768 Chapter XXXI
nel and its policies, often in extravagant and abusive terms. The Federalists, how-
ever, had not yet accepted the propriety of criticism of government. Opposition to
their policies, or even to their persons, was what they meant by sedition. The re-
pression on which they embarked, astoundingly enough in view of American
“moderation,” had less actual justification, if only by raison d ’état, than the repres-
sion conducted by either conservative or revolutionary regimes in Europe and the
rest of America. All eleven persons convicted under the Sedition Act were active
Republicans, and six of them were newspaper editors. The Federalists, it seemed,
really meant to crush a party which had arisen in opposition to government, even
if they destroyed freedom of the press as well. The Republicans naturally took
alarm, since the existence of their newly formed party was what most obviously
was at stake. In the south they responded, through Madison and Jefferson, with
the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, in which state legislatures took it upon
themselves to declare federal laws, in this case the Alien and Sedition Acts, to be
unconstitutional and of no effect. The remedy would have proved as fatal as the
disease, had matters gone further, so far as the creation of a viable national govern-
ment was concerned.
At the same time the polemics in print came to a climax. Over the decade, it is
possible to distinguish two periods, an early one in which writings favorable to the
French Revolution seemed to preponderate, and a later one, beginning about 1795,
when the tide, in words at least, turned more in favor of England. The Americans
were not yet a book- writing people. Books, often enough, like the Federalist, were
reprints of articles written for newspapers. Adams’ Defense of the Constitutions of the
United States had been written in England; since it drew heavily on works which
did not then exist in American libraries, it could not have been written in Amer-
ica. Paine’s Rights of Man was also written in England. Strongly identifying the
French and American revolutions, it was reprinted at least nineteen times in the
United States between 1791 and 1796. The first American printings of some of
Rousseau’s works, including the Social Contract, were made also at this time. On
the whole, most books in the United States, as in colonial times, were still im-
ported; and this fact gave an advantage to Great Britain.
Newspapers and pamphlets, and printed sermons and Fourth of July orations,
were the more usual native media of expression. The newspapers, having no report-
ers, copied from each other, and from the papers which every arriving ship un-
loaded on the docks from Europe. Here again the British had the advantage. As
early as 1790, Thomas Jefferson, having just returned from France, and finding
Fenno’s Gazette of the United States full of British accounts of the French Revolu-
tion, reached an agreement with him to supply extracts from the Leyden Gazette,
published in French in Holland by the old Patriot, John Luzac.^35 In the following
years, as controversy mounted, native- born editors were joined by others from
Britain and Ireland. The Federalists won William Cobbett to their side; but most
of the newcomers found the Republicans more congenial, and brought to the
American political scene some of the animus that they had formed against the
Establishment in England and Ireland. John Daly Burk edited the Boston Polar
35 J. P. Boyd and others, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, XVI (Princeton, 1961), 237–47.