'We shall see the reign of witches pass over'
How American democracy survived an administration that targeted immigrants and journalists
John Adams and Alexander Hamilton couldn’t stand each other.
The second president complained to War Secretary James McHenry that Hamilton is “a man devoid of every moral principle—a Bastard, and as much a foreigner as [Swiss-born Albert] Gallatin.”
Hamilton let loose an extraordinary 14,067-word diatribe against Adams, declaring that he did not “possess the talents adapted to the Administration of Government, and that there are great and intrinsic defects in his character.”
Among those defects: “a vanity without bounds, and a jealousy capable of discoloring every object.”
They weren’t from warring political parties. Both were Federalists who had served under President George Washington. Their mutual dislike was as much visceral as it was ideological. “Adams could not bear to be hectored by Hamilton, who could not bear to be patronized by Adams,” wrote biographer Ron Chernow. “These two vain, ambitious men seemed to bring out the worst in each other.”
Yet in policy terms, Adams and Hamilton agreed on one big thing. They both supported the harsh Alien and Sedition Acts passed in 1798, including the one that President Donald Trump’s executive order cited this month to justify the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
Their problems are our problems
The late 1790s were a historical moment that prefigured many of the tensions we face today: a deeply polarized country, a growing fear of immigration, a foreign war, ferociously partisan media and existential threats to civil liberties and press freedom.
That American democracy survived all of those challenges doesn’t mean it will survive what we face today, but on some level it is reassuring.
Thomas Jefferson, who had a big hand in promoting partisan conflict in his rivalries with Adams and Hamilton, reflected in 1798 that, “In every free & deliberating society there must, from the nature of man, be opposite parties & violent dissensions & discords; and one of these, for the most part, must prevail over the other for a longer or shorter time.”
But he urged a fellow anti-Federalist to have “a little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.”
“A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over…” — Thomas Jefferson
War fever
Fearing attacks from revolutionary France, then-President Adams and former Treasury Secretary Hamilton were among the Federalists who were “convinced that they had to do something to suppress what they believed were the sources of Jacobin [revolutionary movement] influence in America — the increasing numbers of foreign immigrants and the scurrilous behavior of the Republican press,” historian Gordon Wood wrote in Empire of Liberty.
David McCullough set the scene, in his biography of John Adams:
There was rampant fear of the enemy within. French immigration in America, according to the French consul in Philadelphia, by now numbered 25,000 or more. Many were aristocrats who had fled the terror; but the majority were refugees from the slave uprising on the Caribbean island of San Domingo. In Philadelphia a number of French newspapers had been established. There were French booksellers, French schools, French boardinghouses, and French restaurants. the French, it seemed were everywhere, and who is to measure the threat they posed in the event of war with France?
Despite the threat, the Alien and Sedition Acts, which stripped immigrants of their rights and journalists of their freedom of expression, were “a disastrous mistake,” Wood observed. “Indeed, the Alien and Sedition acts so thoroughly destroyed the Federalists’ historical reputation that it is unlikely it can ever be recovered.”
Trump’s order
On March 14, Trump reached back to the Adams administration’s 1798 laws when he issued an executive order accusing Tren de Aragua, a Venezeulan gang, of unlawfully infiltrating the US, “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.”
To defend the nation from what he termed “the devastating effects of this invasion,” Trump proclaimed that all of the gang’s members who are 14 years or older and are not U.S. citizens or permanent residents will be “apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.”
Members of the gang have been arrested in several states, have committed robberies and are suspected of shooting two police officers in New York and of the killing of a former Venezuelan police officer in Florida, according to NPR.
The Trump administration deported more than 250 alleged gang members to El Salvador, where the Trump-friendly government imprisoned them.
Several of those facing deportation had challenged the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act in a court case that has blown up into a politically charged Trump campaign of invective against Judge James E. Boasberg. The judge had ordered the government to refrain from deporting any of the plaintiffs and to turn around any plane that had left the U.S. carrying them until the case could be resolved.
The judge wrote:
It soon emerged that two planes were indeed likely in the air during the hearing. In other words, the Government knew as of 10:00 AM on March 15th that the Court would hold a hearing later that day, and the most reasonable inference is that it hustled people onto those planes in the hopes of evading an injunction or perhaps preventing them from requesting the habeas hearing to which the Government now acknowledges they are entitled.
The planes did not turn around.
Boasberg ruled that those facing deportation under the Alien Enemies Act, including those who deny they are members of the Venezuelan gang, are entitled to a hearing.
Alien Enemies
The Justice Department appealed Boasberg’s ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals.
At a hearing Monday, one of the three judges, Patricia Millett, said suspected Nazis deported from the U.S. during World War II “got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act than has happened here … they had hearing boards, before people were removed. And yet here, there’s nothing in there about hearing boards. There are no regulations, and nothing was adopted by the agency officials that were administering this. People weren’t given notice — they weren’t told where they were going.”
On Wednesday, the appeals court decided by a 2-1 margin to maintain Boasberg’s order temporarily barring more deportations under the Alien Enemies Act while the case continues in the courts.
The act, signed by President Adams on July 6, 1798, is the only one of the much-criticized Alien and Sedition Acts that still remains on the books.
It says that whenever war is declared “or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted or threatened against the territory of the United States, by any foreign nation or government,” citizens of the hostile nation will be subject to being arrested and removed from the United States.
Whether the Venezuelan gang’s activities fall under this provision is a matter for much legal debate.
Quasi-War
After the French government permitted the seizure of American merchant vessels in 1796, the two governments faced off in what was called a Quasi-War. Seeking peace, Adams sent three envoys to France, but their attempts to meet with the Foreign Minister, the Marquis de Talleyrand, were rebuffed.
Instead, the representatives of the U.S. were given a set of preconditions for such a meeting: They had to loan money to France at low interest, pay for any claims filed by American merchants against France and even pay a bribe to Talleyrand.
The envoys wouldn’t comply, but they eventually had a meeting with Talleyrand that resolved little. The disclosure of these events in dispatches from the U.S. diplomats led to an outcry against France among Americans.
Still, many viewed Adams’ new laws as an overreach. The legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky, urged on by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, passed resolutions objecting to the Alien and Sedition Acts, enraging Hamilton who saw the resolutions as evidence of “a regular conspiracy to overturn the government.”
In the end, Adams managed to avert a full war with a controversial move, which Hamilton detested: The president sent a new set of diplomats to France, and the two countries agreed to a peace deal.
Assault on press freedom
The Alien and Sedition Acts were “directed against Democratic-Republicans, the party typically favored by new citizens,” according to the National Archives.. “The only journalists prosecuted under the Sedition Act were editors of Democratic-Republican newspapers.”
The Sedition Act, which expired at the end of the Adams presidency, allowed the government to lock up anyone responsible for “writing, printing, uttering or publishing 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 the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute…”
Thus Adams and Hamilton, two leaders of the young republic who fought for liberty, wound up enforcing one of the biggest violations in history of the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedom.
The controversy over the Alien and Sedition Acts helped put an end to Federalist control of the government. In 1800, their opponents, the Democratic-Republicans headed by Jefferson, won control of the Presidency and both Houses of Congress.
There would never be another Federalist president.
The stakes
In the controversy over Adams’ repressive laws, it was James Madison who made the necessary case for press freedom:
Yes, he argued, the press commits abuses, but “it is better to leave a few of its noxious branches to their luxuriant growth, than, by pruning them away, to injure the vigour of those yielding the proper fruits.”
Without a free press, the U.S. might still be “miserable colonies, groaning under a foreign yoke,” Madison observed.
“To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression…”
Very nice commentary. loce the way you're able to weave the past into the present, and how there always seems to be some connection.
“To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression…” Don't you miss James Madison? Thanks, Rich, for another valuable history lesson.