to allow the lead witness to appear. Chase frequently interrupted the defense lawyers, announcing that they relied on weak authorities or misunderstood the intentions of the court. Callender’s frustrated lawyers eventually walked away from the case, as had the lawyers in another politically charged case that Chase had recently presided over in Philadelphia.
What the jury heard about Callender came almost exclusively from the government’s attorney, Thomas Nelson, who reviewed each statement cited in the indictment and explained why he thought it met the criteria for conviction under the Sedition Act. Chase devoted most of his lengthy instructions to the jury to a sweeping rejection of the argument that a jury might consider the constitutionality of a law. The jury returned a guilty verdict, and Chase sentenced Callender to nine months’ imprisonment and a $400 fine. While in the Richmond jail, Callender continued to write newspaper editorials supporting the election of Jefferson.
Prosecutions and the role of the federal courts
The Lyon, Cooper, and Callender trials were the most publicized of the Sedition Act proceedings, all of which heightened Republican distrust of the federal judiciary. Many Republicans were convinced that the federal courts were dominated by Federalist partisans. Federal judges, particularly the Supreme Court justices serving in the circuit courts, had ardently defended the constitutionality of the Sedition Act and had urged grand juries to dismiss Republican arguments for a broader definition of freedom of speech. Justice William Cushing warned one grand jury that if “licentiousness” went unpunished it would enable “the worst men in a community, to overturn the freest government in the world.” Justice James Iredell told another grand jury that the First Amendment was not intended to protect seditious libel from punishment.
The judges’ support of the Sedition Act helped to win convictions of some of the most outspoken Republicans, but the Federalists soon paid a heavy price. The number of Republican newspapers grew sharply during the time the Sedition Act was in effect, and these newspapers helped to mobilize support for Jefferson’s election as President. The sedition trials fed Republican suspicion of the judiciary, and when the Republicans came to power, they repealed the Federalist expansion of the federal courts. Chase’s conduct in the Callender trial became one of the foundations of the articles of impeachment voted against him by the House of Representatives in 1804. Although the Senate acquitted Chase, his impeachment marked the end of the kind of broad-ranging jury instructions that had occasionally politicized the courts in the late 1790s.
Freedom of speech and political opposition in the early republic
The expiration of the Sedition Act on March 3, 1801, failed to settle questions about the legal limits of political speech and the right of the political opposition to criticize officeholders and the government. When Republicans became the object of strident newspaper attacks during the following decade, some of them were willing to prosecute Federalist editors for seditious libel. President Thomas Jefferson, stung by relentless personal criticism, suggested that selected prosecutions in the state courts would help to temper the partisan press. The state prosecutions, however, remained relatively infrequent and largely ineffective in slowing the development of a partisan press. Although seditious libel prosecutions of partisan newspapers would not entirely disappear until the 1830s, more and more Americans accepted the right of the political opposition to criticize the government. A new political culture based on widening suffrage, broader citizen participation, and greater competition for votes made older notions of seditious libel unworkable and irrelevant.
The Sedition Act Trials — Historical Background and Documents