The Alien and Sedition Acts 165The XYZ Affair
At this point occurred one of the most remarkable
reversals of public feeling in American history. French
attacks on American shipping, begun out of irritation
at the Jay Treaty and in order to influence the elec-
tion, continued after Adams took office. Hoping to
stop them, Adams appointed three commissioners
(Charles Pinckney, United States minister to France,
and elder brother of Thomas;^1 John Marshall, a
Virginia Federalist lawyer; and Elbridge Gerry of
Massachusetts, who was not closely identified with
either party) to try to negotiate a settlement. They
were instructed to seek a moderate settlement, to
“terminate our differences... without referring to
the merits.”
Their mission was a fiasco. Talleyrand, the French
foreign minister, sent an agent later spoken of as X to
demand “something for the pocket,” a “gratifica-
tion,”—read a bribe—as the price of making a deal.
Later two other Tallyrand agents, Y and Z, made the
same demand. The Americans refused, more because
they suspected Talleyrand’s good faith than because
of any particular distaste for bribery. “No, no, not a
sixpence,” Pinckney later told X. The talks broke up,
and in April 1798 President Adams released the com-
missioners’ reports.
They caused a sensation. Americans’ sense of
national honor, perhaps overly tender because the
country was so young and insecure, was outraged.
Pinckney’s laconic refusal to pay a bribe was trans-
lated into the grandiose phrase “Millions for defense,
but not one cent for tribute!” and broadcast through-
out the land. John Adams, never a man with mass
appeal, suddenly found himself a national hero.
Federalist hotheads burned for a fight. Congress uni-
laterally abrogated the French Alliance, created a
Navy Department, and appropriated enough money
to build forty-odd warships and triple the size of the
army. Washington came out of retirement to lead the
forces, with Hamilton, now a general, as second in
command. On the seas American privateers began to
attack French shipping.
Adams did not much like the French and he
could be extremely stubborn. A declaration of war
would have been immensely popular. But perhaps the
famously prickly president did not want to be popu-
lar. Instead of calling for war, he contented himself
with approving the buildup of the armed forces.
The Republicans, however, committed to friendship
with France, did not appreciate Adams’s moderation.
Although angered by the XYZ Affair, they tried, one
Federalist complained, “to clog the wheels of govern-
ment” by opposing the military appropriations. John
Daly Burk of the New York Time Piececalled Adams a
“mock Monarch” surrounded by a “court composed of
tories and speculators,” which of course was a flat lie.
Many Federalists expected the Republicans to
side with France if war broke out. Hysterical and near
panic, they easily persuaded themselves that the dan-
ger of subversion was acute. The French Revolution
and the resulting war were churning European society
to the depths, stirring the hopes of liberals and strik-
ing fear in the hearts of conservatives. Refugees of
both persuasions were flocking to the United States.
Suddenly the presence of these foreigners seemed
threatening to “native” Americans.The Alien and Sedition Acts
Conservative Federalists saw in this situation a chance
to smash the opposition. In June and July 1798 they
pushed through Congress a series of repressive mea-
sures known as theAlien and Sedition Acts. The Alien
Enemies Act gave the president the power to arrest or
expel aliens in time of “declared war,” but since the
quasi-war with France was never declared, this measure
had no practical importance. The Alien Act authorized
the president to expel all aliens whom he thought “dan-
gerous to the peace and safety of the United States.”
(Adams never invoked this law, but a number of aliens
left the country out of fear that he might.)
Finally, there was the Sedition Act. Its first sec-
tion, making it a crime “to impede the operation of
any law” or to attempt to instigate a riot or insurrec-
tion, was reasonable enough; but the act also made it
illegal to publish, or even to utter, any “false, scan-
dalous and malicious” criticism of high government
officials. Although milder than British sedition laws,
this proviso rested, as James Madison said, on “the
exploded doctrine” that government officials “are the
masters and not the servants of the people.”
As the election of 1800 approached, the
Federalists made a systematic attempt to silence the
leading Republican newspapers. Twenty-five per-
sons were prosecuted and ten convicted, all in
patently unfair trials. In typical cases, the editor
Thomas Cooper, an English-born radical, later
president of the University of South Carolina, was
sentenced to six months in jail and fined $400; the
editor Charles Holt got three months and a $200
fine; and the editor James Callender got nine
months and a $200 fine.
The Alien and Sedition Actsat
myhistorylab.comReadtheDocument(^1) The Pinckney brothers were children of Eliza Pinckney, the
woman responsible for the introduction of indigo cultivation
to America.