The Founding Fathers and the First Amendment Follies: Freedom of the Press, Immigration and Partisan Bickering

SUPPER CLUB PRESENTATION, MAY 21, 2019

Saul Shapiro

The Founding Fathers and the First Amendment Follies: Freedom of the Press, Immigration and Partisan Bickering

Although I never watched HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” reviews of the finale talked about Tyrion, the brilliant but black-witted “dwarf” of the House of Lannister, advising the council on choosing a new leader and their future.
“What unites people? Armies? Gold? Flags?” Tyrion asked. “Stories. There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.”

And so we have been taught amazing stories about the faultless Founding Fathers of the American Republic, a mythology equating them with demigods. While they may have been brilliant visionaries, quite cognizant of their role in shaping a nation for posterity, they also were arrogant, petty and thin-skinned.

The early days of the Founding Fathers foreshadowed some current issues, like immigration, freedom of the press, an intrusive government, the power of an executive branch shielded from scrutiny and even the #MeToo Movement.

What they didn’t recognize about creating a Utopia was that the greatest enemy of liberty is fear. When people feel threatened, their tolerance shrinks.

The seeds of this democracy were sown in 1455 when Johannes Gutenberg, who had invented movable type about a decade earlier, printed his first Bible.

Soon the masses were reading texts and exchanging ideas. That begat the religious Reformation, the cultural Renaissance and the political Enlightenment extolling science and reason, not blind adherence to monarchs and religion.

The first newspaper in the British colonies was American Weekly Mercury published by Andrew Bradford in 1723, followed five years later by Pennsylvania Gazette edited by Benjamin Franklin. He wrote most of the articles for the twice-weekly, including news and reports on public events. It also had essay contributions and letters from readers.

Franklin also drew the first political cartoon, “Join or Die” in June 1754, for an editorial “Disunited states” urging the then eight colonies to join the British in the war against the French and Indians. The cartoon depicted a snake cut into eight pieces. A similar cartoon with 13 colonies would become the symbol of the Revolutionary War effort.

The Gazette’s circulation improved substantially when Franklin became Postmaster of Philadelphia, including the publication with all mail deliveries. That increased demand for advertising space. Franklin also created newspaper franchises with select printers from New England to the West Indies, enabling him to retire from the business in 1748.

His Poor Richard’s Almanack — a compilation of calendars, witticisms and fake news written under his pseudonym of Richard Saunders — sold 10,000 copies annually from 1733 to 1758. It was supposedly written for the “public good,” but Poo Richard admitted his wife implored him to finally make money, not just “gaze at the stars.”

The American revolutionaries were influenced by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Adam Smith, René Descartes, Isaac Newton, Voltaire and notably Montesquieu, whose “Spirit of Laws” articulated the need for the separation of government into three co-equal branches, the executive, legislative and judiciary.

The Declaration of Independence, published in the Pennsylvania Gazette and read aloud in gatherings throughout the colonies, was the clarion call for a break with Britain. But it would have ended up on the ash heap of history if not for the globalism of its time.

The American army didn’t score its first victory until Gens. Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold defeated the British at the Battle of Saratoga on Oct. 17, 1777. That spurred Franklin’s successful negotiations with France, Britain’s archenemy, which had lost the French and Indian Wars in North America, ceding Canada to the British.

French and the Dutch bankers provided critical funding. More importantly, France supplied thousands of troops to help a beleaguered George Washington’s army overcome a miserable winter in Valley Forge in 1778. Upon hearing the news of France’s intervention, Washington declared, “Long Live the King of France.”

The French fleet effectively patrolled the coast so that John Paul Jones, the American naval commander, could keep the Continental Army stocked with armaments delivered by Dutch merchants to the Caribbean island of St. Eustatious. This annoyed Britain, it prompting the fourth British-Dutch war.
Washington did most of his fighting in the Northeast, while Nathaniel Greene and the Marquis de Lafayette faced the British in the South. Washington, a model of indecision, preferred to stay in New York, but was persuaded in 1781 by the Comte de Rochambeau, the French commander, to take the fight to the British in Virginia. The French fleet under Commander Francois de Grasse left Haiti with troops aboard 29 ships for the Chesapeake Bay, while Cornwallis awaited reinforcements from New York City that never came.
While the Marquis de Lafayette kept Cornwallis bottled up in the peninsula below Richmond in the village of Yorktown, Washington’s plans hit a snag — the American war chest was nearly empty. His troops lacked food, uniforms and supplies and were on the verge on mutiny. He needed $20,000 to finance the final campaign, but Congress wouldn’t provide more money. So Washington told Robert Morris, the superintendent of finance, “Send for Haym Salomon.” The Polish Jewish immigrant financier from Philadelphia quickly raised $20,000 for Washington to conduct the Yorktown campaign.
Washington wanted the French to lead the final charge, but was persuaded by his aide de camp Alexander Hamilton that it would be bad optics. The ambitious Hamilton begged Washington for the opportunity, so an American could share in the glory. Washington finally agreed to let him lead three infantry battalions alongside one French battalion. On Oct. 14, Hamilton led the decisive, 10-minute charge.
It was redemption for Hamilton after the Battle of Long Island in September 1776. With the Americans nearly trapped, first in Brooklyn, then on Manhattan, a wave of 25,000 British soldiers sailed into New York, but their attack was delayed by the onset of thick fog. In the interim, Major Aaron Burr led Hamilton and the other troops along the rocky shores of the East River to safety in Harlem Heights. The Americans then fled the city. 
Burr would save Hamilton’s life twice, before taking it.
Cornwallis surrendered on Oct. 19, 1781 — six years and six months after the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The Treaty of Paris officially ending the war in 1783.
Thus was born the American republic, but it didn’t take shape until the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 — a convoluted compromise reflecting divisions that exist today. Notably, it didn’t address slavery, except for an agreement to end the slave trade by 1808. Only in New Jersey could women and blacks vote. That lasted until 1807 amid a backlash from property-owning, non-immigrant white males who kept the franchise to themselves.
Colonial America was a nation of immigrants, but not necessarily a melting pot. The Dutch settled New York, while the Swiss, Swedes, Finns, and French Huguenots were elsewhere along the East Coast. In the early 18^th century, England had such severe labor shortages that it restricted emigration to America, which needed more workers. That gave rise to the slave trade and laborers from the Rhine Valley and Northern Ireland.

Many European communities lived in isolation. There was widespread hostility toward those speaking Dutch and German and English-speaking Scotch and Irish immigrants.

After the failure of the Articles of Confederation, the new Constitution involved deals between the Federalists — the financial and merchant class of the urban North who wanted a strong central government, and Republicans — the agrarian class, largely from the less populous South who wanted states’ rights. Hence, we got the Electoral College.

From the outset taxation was an issue. The war was expensive, and the Dutch and French financiers had to be paid. Indeed, the French government had become nearly bankrupt helping the American Revolution, which sowed the seeds for the French Revolution. The Federalists believed taxes were necessary to pay off war debts in order to continue trade with Europe and fund the government. Southern farmers adamantly opposed them.

According to a 2010 Congressional Research Service report, “Costs of Major U.S. Wars,” the Revolution saddled the U.S. with a debt of $37 million at the national level and $114 million at the state level — equivalent to $2.4 billion today.

So the Founding Fathers made deals, many engineered by James Madison, a Republican protégé of Thomas Jefferson from Virginia, and Hamilton, a Caribbean-born New Yorker who led the Federalist faction.

They were co-authors (along with John Jay of New York) of the Federalist Papers — a series of 85 newspaper essays conceived by Hamilton that were designed to win New York’s ratification of the Constitution and were eventually published in book form.

To be clear, political parties didn’t yet exist. They were regarded as contemptible because of the potential damage divisiveness could cause to a fledgling nation. “Party” was associated with groups of troublemakers and enemies of good government. In his farewell address, Washington cautioned about “the baneful effects of the spirit of party” and “the alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension.”

But sides were being taken.

Jefferson saw democracy as constantly evolving and wanted the Constitution to be a living document to change with every generation to reflect the times. Madison disagreed.

Madison, the author of Virginia’s Bill of Rights, believed it was essential to enshrine individual rights in the Constitution. But Hamilton and the Federalists had little faith in the intelligence or morals of the average man. Liberty was to be guided by an informed aristocracy. Hamilton called the Bill of Rights “dangerous.” He believed the checks and balances of the branches of government sufficed to safeguard individual liberties.

Madison won that battle for the Bill of Rights.

The First Amendment states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The first clause was, perhaps, more like “freedom from religion.”

Virginia had passed its groundbreaking religious statute because the dominant Anglican Church was allowed to force all citizens to attend services and pay tithes to support it. The Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists wanted ties severed between government and the state church.

The Virginia statute read, “No man shall be compelled to frequent or support” any church or religion and none “shall be restrained, molested or burthened on account of his religious opinions or beliefs.” “All men should be free to profess … their opinions in matters of religion” and those opinions “shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”

Despite the “freedom of the press” clause in the First Amendment, the Constitution only had only a vague mandate that Congress keep and publish a journal of its proceedings “from time to time,” while allowing exceptions for “such parts that may in their judgment require secrecy.” The Senate kept a journal, but didn’t allow the press or the public into its august proceedings until December 1795.

That we have a record of any congressional actions is precisely because there was a free press to record House proceedings, but no stenographers or other record keepers. The lack of a stenographer was due to expense and a fear that those in power could write history to suit their interests.

The Federalists had a built-in news advantage. Of the 318 newspapers, 171 were in their camp, 89 were Republican. The others were neutral or avoided politics. Postmasters were likely to waive fees for papers promoting the agenda of their political party.

Newspapermen recorded the events in the House, blow by blow on one occasion, as well as long-winded speeches. Congressmen complained that reporters made them look foolish and incompetent, that their speeches were distorted with invented facts.

Those speeches were, in fact, often delivered furiously while reporters struggled to keep up, making misquotes inevitable rather than necessarily deliberate.

On Sept. 26, 1789, the House debated a resolution introduced by Republican Aedanus Burke of South Carolina that journalists had “misrepresented these debates in the most glaring deviations from the truth” “throwing over the whole proceedings a thick veil of misrepresentation and error.”

It came two days after the House approved the final wording of the First Amendment, but foreshadowed problems.

Meanwhile, deal making continued to bridge differences. Jefferson engineered the Compromise of 1790 bringing together Hamilton, who feared he lacked the votes for his central bank, and Madison over dinner in New York. Madison agreed not to block a strong bank that would impose taxes on the states to help pay war debts. Five percent tariffs and selling land would fund the government.

In return, Virginia would have its war debts were forgiven and Madison got a promise to move the capital from New York City to a site on the Potomac River. Pennsylvanians, who believed the interim capital in Philadelphia would become permanent, thought it would be upriver near the state. Instead, Washington chose a site near his home at Mount Vernon. Pennsylvania was assuaged by naming the main drag Pennsylvania Avenue.

Jefferson later lamented the compromise, which was ironic, because without it he wouldn’t have had a central bank to assist with the Louisiana Purchase.

Hamilton was not shy about attacking Jefferson personally and ideologically in newspapers. He wrote 25 essays under the pen name “Phocion,” charging that Jefferson had “skulked to a snug retreat” (going to Paris on diplomatic missions); abandoned the nation in its hour of peril (he had rejected Washington’s desperate request for Virginia troops); and fled danger (racing from Monticello when the Brits arrived.). All true.

But Hamilton’s critics shot back in Republican newspapers, describing a fictitious immigrant from the Caribbean named “Tom Shit”— clearly meant to resemble Hamilton — supposedly the illegitimate offspring of a white father (true) and a black mother (not; although his mother left her husband for Hamilton’s father). “Tom” peddled advice to a “Mrs. Columbia” (Washington) about how to run her plantation.

Things were a bit touchy since both were in Washington’s cabinet — Jefferson as secretary of state and Hamilton as secretary of the treasury. Jefferson said they were “daily pitted in the cabinet like two cocks.”

Hamilton didn’t respond directly to the attacks, but enlisted John Fenno, the Federalist publisher of Gazette of the United States, to do the his bidding. He also put him on the Treasury payroll.

Jefferson lured journalist Philip Freneau, Madison’s college roommate and “the poet of the American Revolution,” to publish Republicans’ National Gazette. Freneau portrayed Hamilton as catering only to wealthy Northerners, equating his style with that of British prime ministers who served their king, and calling his followers “Noblesse and Courtiers.” Freneau was on the secretary of state’s payroll as a translator, even though he only spoke French, although Jefferson was fluent in it.

Washington was mortified by the attacks and invited Jefferson to Mount Vernon, telling him the partisan warfare had gone too far. Instead, Jefferson attacked Hamilton’s “monarchial bent” before backing off in the face of Washington’s anger.

A few weeks later, Jefferson learned of a scandal involving Hamilton, who was 32 and a presumably happily married father of four. Hamilton had been visited one hot summer day in 1791 by the very hot Maria Reynolds, 23, while his wife, Betsey, and the kids were at her parents’ home in Albany.

Maria told a tale of woe, mistreated by her husband, James, who abandoned her for another woman, leaving her destitute. She asked Hamilton for financial assistance.

That night the clueless Hamilton brought her treasury bills issued by the Bank of the United States and engaged in a more intimate transaction. The affair continued for the next two months, usually at Hamilton’s home. After Maria magically reconciled with her husband, the scene shifted to her home — when hubby was away.

That winter, Maria told Al that her husband knew of their tryst. James demanded “satisfaction” to the tune of $1,000 or he’d tell Betsey and the world. Hamilton paid up, but James invited him to continue his affair with Maria, which lasted another five months —while Betsey was pregnant with their fifth child — in return for more blackmail payments. He finally quit in August 1792.

All was quiet until the arrests of Reynolds and James Clingman, the clerk to former Speaker of the House Frederick Muhlenberg, in November 1792 for perjury and defrauding the government. Trying to get Comptroller of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott to abandon the case, they produced letters from Hamilton to Maria Reynolds and evidence to “hang the secretary of the treasury” for illegal speculation in treasury securities.

Muhlenberg created a committee that included Virginia congressman James Monroe, a close Jefferson confidant, to help him investigate. They interviewed both Reynolds before confronting Hamilton, who owned up to his affair — “a plain case of a private amour,” he said — and the blackmail, providing documents to counter the charges.

He was found blameless. The committee agreed to keep it from public view. The clerk of the House — Virginian John Beckley, yet another close friend of Jefferson— was enlisted to make copies of the documentation.

Sexual indiscretions were not yet a part of partisan politics, but Jefferson leaped at the opportunity to rid the nation of Hamilton over supposed financial malfeasance and dishonorable behavior. He prevailed on Virginia congressman William Giles to call for a formal inquiry, expecting Hamilton would resign rather than have his affair become known. Jefferson helped draft a resolution to have Hamilton make an accounting of America’s loans, which could have led to a House investigation.

However, Hamilton beat back the inquiry, advising friendly congressmen how to counter the charges. And Jefferson was wary his own sexual indiscretions, long rumored in Charlottesville, might come to light if he openly continued with his tack.

Back in 1768, his William and Mary classmate Jack Walker had asked Jefferson to look after his young wife, Betsy, and infant daughter while he was away on a diplomatic mission in New York State, negotiating a treaty with Native Americans. Jefferson attempted to seduce Betsy, and persisted in his efforts for 11 years, even after his marriage to his beloved wife Martha in 1772.

He wouldn’t take “no” for a real answer. On one visit, he “renewed his caresses” on Betsy, then slipped a written note into her gown’s sleeve describing “the innocence of promiscuous love.” She tore it up. Jefferson didn’t get the hint. Later at a house party given by a mutual friend, after the women all retired for the night, Jefferson feigned a headache and said he was turning in. Instead, Tom found Betsy’s bedroom where she “was undressing or in bed.” While nothing happened, the incident had legs years later.

At 27, and still without much luck romantically, Jefferson wrote to his friend John Page about his wife’s charms and his “treasonable thoughts” about living as a threesome that “could pull down the moon.” Then there was Jefferson’s affair with his wife’s half-sister, Sally Hemings, a slave who accompanied him to Paris and lived at Monticello.

Those stories wouldn’t surface until his presidency.

Instead, Freneau attacked the leading Federalists: Hamilton threatened American independence by making it subservient to Great Britain, John Adams purportedly had an affinity for a monarchy and even Washington became fair game after his re-election in 1792 for his “monarchical prettiness” and “seclusion from the people.”

Jefferson was depicted as experienced and trustworthy, a champion of human rights.

Fenno, on the other hand, decried Jefferson as “weak, wavering and indecisive,” more suited to being a college president than United States president. The Federalists called him a secret atheist and danger to Christianity, and the embodiment of French Jacobism.

Amid those attacks and counterattacks, many Americans were becoming worried about who the nation’s real enemy was — France or Britain?

At first, most Americans were Francophiles. After all, the French had rescued an indecisive Washington from himself, leading to the victory at Yorktown.

Jefferson felt a spiritual kinship with the French after spending four years as a minister in Paris prior to the revolution. He viewed France as an evolving antidote to European aristocracy in a march toward “liberty on the whole Earth.”

Americans rejoiced when the French Third Estate — commoners and lower clergy, who Louis XVI had locked out of the Estates General — declared themselves the actual National Assembly, taking the Oath of the Tennis Court, a pledge that political authority came from the nation’s people. The French National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, co-authored by the Marquis de Lafayette in consultation with Jefferson in 1789.

Freneau’s National Gazette continued to take shots at Washington for his supposed British sympathies, while advocating close ties with France. The president asked Jefferson about his involvement with Freneau. He denied any role.

In 1792 French mobs with pick axes, clubs, knives and swords began slaughtering thousands, stoning to death the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, John Adams’ friend who translated the Declaration of Independence. The Marquis de Lafayette fled France after being declared an enemy of the state and was jailed in Austria.

After the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, Adams wrote, “Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots.”

The British went to war with France again in 1793 and began seizing U.S. merchant ships on the high seas believed bound for France. They forced U.S. sailors into service and wouldn’t honor terms of the peace treaty allowing American ships access to British ports.

The Aurora, published by Benjamin Franklin Bache, the grandson of his namesake (and son of his only legitimate daughter, Sarah), was the most strident Republican newspaper — pro-France and anti-British.  With its motto, “The Freedom of the Press is the Bulwark of Liberty,” it attacked Washington as a “weakling, a phony and a cad,” whose war victories were overblown, saved by the French.

He wrote that Washington was a closet royalist for negotiating the Jay Treaty that averted war with England in 1795, but largely favored British interests. The reality was that the fledgling American nation had little commercial or military leverage.

When an unauthorized copy of the treaty was leaked to the Aurora on June 29, riots and public bonfires of the British flag, the treaty, and effigies of Jay ensued. Washington was barraged with letters. He called the treaty opponents “mad dogs.” “Every one … seems engaged in running it down.”

On the Republican side, Madison vigorously opposed the treaty in Congress, but it passed, 51-48.

Jefferson was so forlorn about the treaty that he wrote to Philip Mazzei, a former neighbor who had moved to Italy, that “an Anglican, monarchical and aristocratical party has sprung up, whose avowed object is to draw over us the substance” of the British system.” … “It would give you fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over these heresies, men who were Samsons (meaning Washington) in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England.”

Mazzei had the letter published in a Florence newspaper, much to Jefferson’s regret, and it made its way back to the U.S., where it was printed in every Federalist newspaper, which decried Republicans as more loyal to France than America.

Washington was so stung by “the Samson in the field” criticism — and other tales of Jefferson’s doings — that he rebuffed all of Jefferson’s future attempts to contact him.

The French also weren’t happy with a perceived American tilt toward Britain.  French privateers in the West Indies captured hundreds of U.S. merchant ships, which were delivering timber, fish, grain and other commodities in return for sugar. They searched for cargo containing English goods, proclaiming it a pirate ship if it had them, but seized the ships and crew if they didn’t have proper French documentation.

In one of his last acts as president, Washington sent a delegation to Paris to negotiate, but the French refused to see them.

Adams, his successor, wanted a strong navy to combat losses on the high seas. Hamilton, although out of office, preferred a standing national army with Washington as its leader. That was a ruse, because he know Washington would defer to him. The military initiatives both played into Republican fears of an abusive federal government.

Meanwhile congressmen were debating loyalty and immigration.

Federalists had long mistrusted foreigners in general and immigrants in particular, especially if poor and non-English speaking. They unsuccessfully had opposed a provision in Article VI of the Constitution prohibiting religious tests for anyone serving in the federal government. Allowing non-Christians, Federalists feared, could cause the government to teem with “Jews, Turks and infidels.”

But they also weren’t crazy about the lower-class English and Scotch who fled their homelands because of animosity toward the monarchy and authority. Congressman Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts was wary of “hordes of wild Irishmen — the mass of vicious and disorganizing characters who could not live peaceably at home.”

Which brings us to Irish-born Congressman Matthew Lyon, of Vermont, a former indentured servant once traded for cattle, who became a self-educated printer, farmer and soldier, then started a Republican newspaper. He was a notorious rabble-rouser.

A Federalist newspaper had this to say about a Lyon rally:

“This singular animal is said to have been caught in the bog of Hibernia, and when a whelp, transported to America; curiosity induced a New Yorker to buy him and moving into the country, afterward exchanging him for a yoke of young bulls with a Vermontese. He was petted in the neighborhood of Gov. Chittenden, and soon became domesticated, that a daughter of his excellency would strike and play with him as a monkey. He differs considerably from an African lion, is more clamorous and less magnanimous. His pelt resembles more the wolf or the tiger, and his gestures bear a marked resemblance to the bear. This, however, may ascribed to his having been in the habit of associating with that species of wild beast on the mountains. He is carnivorous, but not very ferocious — he has never been detected in having attacked a man, but a report says he will beat women.”

Federalists falsely claimed Lyon was expelled from the Continental Army for cowardice and forced to carry a wooden sword that symbolized dishonor. Lyon maintained — with support — that he had voluntary left Gen. Horatio Gates’ command because he had been reduced to guarding wheat fields. He rose to the rank of captain with troops commanded by Seth Warner and fought in the Battle of Saratoga.

Lyon and other foreign-born congressmen were targeted by Federalists, including Swiss-born Abraham Alfonse Albert Gallatin, who had a “suspicious French accent.”

John Allen of Connecticut declared Lyon was trespassing on the sacred floor of American statesmanship.

Lyon responded that was glad to say he was “not descended from the bastards of Oliver Cromwell or his courtiers or from the Puritans, who punished their horses for breaking the Sabbath, or from those who persecuted the Quakers or hanged the witches.”

Federalists tried to slip a new $20 naturalization fee to slow the tide of immigration into a revenue-raising stamp tax bill. Republicans accused them of trying to reshape the immigration policies without debate.

Lyon called the fee “injurious, cruel and impolitic” — “we had told the world that there was in this country a good spring of liberty, and invited all to come drink of it. We had told them that the country was rich and fertile, and invited them to come and taste of our fruits.” Now, he added, we would “turn around and say, you shall not be admitted as citizens unless you pay $20.”

David Brooks of New York assured Republicans he had nothing against foreigners in general, but just wanted to keep “fugitives from justice” and other undesirables out.

The arguments grew so contentious that on January 30, 1798, Federalist congressman Roger Griswold of Connecticut told Lyon, “If you go into Connecticut, you had better wear your wooden sword.”

Lyon spat in his face.

Federalists sought his expulsion, but lacked the two-thirds majority necessary.

On Feb. 15, 1798, nearly two centuries before the Ali-Frazier “Thrilla in Manilla, there was the Lyon-Griswold “Fracas in Congress.”

As Lyon rose from his desk after writing some correspondence, Griswold hit him in the head with a hefty wooden cane. Bleeding with a gash to the forehead, Lyon went to the fireplace and grabbed metal tongs, which Griswold grabbed before he could be hit in the head. Representatives pulled them apart by the legs.

Newspapermen recorded the events, blow by blow, and a cartoon immortalized the fight.

“Lyon (who) protecting his head & face as well as he could then turned & made for the fire place & took up the (fire) tongs. Griswald dropped his stick & seized the tongs with one hand, & the collar of Lyon by the other, in which position they struggled for an instant when Griswald tripped Lyon & threw him on the floor & gave him one or two blows in the face. Moments after the two grappling combatants were separated, Lyon retreated to the House water table; when Griswold re-approached him, Lyon lunged forward with the fire tongs and initiated a second brawl. As Jonathan Mason commented, the central legislative body of the United States of America had been reduced to “an assembly of Gladiators.”
House Speaker Jonathan Dayton, a New Jersey Federalist, had had enough of the quarrels and the ensuing coverage. He proposed that all journalists be required to submit their notes to members of Congress before publishing stories. It wasn’t censorship, but “the opportunity of correcting” notes to ensure accuracy.
Meanwhile, Bache was doing his best to alienate Adams, calling him an “old querulous, bald, blind, crippled and toothless.”
Abigail Adams countered that Bache’s grandfather with his “illegitimate offspring” was nothing to be proud of, calling Bache a “wretch” and predicting he would soon get his comeuppance when “the wrath of an insulted people will by & by break him.”
That would, indeed, come to pass.
The catalyst was the XYZ Affair in 1797.

Adams let it be known he was considering his soon-to-be former friend Vice President Jefferson or Madison to head a bipartisan peace delegation to France. Madison told Jefferson to choose between his affection for Adams or Republican Party leadership. He opted for the latter. Political parties were now in full swing.

The French refused to meet with Adams’ delegation, but issued demands through three diplomats (codenamed X,Y and Z) for the Americans to disavow any tilt toward England, provide France with a war loan and give French Foreign Minister Talleyrand a $250,000 bribe.
The threat backfired. Once it became public, Talleyrand composed a conciliatory letter to Adams, given to Bache to print in the Aurora. He claimed it was handed to him by an American politician (the mayor of Philadelphia supported him in a sworn affidavit).
Federalists accused Bache of being a “secret agent of the French government,” which was tantamount to treason. He responded with a 12-page pamphlet, “The Foul Charges of the Tories Against the Editor of the Aurora, Repelled by Positive Proof and Plain Truth, and his Base Calumniators Put to Shame.”
Bache, though, wasn’t the only provocateur in the press. Which brings us to James Thomas Callender, a Scotsman who fled Britain and Ireland ahead of the scaffold after his investigative reporting angered authorities. He landed in the United States where Jefferson subsidized him as a firebrand for the Philadelphia Gazette. In 1797, he came into possession of the copies of Hamilton’s letters to the Reynolds.

Callender was not interested in Hamilton’s “wenching,” but thought Hamilton had used Treasury Department funds to speculate in securities — essentially laundering money through James Reynolds.

Hamilton, whose wife and children had just learned of the affair, decided to respond to the “Jacobin Scandal Club,” stating he was absolved by an investigation of financial misdeeds; that if he wanted to pilfer money, he would have taken more than that alleged.

“My crime is an amorous connection with his wife and (Reynolds’) design to extort money from me.” He was the “dupe of the plot,” ensnared by their “most imposing art,” swept off his feet by Maria’s many charms. “I can never cease to condemn myself,” he wrote, admitting that he slept with Maria even after she admitted her husband knew.

Callender said the admission was “worth all that fifty of the best pens in America could have said against him.” The story became a popular New York theatrical production — a spoof, not a fawning hiphop musical.

Hamilton then turned his rage to James Monroe from the investigative committee, who he was convinced was the leaker. He called him a “Scoundrel” and proposed a duel. “I will meet you like a gentleman.” Monroe responded, “I am ready. Get your pistols.”

But Monroe’s second, Aaron Burr, believed the duel was pointless and intercepted letters between the two men. It was the second time Burr saved Hamilton’s life.

Because of the outspoken Lyon, Bache, Callender and other Republican politicians and journalists, the Federalists called for restrictions on the press, which worried Jefferson.
He wrote to Madison that Adams “may look to the Sedition bill, which was spoken of, and which may be meant to put the printing presses under the imprimatur of the executive. Bache is thought to be a main object of it.”
Bache wrote on June 13, “We ring the alarm. Papers of freedom, you have not sold yourselves, you that forget your revolution and the constitution … take up the sound before it dies and let the peal rouse the spirit and reflection of the land.”
Two weeks later, a federal judge issued a warrant for his arrest, charging him under common law with libeling the president and government in a manner tending to excite sedition.” Bache posted $4,000 in bond and continued to publish the Aurora.
The Federalists, boasting strong majorities and a public inflamed by possible war with France, upped the ante.
First, they passed the Alien Act of 1798, increasing the time for naturalization from five to 14 years. Immigrants already in the country would have to register as aliens. The president could deport any alien or intern them without trial.
As for citizens, the Federalists introduced “a bill to determine particularly the crime of treason, and to define and punish the crime of sedition.”
“That if any persons shall, by any libelous or scandalous writing, printing, publishing or speaking, traduce of defame the legislature of the United States, by seditious or inflammatory declaration, or expressions, with an intent to create a belief in the citizens thereof, that the said legislature, in enacting any law, was induced thereto by motives hostile to the constitution, or liberties and happiness thereof; or shall in a manner aforesaid, traduce or defame the President of the United States, or any court or judge thereof, by declarations tending to criminate their motives in any official transaction; the person so offending, and thereof convicted, before any court of the United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine, not exceeding $2,000, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years.”
Freneau of the National Gazette challenged his readers: “Are you freeman who ought to know the individual conduct of your legislators or are you an inferior order of beings incapable of comprehending the sublimity of the Senatorial function and unworthy to be trusted with their opinions?”
The Senate approved the measures on July 4, 1798, 18-6. (Of note, the Fourth of July didn’t become a national holiday until 1870.)
Because libel law was nonexistent, the truth of the article as a defense was not established. Republican Thomas Claiborne of Virginia persuaded the House to deviate from the Senate version of the bill by adding truth as a defense. The bill passed, 67-15.
The legislation conveniently would expire when Adams left office, allowing the Federalists to attack Jefferson if he became president.
Secretary of State Thomas Pickering, of Salem Massachusetts, immediately embarked on a massive witch hunt against dissenters by organizing a network of informers, including Federalist publishers. Zealously anti-French, his targets included a seamstress making dresses in a French fashion. His 20^th century biographer, initially intent on restoring his reputation, concluded he was “one of the principal villains of early American history.”
His first target was an obscure New York publisher who was arrested for comparing Adams to Benedict Arnold, suggesting both men wanted to return the United States to its former position as “an appendage of the British monarchy.” Another New York publisher was arrested after warning that the secretary of state was “organizing a system of espionage. Citizens beware of spies and informers.”
Because that publisher was born in Ireland, Pickering weighed prosecution or deportation. Aaron Burr, a Republican senator, intervened, getting Pickering to agree to deportation, not criminal charges, while the editor slipped away into Republican Virginia.
Callender also left Philadelphia for Virginia, where Jefferson sent him periodic checks. Callender, though, continually got drunk and thrown in jail.
Adams, meanwhile, couldn’t keep the Federalists in line. He wanted a strong Navy to deal with the attacks on the high seas, but Hamilton managed to goad the Federalists into approving a standing Army. He took the helm when Washington preferred retirement.
That inspired Bache to blast the “pious” Adams for appointing a “confessed adulterer Hamilton as inspector general of the army.”
Bache was facing sedition changes that September, but he died that summer during the yellow scourge that decimated much of Philadelphia’s population.
In late July, the Sedition and Alien Acts became personal for Adams as his carriage went through Newark, N.J. Artillery shells announced his arrival and a chorus sang out, “Behold the Chief who now commands.” But Luther Baldwin, a 46-year-old, who had been drinking, said, “I don’t care if they fire through his arse.”
The Federalist postmaster overheard him and had charges brought. It would have been the nation’s first free speech trial, but Baldwin agreed to pay a $150 fine.
Meanwhile, the Federalists were hell bent to finally exact revenge against Lyon, who wrote a letter critical of Adams for a Vermont newspaper. He was charged with sedition and didn’t stand a chance. The prosecuting attorney was a friend of a longtime nemesis. The judge had been his opponent in the congressional race. The jury was packed with Federalists. Lyon’s claims that the law was unconstitutional fell on deaf ears. How could it be unconstitutional if Congress had passed it?
A jury found him guilty within hours. He got four months in jail and a $1,000 fine — serious money compounded by the fact you stayed behind bars until it was paid.
That fall, while Lyon sat in jail, he was overwhelmingly re-elected. Federalists tried to have him expelled but again failed to get the two-thirds majority necessary.
At Adams’ behest, Pickering went after Thomas Cooper, a Pennsylvania publisher who fled England with his friend Joseph Priestley, the noted English theologian, natural philosopher, political theorist, and chemist. Adams had admired Priestly and dined with him, but now he felt betrayed.
Cooper accused Adams of abusing his authority, advancing tyranny and despotism, supporting large banks over farmers and merchants and building standing armies and navies to intimidate people into submission, while seeking to engage in foreign wars.
He attempted, without success to subpoena Pickering, congressman and the president. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase denied his requests, maintaining the Constitution expressly prohibited the president testifying, without providing a citation. Cooper claimed Chase had made up “executive privilege” out of whole cloth.
Because the Sedition Act allowed truth as a defense, Cooper also requested documents from Pickering and copies of presidential addresses to “prove” Adams’s “bungling” performance in office. Chase again denied it.
The prosecutor maintained an attack on an individual politician was an attacked on all those who elected him and, in turn, the United States. Cooper, he said, must be made an example.
Chase found Cooper guilty, fined him $400 and sentenced him to six months in jail.
In Virginia, the Sedition Act caught up to Callender, with the roaming Chase as a judge. He again denied defense attempts to show that the Sedition Act was unconstitutional. Callender was fined $200 and received nine months in prison.
While Republicans were being ushered off to jail, they also were winning elections. State legislatures were inundated with petitions to rescind the Sedition Act. Federalists had been dared to ignore petitions at their risk, a hallowed tradition since the Magna Carta.

Meanwhile, Adams brokered peace with the French, which created a rift in his own party. The warmonger Pickering sought to find another presidential candidate to replace him, so Adams fired him. Hamilton wrote a 54-page essay, citing Adams’ “unfitness for the station” of president, prompting Cooper to ask why Federalists weren’t pursuing Sedition Act charges against him.

On March 3, 1801, the Sedition Act expired with the Adams presidency — after two years, seven months and 17 days.

Jefferson become president after an Electoral College tie with Aaron Burr was broken when Hamilton urged the Federalist-dominated House of Representatives to vote for his former cabinet nemesis, a hypocrite whose politics are “tinctured with fanaticism,” but is “able and wise,” rather than Burr, “unprincipled” and “cunning,” “shifty and dexterous.”

Callender was now free to attack another sitting president. He turned on his former patron Jefferson.

After Callender got out of jail in 1801, Jefferson reneged on offering him the position of postmaster in Richmond.

Subsequently, in a series of articles in the Richmond Recorder beginning on September 1, 1802, Callender alleged that Jefferson had several children by a slave concubine, “Sally” (Hemings).
He also broke the story of Jefferson’s long ago improper advances toward Betsy Walker decades earlier, which she had revealed publically in a “Me Too”-like confession. Federalist editors nationwide gleefully published the stories.

Jefferson was silent about the relationship with Hemings. Notably, when he liberated some slaves in his final days, he did not set her free, something his daughter would finally do so she could live with her two sons.

On July 11, 1804, Hamilton and Burr crossed paths for the final time, a meeting precipitated by a letter a friend had written following a private dinner with Hamilton when he had talked about his “despicable opinion” of Burr. The letter found its way into print. Hamilton would not apologize. At a dueling ground in Weehawken, New Jersey, along the Hudson River and below the Palisades, Hamilton shot into the air, felling a tree branch. Burr hit Hamilton in the leg with a fatal shot, severing an artery. He subsequently fled to Georgia amid intense press criticism.

The best postmortem for the Sedition Act was written before its demise. In January 1799, Virginia attorney George Hay wrote “An Essay on the Liberty of Press,” equating a free press to freedom of religion, arguing that even hateful ideas must be permitted in any society that wishes to live in freedom.
“The evils arising from the toleration of heresy and atheism, are less, infinitely less, than the evils of persecution.” Likewise, “if the words freedom of the press, have any meaning at all, they mean a total exemption from any law making any publication whatever criminal,” since the only way to stifle objectionable voices would be to exercise “a power fatal to the liberty of the people.”

Indeed, for a society to remain free, “A man may say every thing which his passion can suggest; he may employ all his time, and all his talents, if he is wicked enough to do so, in speaking against the government matters that are false, scandalous, and malicious.” The best way to counter such maliciousness is with truth, as discerned by free, reasoning minds, Hay added. “The truth cannot be impressed upon the human mind by power.”

Adams tried to distance himself from the Alien and Sedition Acts, claiming they were Hamilton’s idea, but adding, “I knew there was need enough of both, and therefore I consented to them.”
The website for the Adams National Historic Park claims, “Adams played no part in the formation of these acts nor did he take steps to enforce them, but he was held responsible for these unpopular measures in the public mind.”
The record, though, shows Adams was a zealous advocate and enforcer, a hypocrite who had written in the Boston Gazette in 1765 about the “indisputable, inalienable, indefeasible divine right” of individuals to criticize their leaders.

SOURCE MATERIALS

·       Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, by Joseph Ellis

·       Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry that Forged a Nation, by John Ferling

·       Liberty's First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson, and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech, by Charles Slack