still is, the official title of the party. There was no party opposition, however, to the re-election of Washington in 1792, or to the admission of Vermont (1791), Kentucky (1792) and Tennessee (1796) as new states.
118. The British government had accredited no minister to the United States, and it refused to make any commercial treaty or to give up the forts in the western territory of the United States, through which its agents still exercised a commanding influence over the Indians. In the course of its war with France, the neutral American vessels, without the protection of a national navy, fared badly. A treaty negotiated in 1794 by Jay's Treaty. Chief-Justice John Jay (q.v.) settled these difficulties for the following twelve years. But as it engaged the United States against any intervention in the war on behalf of France, was silent on the subject of the right of search, and agreed to irksome limitations on the commercial privileges of the United States, the Republicans, who were opposed to the negotiation of any treaty at this time with Great Britain, made it very unpopular, and the bitter personal attacks on Washington grew out of it. In spite of occasional Republican successes, the Federalists retained a general control of national Election of 1796. affairs; they elected John Adams president in 1796, though Jefferson was chosen vice-president with him; and the national policy of the Federalists kept the country out of entangling alliances with any of the European belligerents. To the Republicans, and to the French republic, this last point of policy was only a practical intervention against France and against the rights of man.
119. At the end of Washington's administration the French Directory broke off relations with the United States, demanding the abrogation of Jay's treaty and a more pronounced sympathy with France. Adams sent three envoys, C. C. Pinckney (q.v.), John Marshall and Elbridge Gerry (q.v.), to endeavour to re-establish the former relations; they were The “X.Y.Z.” Mission. met by demands for “money, a great deal of money,” as a prerequisite to peace. They refused; their letters home were published,[1] and the Federalists at last had the opportunity of riding the whirlwind of an intense popular desire for war with France. Intercourse with France was suspended by Congress (1798); the treaties with France were declared at an end; American frigates were authorized to capture French vessels guilty of depredations on American commerce, and the president was authorized to issue letters of marque and reprisal; and an American army was formed, Washington being called from his retirement at Mount Vernon to command it. The war never went beyond Quasi-war with France. a few sea-fights, in which the little American navy did itself credit, and Napoleon, seizing power the next year, renewed the peace which should never have been broken. But the quasi-war had internal consequences to the young republic which surpassed in interest all its foreign difficulties: it brought on the crisis which settled the development of the United States towards democracy.
120. The reaction in Great Britain against the indefinite “rights of man” had led parliament to pass an alien law, a sedition law suspending the writ of habeas corpus, and an act giving wide and loosely defined powers to magistrates for the Error of the Federalists. dispersion of meetings to petition for redress of grievances. The Federalists were in control of a Congress of limited powers; but they were strongly tempted by sympathies and antipathies of every sort to form their programme on the model furnished from England. The measures which they actually passed were based only on that construction of the Constitution which is at the bottom of all American politics; they only tended to force the Constitution into an anti-democratic direction. But it was the fixed belief of their opponents that they meant to go farther, and to secure control by some wholesale measure of political persecution.
121. Three alien laws were passed in Tune and July 1798. The first (repealed in April 1802) raised the number of years necessary for naturalization from five to fourteen. The third The Alien and Sedition Laws. (still substantially in force) permitted the arrest or removal of subjects of any foreign power with which the United States should be at war. The second, which is usually known as the Alien Law, was limited to a term of two years; it permitted the president to arrest or order out of the country any alien whom he should consider dangerous to the country. As many of the Republican editors and local leaders were aliens, this law really put a large part of the Republican organization in the power of the president elected by their opponents. The Sedition Law (to be in force until March 1801 and not renewed) made it a crime, punishable by fine and imprisonment, to publish or print any false, scandalous and malicious writings against the government of the United States, either house of Congress, or the president, or to stir up sedition or opposition to any lawful act of Congress or of the president, or to aid the designs of any foreign power against the United States. In its first form the bill was even more sweeping than this and alarmed the opposition thoroughly.
122. Most of the ability of the country was in the Federalist ranks; the Republicans had but two first-rate men—Jefferson The Republican Opposition. and Madison. In the sudden issue thus forced between individual rights and national power, Jefferson and Madison could find but one bulwark for the individual—the power of the states; and their use of it gave their party a pronounced list to state sovereignty from which it did not recover for years. They objected to the Alien Law on the grounds that aliens were under the jurisdiction of the state, not of the Federal government; that the jurisdiction over them had not been transferred to the Federal government by the Constitution, and that the assumption of it by Congress was a violation of the Constitution's reservation of powers to the states; and, further, because the Constitution reserved to every “person,” not to every citizen, the right to a jury trial. They objected to the Sedition Law on the grounds that the Constitution had specified exactly the four crimes for whose punishment Congress was to provide; that criminal libel was not one of them; and that amendment I. forbade Congress to pass any law restricting freedom of speech or of the press. The Federalists asserted a common-law power in Federal judges to punish for libel, and pointed to a provision in the Sedition Law permitting the truth to be given in evidence, as an improvement on the common law, instead of a restriction on liberty.
123. The Republican objections might have been made in court, on the first trial. But the Republican leaders had strong doubts of the impartiality of the Federal judges, who were Federalists. They resolved to entrench the party in the state Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. legislatures. The Virginia legislature in 1798 passed a series of resolutions prepared by Madison, and the Kentucky legislature in the same year passed a series prepared by Jefferson (see Kentucky: History). Neglected or rejected by the other states, they were passed again by their legislatures in 1799, and were for a long time a documentary basis of the Democratic party. The leading idea expressed in both was that the Constitution was a “compact” between the states, and that the powers (the states) which had made the compact had reserved the power to restrain the creature of the compact, the Federal government, whenever it undertook to assume powers not granted to it. Madison's idea seems to have been that the restraint was to be imposed by a second convention of the states. Jefferson's idea is more doubtful; if it meant that the restraint should be imposed by any state which should feel aggrieved, his scheme was merely Calhoun's idea of nullification; but there are some indications that he agreed with Madison.
124. The first Congress of Adams's term of office ended in 1799. Its successor, elected in the heat of the French war excitement, Effects of the Laws. kept the Federalist policy up to its first pitch. Out of Congress the execution of the objectionable laws had taken the shape of political persecution. Men were arrested, tried and punished for writings which the people had
- ↑ In these letters as published the letters X, Y and Z were substituted for the names of the French agents with whom the American envoys dealt; and the letters are known as the X Y Z correspondence.
