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John Adams

• Message 1.Β 

  Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Friday, 22nd April 2011

  I'm currently reading Obama's book 'Audacity of Hope', and he makes several references to the Alien and Sedition Acts, passed into law during the administration of president John Adams. Apparently, these Acts have diminished the legacy of Adams to later historians and politicians. However, Obama didn't elaborate on these Acts, so I've had to look them up, and I must admit, in the recent TV series I watched on Adams, I didn't see any reference to them. Can anyone here recall if the TV series - which painted Adams as such a wonderful guy - spoke about these Acts?
  
  I found this:
  
  
  
  Four separate laws constituted what is commonly referred to as the "Alien and Sedition Acts"
  
  1. The Naturalization Act (officially An Act to Establish a Uniform Rule of Naturalization; ch. 54, 1 Stat. 566) extended the duration of residence required for aliens to become citizens of the United States from five years to fourteen years.
  2. The Alien Act (officially An Act Concerning Aliens; ch. 58, 1 Stat. 570) authorized the president to deport any resident alien considered "dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States." It was activated June 25, 1798, with a two year expiration date.
  3. The Alien Enemies Act (officially An Act Respecting Alien Enemies; ch. 66, 1 Stat. 577) authorized the president to apprehend and deport resident aliens if their home countries were at war with the United States of America. Enacted July 6, 1798, and providing no sunset provision, the act remains intact today as 50 U.S.C. §§ 21–24. At the time, war was considered likely between the U.S. and France.
  4. The Sedition Act (officially An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes against the United States; ch. 74, 1 Stat. 596) made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against the government or its officials. It was enacted July 14, 1798, with an expiration date of March 3, 1801 (the day before Adams' presidential term was to end).
  
  
  They sound pretty oppressive to me....
  
  Granted, they occurred at a time when the US was involved in an unofficial war with France, and they were probably necessary in a young republic. But they do seem to contrast with the rosy picture of Adams that was presented to us on that TV series....

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• Message 2

  , in reply to message 1.

  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 22nd April 2011

  shivfan
  
  It seems to me that these acts were pretty much in keeping with the kind of Acts that were passed in the UK as the threat of sympathetic revolutionary activity increased with the war with France becoming a reality in Britain's case.
  
  After all the American Revolution was in many ways merely a 'de facto' severing of relations with the British Crown that left the American ruling elite pretty much in place.. The Southern States being ruled as I seem to recall by crown servants sent out from Britain, and the Southern slave states generally were more concerned about the need for British military support in view of the slave- free man ratio.
  
  Is it not the case that Tom Paine went to France and was sympathetic to the popular phase of the revolution in France, that overtook the initial Middle Class one. Was it not there and in these conditions that he wrote "The Rights of Man"? Perhaps not because Mary Wolstonecraft had already written her "Vindication of the Rights of Women" before she went to Paris seduced by the French Revolution and a French Revolutionary. But Paine wrote pamphelts. The kind of ideas that seemed to justify the Haitian slave revolt and take over.
  
  Moreover there were obvious differences, but perhaps similarities too in the relationship between Ireland and the British Crown, and all those parts of the old French Empire in North America that had been handed to Britain in 1763. Quebec was still in British Canada, but what about the huge French lands to the West of the Alleghenies? Was 1798 not the Irish "Year of Liberty" when the Tricolour was raised and it was hoped that this new and resurgent France might reclaim "its own"..
  
  I was reading recently about the great Napoleonic expedition at this time to aquire a French Empire in Egypt as a first step towards the wealth of Asia and a more successful challenge to the rising British power out in the Indian sub-continent.
  
  To some extent the whole American Declaration of Independence had been predicated on the idea that the Quakers of Pennsylvania believed in pacifism, while others were happy to believe that in future wars they would only have to continue to cope with the Amerindians- and they thought that by this time the backbone of Amerindian power had been broken.
  
  But the events of 1789 might have been "very heaven" for Wordsworth- possibly in one of his drug-induced reveries, but for sober practical men faced with the challenges of a USA that had only just got its new written Constitution these were surely even more unsettling times than they were for Britain, that had spent six years undergoing its own "Tory Revolution".
  
  The question about the laws of this time was how they were applied.. In the UK there was the suspension of Habeas Corpus, and was not Horne Tooke of the London Corresponding Society prosecution for Sedition. An English jury found him not guilty. But he fainted with relief.. Sometimes such a close "warning call" is enough.
  
  As for John Adams - I have never studied him, but later historians like T.B.Macaulay felt that the instigator of the Tory Revolution, William Pitt, would have been a truly great Prime Minister if all of his Liberal and Reforming work had not been compromised by the policies that his government took to deal with the threat of revolution and the actual war..
  
  It is easy enough in the aftermath of victory to assume some kind of inevitability of success.. Actual success is often based upon "covering all the bases" and taking precautioary measures against all conceivable eventualities.
  
  Cass
  
  

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