Two hundred years ago, on a summer's day in 1798, the second president of the United States, John Adams, passed through Newark, N.J., on his way home from the political strife of the temporary capital in Philadelphia to the homely comforts of Braintree, Mass.

Federal Party followers of Adams' assembled to greet the chief executive's entourage with waving flags, ringing church bells and sounding cannon. Then, to the astonishment and mortification of the citizenry, the president pushed his horses to full speed and rushed by, carriage curtains down, without even a nod.

Here's how the Philadelphia Aurora, a pro-Jefferson paper that delighted in tormenting Adams, reported what then ensued: "Luther Baldwin happening to be coming toward John Burnet's dram shop, a person that was there says to Luther, 'There goes the President and they are firing at his a--.' Luther, a little merry, replies that he did not care if they fired through his a--.' Then exclaims the dram seller, 'That is sedition' -- a considerable collection gathered -- and the pretended federalists, being much disappointed that the president had not stopped that they might have the honor kissing his hand, bent their malice on poor Luther, and the cry was that he must be punished."

Such was the temper of those times that poor Luther indeed was punished. He was tried, found guilty and fined $400 (a considerable sum) for violating the brand-new Sedition Act, one of the most detested laws in the nation's history.

It criminalized the writing, printing, uttering or publishing of "any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the Government of the United States, or either House of Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States."

Together with equally notorious Alien Acts that gave the president authority to deport without trial any alien in peace or war, the sedition statute reflected hysteria over threatened war with France and the vulnerability of a shaky republic operating under a Constitution not yet a decade old.

If such a measure were on the books today, would President Clinton be spared the humiliation of being called a liar and a womanizer or of having a body part more intimate than his posterior discussed in the public media?

Not a chance. For although the Sedition Act has been pilloried as an egregious violation of the First Amendment, which it was, its actual effect was quite the opposite. Americans discovered for the first time how much they treasured their new Constitution's protection of intellectual freedom. The Alien and Sedition Acts turned out to be almost unenforceable.

As Justice William J. Brennan Jr. noted in 1970, the Supreme Court never ruled on the Sedition Act, but "the attack upon its validity has carried the day in the court of history."

Only a score of citizens -- editors of anti-Federalist newspapers, one congressman, the unfortunate Luther Baldwin and a few others -- were arrested. The number of newspapers critical of Adams more than doubled. Federalists split over policy toward France, then their enemy of choice. Ultras among them turned on Adams as he sought peace, excoriating him in their newspapers with as much venom as the most outspoken of Republican-Democrat sheets. The Sedition Act became a dead letter with the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson as president in 1801.

In this bicentennial year of the Alien and Sedition Acts, it is worth noting that the First Amendment, with its protections of free speech, press and religion, is always at risk. Just as Adams railed against the "licentiousness" of newspapers that vilified him, so did Jefferson once he was in office.

During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln trampled on individual rights to preserve the Union. After communism came to power in Russia, Woodrow Wilson's attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, ordered raids on the homes and meeting halls of suspected Bolsheviks. During World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration sent thousands of Japanese-American citizens to concentration camps, a shameful episode far more drastic than anything contemplated two centuries ago.

Closer to our time, as the country was seized by McCarthyism, the government blacklisted supposed security threats with a zeal reminiscent of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

In his two-volume work on the second president, historian Page Smith defended Adams and the Federalists by noting that the republic was less than 10 years old, that it was torn by political parties determined to destroy their opponents, that Napoleonic France was harassing U.S. ships and ports, that 30,000 French nationals and even greater numbers of Irish immigrants posed an internal threat and that a "violent and vituperative press" was assaulting the nation's leaders and institutions.

Three Marylanders played major roles in the alien and sedition saga. Sen. James Lloyd, an ultra-Federalist, introduced a measure that labeled the government and people of France as enemies, declared that giving them aid and comfort (even in peacetime) was treason punishable by death and proscribed any "writing, printing or speaking" damaging to the "character, person and property" of any person holding an office of public trust. Even Alexander Hamilton, leader of the Federalists, warned that the Lloyd bill would introduce a "tyranny."

In the House of Representatives, one of the most outspoken opponents of oppressive legislation was Rep. Samuel Smith, a hero in the Revolutionary War who later led the defense of Baltimore during the War of 1812. He and other Jefferson Republicans managed to water down the extremist Lloyd proposal by making truth a defense against libel.

The third Marylander to figure in the Alien and Sedition Acts story was Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, known to the Jefferson Republicans as the "hanging judge." Often acting more as zealous prosecutor than impartial judge, Chase had the dubious distinction of imposing the harshest sentences on the unlucky few caught in the hysteria of the moment.

From the vantage point of two centuries, some salient points emerge. Newspapers during the early years of the Republic were strictly party organs. The chief Federalist paper, John Fenno's Gazette of the United States, was as hot as the most fervent Federal enforcers to throw Republican editors in jail. The modern party system, which assumes cycles of winning and losing rather than destruction of the opposition, was still years in the future.

Political "factions," the pro-British Federalists and the pro-French Republicans, were enmeshed in European enmities.

Sectional strife that was to result in the Civil War 60 years later had one of its earliest manifestations in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolves to "nullify" under the banner of states' rights the Alien and Sedition Acts.

In addition, ideological differences were yet to be hammered out on the hard anvils of logic and time. The Federalist belief in a strong central government was seen by Jeffersonians as a path to tyranny. The Jeffersonian adherence to free expression and popular democracy was considered by Federalists as the road to anarchy.

Yet, in the course of the next 200 years, strong central government and individual liberty were as often in alliance as they were in opposition to one another -- a phenomenon that might well have astonished those old antagonists, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

The nation survived this first Constitutional crisis, but it was a near thing and a harbinger of future trials and stress.

The Sedition Act

Sec. 1 Be it enacted ... That if any persons shall unlawfully combine or conspire together with intent to oppose any measure or measures of the government of the United States.

Sec. 2 And be it further enacted, That if any person shall write, print, utter or publish ... any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the Government of the United States, or either House of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States with intent to defame ... or bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States ... or to impede the operation of any law of the United States ... or to resist, oppose or default any such law or act ... then such persons, being thereof convicted ... shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars and by imprisonment not exceeding two years.

Pub Date: 10/15/98