A Magnificent Catastrophe

by Edward J. Larson

  Alarmists in America saw parallels where none existed. They now equated a series of easily suppressed tax revolts over the past two decades—Shays’s Rebellion against Massachusetts tax and foreclosure laws in 1786, the Whiskey Rebellion against national excise taxes in 1794, and Fries’s Rebellion against national war taxes in 1799—with the massive popular uprisings that plunged revolutionary France into chaos, even though the scale and causes of them differed greatly. “If our people cannot be brought to bear necessary taxes,” Fisher Ames sternly advised Treasury Secretary Oliver Wolcott in January 1800, “I am afraid they are unfit for an independent government.”

  During the 1800 presidential campaign, Ames became the brooding conscience of Federalism by incessantly invoking in published essays and private letters the specter of France to rally opposition to Jefferson’s election. Regardless of his personal prudence, Jefferson “must act as his party will have him,” warned Ames, a recently retired member of Congress who would later be offered the presidency of Harvard College. “Behold France—what is theory here, is fact there,” he asserted. “The men, the means, the end of such a government as Jefferson must…prefer will soon ensure war with Great Britain,…alliance with France, plunder, and anarchy.” In a widely circulated essay, Ames added that if in the presidential election the American Jacobins “should prevail, the people would be crushed, as in France, under tyranny more vindictive, unfeeling, and rapacious, than that of Tiberius, Nero, or Caligula.”

  In countless Federalist editorials, Bonaparte came to personify the likely consequence of excessive republicanism. Endlessly compared to Caesar and Cromwell, he became the tyrannical usurper of legitimate authority—put forward as a warning for true patriots. “Behold France, that open hell, still ringing with agonies and blasphemies, still smoking with sufferings and crimes, in which we see their state of torment, and perhaps our future state,” Ames wrote. “Friends of virtue, if you will not attend the election, and lend to liberty the help of your votes, within two years you will have to defend her cause with your swords.” To Federalists, Jefferson now became “the great arch priest of Jacobinism and infidelity.”

  No less stark in their rhetoric, Republicans drew a very different moral from Bonaparte’s military coup: A standing army threatens popular democracy. At first, America could only guess what Bonaparte intended to do with his political power. “Whatever his views may be,” Jefferson wrote to Samuel Adams early in 1800, “he has at least transferred the destinies of the republic from the civil to the military arm. Some will use this as a lesson against the practicability of republican government. I read it as a lesson against the danger of standing armies.” Madison made similar comments to Jefferson at the time. “Whether the lesson [from Napoleon’s coup] will have the proper effect here in turning public attention to the danger of military usurpations,” he wrote, “is more than I can say. A stronger one was perhaps never given, nor to a country more in a situation to profit by it.”

  Republican printers picked up this theme and published it throughout the land. “Nothing more solemnly points out the danger to free governments from a standing army than the recent events of France,” the Aurora noted. Every reader knew which standing army these Republicans feared: the Additional Army now led by Alexander Hamilton. In private letters and conversations, Republicans began referring to Hamilton as “our Bonaparte.” “The enemies of our Constitution are preparing a fearful operation,” Jefferson warned a fellow Virginian in February 1800. “Our Bonaparte, surrounded by his comrades in arms, may step in to give us political salvation in his way.” Indeed, in February 1799, Hamilton had privately proposed just such a military maneuver against radical Republicans in Virginia. Perhaps getting wind of this threat, Adams worried aloud in March 1799 to his political confidant, Elbridge Gerry, that some extreme Federalists “were endeavoring to get an army on foot to give Hamilton the command of it and then proclaim a regal government.”

  For over a decade, Jefferson and the Republicans had stressed the fundamental similarities linking the French and American experiments with democracy and expressed their hopes that both experiments would ultimately turn out all right. Indeed, they regularly complained that royalists in England and Federalists in America exaggerated the excesses of republican France. For some Republicans, seeing their cause as an integral part of an international movement magnified its significance and their own importance.

  Upon learning that Bonaparte had imposed military rule in France, however, they began pointing to differences between the two cases and arguing that, contrary to Federalist warnings, greater democracy in America need not lead to a Napoleonic outcome. “The people of [France], having never been in the habit of self-government, are not yet in the habit of acknowledging that fundamental law of nature by which alone self-government can be exercised in a society,” Jefferson wrote upon hearing of Bonaparte’s coup. “I mean the lex majoris partis [or law of the majority].” In contrast, he implied, Americans took that principle to heart. “It is very material,” Jefferson added, for American citizens “to be made sensible that their own character and situation are materially different from the French; and that whatever may be the fate of republicanism there, we are able to preserve it inviolate here.” Jefferson especially worried that if Bonaparte declared himself leader for life and brought peace to his troubled land, then Americans might become more receptive to High Federalist notions of a lifetime president or American monarch. “The late defection of France has left America the only theater on which true liberty can have a fair trial,” Madison lamented to Jefferson.

  The tightly knit network of Republican papers reported the news from France in Jeffersonian terms. In their striving for liberty and democracy, a long essay in the Aurora explained, the French “had to struggle not only against all the evils of the most enormous and corrupt [religious] hierarchy that ever existed, against the most numerous and useless body of privileged idlers that ever aggrieved a nation, but against the wide spread influence of a wicked, debauched, and unprincipled court.” The legacy of religious, aristocratic, and monarchic domination made stable republican rule much more difficult to sustain in France than in the historically self-governing American states, the essayist suggested. “Our vessel is moored at such a distance,” Jefferson wrote of the French, “that should theirs blow up, ours is still safe, if we will but think so.”

  Republican newspapers widely reprinted rumors that British agents had aided Bonaparte in his coup and suggested that they might support an American military usurper as well. The Republicans had Hamilton and his Additional Army squarely in their sights in doing so. Adams later viewed such newspaper attacks on the Army—“a thousand anecdotes,” he called them, “propagated and believed,”—as central to the Republican campaign against him.

  Federalists had the legal means to fight back against such Republican attacks, and they readily used them now. Back in 1798, during the height of political and military tensions with France following the XYZ Affair, Federalists in Congress had pushed through the Sedition Act with the purpose of silencing critics of the government in the name of national security. The law made it a crime, punishable by fine and imprisonment, “to write, print, utter or publish…any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government,…the Congress,…or the President of the United States, with intent to defame.” Jefferson had denounced the measure as “palpably in the teeth of the Constitution” and even Hamilton viewed it as imprudent, but, with strong support from High Federalists in Congress, it passed on what amounted to a party-line vote, and Adams had signed it into law.

  Outraged by the Act and companion measures raising the bar for citizenship and authorizing the deportation of aliens, Republican-dominated state legislatures in Kentucky and Virginia passed resolutions secretly drafted by Jefferson and Madison challenging the constitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Kentucky resolution went so far as to declare the acts “altogether void and of no force.” Privately, Jeffers
on characterized this entire period of High Federalist lawmaking as a “reign of witches.”

  Undeterred by the outcry that had followed enactment of the Sedition Act, Federalist prosecutors made partisan use of it from the start, and now brought ever more prosecutions during the run-up to the presidential election. Even before its passage, Federalists had freely admitted that the Sedition Act targeted the Republican press. After all, they passed the law as a wartime security measure, and many of them viewed Republican printers as potentially dangerous (and possibly treasonous) Francophiles. At the time, most American newspapers were openly partisan, with some going so far as to include party labels in their mastheads. Many received financial support and editorial copy from party sources. As a rule, newspapers did not then practice balanced reporting. Diversity came through the variety of publications within a community (many of them low-budget, four-page weeklies) rather than from various voices collected within any one source. Readers expected to receive slanted reports with little distinction between news articles and editorial commentary. The best way to silence a partisan viewpoint was to shut down its newspapers. Aside from pamphlets, no other means of mass communication then existed.

  Although a majority of newspapers wore a Federalist face, Republican outlets more than made up for their lesser numbers by their intense partisanship. Through Philadelphia’s Aurora, Boston’s Independent Chronicle, and New York’s Argus (all of which supplied original copy for other newspapers), the Republican voice was heard across the land. Each of these three papers had become the subject of multiple prosecutions under the Sedition Act or related laws. In all, federal attorneys brought at least seventeen indictments against Republican newspapers between 1798 and 1800, with most of these cases intended to shut down presses during the run-up to critical elections. Some succeeded in that objective, but new Republican papers quickly replaced shuttered ones. “The most vigorous and undisguised efforts are making to crush the republican presses, and stifle enquiry as it may respect the ensuing election,” one Republican senator privately advised Madison in April 1800.

  With Adams’s full knowledge, Secretary of State Timothy Pickering coordinated the legal assault. According to Pickering, the Sedition Act could not possibly violate the Constitution because it punished only “pests of society and disturbers of order.” Partisan attacks on the Additional Army particularly incensed Pickering, a Hamilton loyalist.

  Simply referring to the federal troops as a “standing army” could serve as grounds for an indictment. To the Revolutionary War generation in the United States, including both Federalists and Republicans, the term carried a sinister meaning. Under popular rule, Americans then commonly believed that citizen soldiers would turn out in sufficient numbers to defend their country in times of foreign invasion or domestic insurrection, and then return home after the danger passed. State militias acted in this manner and provided the bulk of American forces at the time. The citizen-soldier ideal was personified by George Washington. In contrast, Americans saw foreign tyrants using professional “standing armies” to usurp or maintain power against the popular will. In this respect, among the despotic “abuses and usurpations” of power listed to justify the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence specifically charged George III with having “kept among us in times of peace standing armies.” Even if not used to subdue popular rule, Americans at the time tended to view soldiers in a peacetime standing army as armed and potentially dangerous idle young men living well at taxpayer expense.

  This is why in 1798, when Federalists in Congress authorized a full-time force to counter any potential invasion by France, they pointedly called it an “Additional Army”—as in one temporarily added to deal with a particular danger—rather than a permanent or standing army. Always fearful that Hamilton might use the force against them, or even to usurp power for himself, Republicans naturally denounced it as a “standing army.” The term stung. If believed, it could cost votes for Adams and other Federalists. Responding to criticisms of the Army, in May 1800, Adams ordered it disbanded, which caused him grief from both High Federalists, who still strongly supported it, and suspicious Republicans, who questioned his motives. By this time many saw Adams’s decision as purely motivated by politics, including some disgruntled members of his own party. By “a disbanding of the army,” the uncompromising High Federalist printer William Cobbett observed disapprovingly, “Adams was now laying in a provision of popularity against the ensuing election for President.” It was too late for him to win over many Republican voters, however.

  Adams moved to disband the Army shortly after two high-profile trials focused national attention on Republican denunciations of it as a “standing army.” These prosecutions, both heard in April before prominent High Federalist justices of the United States Supreme Court sitting as trial judges for criminal prosecutions, involved printers charged with violating the Sedition Act. Their indictments covered more than simply their depictions of the federal military as a “standing army,” but that became a key issue in both cases and the only grounds for conviction in one. Occurring as they did during the election season, and clearly timed to shut down Republican presses before the election, these cases became an integral part of the presidential campaign. For Federalists, they showed the government’s patriotic commitment to maintaining domestic security and civil order. For Republicans, they demonstrated Adams’s despotic disregard of individual liberty.

  The first trial involved Charles Holt, a fiery iconoclast who, in 1797, opened the first Republican newspaper in the rock-ribbed Federalist state of Connecticut. He called it The Bee because of its sting. Federal prosecutors indicted Holt for publishing a reader’s letter suggesting that, although Americans would readily give their lives to defend their country, no worthy recruits would “devote their valor to promote the views of ambition or to oppose their country and prosperity with a standing army.” In his charge to the jury, Justice Bushrod Washington (the former President’s nephew) declared the “publication to be libelous beyond even the possibility of a doubt” and virtually instructed the jurors to convict Holt, which they did. His three-month incarceration shut down The Bee for a significant segment of the election season.

  Less than a week after Holt’s conviction in Connecticut, the Northumberland, Pennsylvania newspaper printer Thomas Cooper, a radical English émigré with legal training and a bitter, biting wit, went on trial in Philadelphia before Justice Samuel Chase. Although Cooper had attracted the administration’s attention with a 1799 article that Adams denounced as a “libel against the whole government and, as such, ought to be prosecuted,” the 1800 indictment involved a political handbill. Among other partisan accusations, it charged Adams with seeking to maintain a standing army. Abigail Adams had already pronounced her judgment in a letter to her sister stating that Cooper, “in his former mad democratic style, abused the President, and I presume subjected himself to the penalty of the Sedition Act.”

  Conducted in Philadelphia, the nation’s capital, Cooper’s trial became a sensational political event. Pickering attended it daily along with two other members of the cabinet and several leading members of Congress. “A more oppressive and disgusting proceeding I never saw,” Republican Senator Stevens Thomson Mason complained in a letter to Madison. “Chase in his charge to the jury (in a speech of an hour) showed all the zeal of a well fee’d lawyer and the rancor of a vindictive and implacable enemy.” In that charge, Chase articulated the Federalist argument for prosecuting sedition, and made it stick against Cooper. “If a man attempts to destroy the confidence of the people in their officers, their supreme magistrate, and their legislature, he effectually saps the foundation of the government,” Chase told jurors. “A republican government can only be destroyed in two ways: the introduction of luxury or the licentiousness of the press.” Upon Cooper’s conviction, the court sentenced him to six months in the local prison, which the Aurora dubbed “Chase’s repository of Republicans.”

  Both convictions
backfired on Federalists by transforming small-town printers into nationally known martyrs to the cause of a free press. Republican newspapers depicted the trials as politically motivated election-year witch hunts. Far from silencing Holt and Cooper, both men denounced their convictions in articles from jail and emerged from incarceration more defiant than ever. Holt resumed publishing The Bee in time for the election, swinging at every Federalist in sight. “Punishment only hardens printers and pleases the fellows,” he wrote, “for they come out of jail holding their heads higher than if they had never been persecuted.” Cooper emerged from jail in Pennsylvania hailed by Republicans in public celebrations as “the conspicuous victim of the sedition law…and the able advocate of universal liberty.”

  Federalists hoped that criminal convictions would discredit antigovernment printers—and perhaps they did, in some eyes—but they also galvanized the opposition and turned the Sedition Act into a major issue in the presidential campaign. Vermont voters had already rendered their verdict on the Act in the fall of 1798 by reelecting to Congress a Republican politician and printer, Matthew Lyon, convicted of violating it. Carried back into office on a wave of sympathy aroused in part by graphic depictions of his confinement in a common cell with hardened criminals, Lyon won by a two-to-one margin over the Federalist printer who helped to put him in jail.