John Adams’ term as President is not a high point of
American history. In fact, with the Alien and Sedition Acts, he and the
Federalists managed to pass some of the most un-American legislation in history.
Forget four score and seven years, the Federalists could not wait twenty years
before they tried to create a dictatorship.
The
Alien and Sedition Acts essentially allowed John Adams to imprison or fine any
one he wanted. Specifically, the Sedition Act allowed the President to imprison
or fine anyone who criticized the government. The Alien Acts allowed for the
imprisonment or fining of anyone born in another country. The Naturalization
Act, which is also lumped in with this other nonsense, raised the years of
residency from five to fourteen in order to become a citizen of the country.
The
Federalists claimed that new immigrants were harming the country.
European
radicals were coming to America to start the next French Revolution!
Harrison Gray Otis, a Massachusetts Federalist congressman, exclaimed
that there was no need to “invite hordes of Wild Irishmen, not the
turbulent and disorderly of all the world to come here with a basic view
to
distract our tranquility.”[i] The
truth of course was that new immigrants had proven more likely to vote for the
Democratic-Republican party and the Federalists had to do something about the erosion
of their power.
So why
was this attempt to discourage immigration so un-American? Let’s take a look at
the Declaration of Independence. You know the document that John Adams
supposedly helped to write? Although the fact that he signed these Acts into
law makes one wonder if he ever even read it. After you get past the Life,
Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness part, the Declaration becomes a list of
complaints against King George III. One of them reads as follows:
“He has endeavoured to prevent the population of
these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of
Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and
raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”
To put it simply, the idea the immigrants are
welcome here, necessary here, is one of the founding principles of the United
States of America. Unanimous, indisputable, right there on the parchment.
When the Alien Friends
Act was read before Congress in May of1798, Edward Livingston gave it a
stinging, three-hour long rebuke on the floor. Newspaper accounts of his speech
would take up ten full columns. This earned him the scorn of Abigail Adams who wrote;
“we want more Men of Deeds, and fewer of Words.”[ii]
Of course the Adams had hated the Livingstons for more than two decades at this
point and Abigail was always quick to defend her husband.
And
he did need defending. In the speech Edward Livingston called out the
Federalist party for trying to “complete the picture of tyranny” by giving John
Adams the power to dispose of his enemies with no oversight. Several
journalists were imprisoned or fined under the Sedition Act for criticizing Adams’
administration. The Alien Act would allow him to do the same to others based solely
on their place of birth and the President’s “present interest or passion”
Having
shown over the course of his three-hour lecture that the bill was “at war with
the fundamental principles of our government” Livingston and the other
Democratic-Republicans could only hope they had swayed enough of the majority
Federalists that the bill would not move forward. They had not and the bill
moved on and was eventually signed into law.
What were
the implications of this? In the short term, John Adams lost his
reelection bid
in 1800 making him the first president voted out of office for attempted
despotism. Thomas Jefferson became president and most of the acts were allowed
to expire. The imprisoned were released and fines were eventually returned.
The Alien Enemies Act languished on the
books for more than a century. Then another particularly virulent cycle of
xenophobia hit, and the Act was dusted off by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during
World War II. He used it to round up Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants
and put them in concentration camps. This action has been almost universally condemned.
It is
a sad fact that throughout the history of the United States of America
fearmongers have used the threat of a dangerous “other” to garner more power
for themselves. America has always been fortunate though that there have been
good people to stand up and fight when xenophobes try to seize power.
[i] Morison, Samuel Eliot
Harrison Gray Otis 1765-1848 The Urbane Federalist Houghton Mifflin Company Boston 1969 p 108
[ii] “Abigail
Adams to William Smith, 10 June 1797,”
Founders Online, National
Archives, accessed April 11, 2019,
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-12-02-0095. [Original source:
The
Adams Papers, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 12,
March 1797 –
April 1798, ed. Sara Martin, C. James Taylor, Neal E. Millikan, Amanda A.
Mathews, Hobson Woodward, Sara B. Sikes, Gregg L. Lint, and Sara Georgini.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015, pp. 154–156.]
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