American Realities with Bill Youngs
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        • The Native Americans
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        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
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        • A Slave's Story
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        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
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        • Modernity versus Tradition
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    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map
  J. William T. "Bill" Youngs, American Realities, Volume One: 
Historical Episodes from First Settlements to the Civil War, Chapter Seven


John Adams, Official Presidential Portrait, by John Trumbull, courtesy of the Wikipedia Commons

07. Testing the Constitution
The Alien and Sedition Acts

Summary

Picture
During the two centuries since 1776, Americans have frequently found new rights imbedded in the ideology of the Revolution, but at other times they have moved towards limiting the rights associated with the Revolution. In the struggle over the Alien and Sedition Acts, they adopted measures greatly limiting freedom of speech — contrary to the Bill of Rights. This essay explores the immediate circumstances that made those limitations seem proper. Then it traces the growth of a public reaction against the acts and argues that this opposition ultimately strengthened the First Amendment. In the story of the Alien and Sedition Acts we see the first of many episodes in which Americans would reexamine, then reaffirm, the high ground of human rights they had adopted during the era of the Revolution.

Author Reads From the Text

President John Adams had hoped to travel quietly from Philadelphia, the national capital, to Quincy, Massachusetts, where he and his wife, Abigail, would spend the summer. The business of preparing for war — expanding the army, building new ships, appointing officers — had left him exhausted. Abigail, too, needed rest, having followed every turn of national affairs almost as closely as her husband. She found Philadelphia’s summer air so hot and close that “you had as good be in an oven.” She missed her friends at home and now wanted to “slide along to them, unnoticed and without parade.”


As the carriage entered Newark, the good citizens of that place were more pleased to see the president than he was to see them. Undoubtedly he waved and smiled politely, but he did not stop to greet the notables who had hoped to kiss his hand. As he drove past the young men preparing to saluate him with a cannon, they chanted in unison, “Behold the chief who now commands.” The president probably acknowledged their greeting, but his carriage rattled on, leaving the youths to fire a sixteen-gun salute after their departing commander in chief.


At the doorway of John Burnet’s tavern a well-liquored crowd watched the coach as it disappeared down the road. The town’s moment of glory had ended abruptly, and there remained only the anticlimax of the day ahead. Perhaps to enliven the atmosphere, one of the men remarked, “There goes the President, and they are firing at his ass.”
     

 In response another fellow, one Luther Baldwin, who was said to be “a little merry,” expressed his political sensibilities in a few pithy words, “I do not care,” said he, “if they fire through his ass.”

Suddenly the town had a new event at which to marvel. Here in their midst was a traitor, a speaker of forbidden words. Such, at least, was the conclusion of the tavern owner. “This is sedition,” he said. A group of Federalists who had gathered around expressed their agreement. Luther Baldwin had broken the law, and he must pay the penalty…


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Chapter 6: The American Revolution
Chapter 8: Republican Nationalism