When Presidents Declare War on the Press: The Battle for Free Speech and Democracy

From Adams’ Sedition Acts to Trump’s relentless attacks, the war on truth threatens to unravel the very foundation of our republic...

Yesterday, for Thanksgiving, I published a short history of Jefferson’s and his Democrats’ reaction to John Adams’ fearmongering for political power around the “XYZ Affair.” I referenced Adams’ shutting down the opposition newspapers in America, but a surprising number of people responded with:

“What??? Really????? An American president shut down all the opposition newspapers because they insulted him? That really happened?”

So here’s the rest of the story:

Some Americans are suggesting that the ascendance of a strongman president who wants to shut down America’s press is totally new in the experience of America and may spell the end of both democracy and the Bill of Rights. History, however, shows another view, which offers us both warnings and hope.

Although you won't learn much about it from reading the “Republican histories” of the Founders being published and promoted in the corporate media these days, the most notorious stain on the presidency of John Adams began in 1798 with the passage of a series of laws that would give him virtually unlimited strongman powers to attack his political enemies and, like Trump says he wants to do, end the First Amendment right of a free press.

It started when Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin and editor of the Philadelphia newspaper the Aurora, began to speak out against the policies of then-President John Adams. Bache supported Vice President Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party (today called the Democratic Party) when John Adams led the conservative Federalists (who today would be philosophically close to today’s Republicans).

Bache attacked Adams in an op-ed piece by calling the president “old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams.”

To be sure, Bache wasn’t the only one attacking Adams in 1798. His Aurora was one of about 20 independent newspapers aligned with Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, and many were openly questioning Adams’ policies and ridiculing Adams' fondness for formality and grandeur.

On the Federalist side, conservative newspaper editors were equally outspoken. Noah Webster wrote that Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans were “the refuse, the sweepings of the most depraved part of mankind from the most corrupt nations on earth.”

Another Federalist characterized the Democratic-Republicans as “democrats, momocrats and all other kinds of rats,” while Federalist newspapers promoted a weird collection of bizarre conspiracy theories about Jefferson and his colleagues.

But while Jefferson and his Democratic-Republicans had learned to develop a thick skin, University of Missouri-Rolla history professor Larry Gragg points out in an October 1998 article in American History magazine that Bache’s writings sent Adams and his wife into a self-righteous frenzy.

Abigail wrote to her husband and others that Benjamin Franklin Bache was expressing the “malice” of a man “possessed by Satan.” The Democratic-Republican newspaper editors were engaging, she said, in “abuse, deception, and falsehood,” and Bache was a “lying wretch.”

Abigail insisted that her husband and Congress must act to punish Bache for his “most insolent and abusive” words about her husband and his administration. His “wicked and base, violent and calumniating abuse” must be stopped, she demanded.

Abigail Adams followed the logic employed by modern-day “conservatives” who say that those opposed to Trump’s policies are “unpatriotic,” by writing that Bache’s “abuse” being “leveled against the Government” of the United States (her husband) could even plunge the nation into a “civil war.”

Worked into a frenzy by Abigail Adams’ and Federalist newspapers of the day, Federalist senators and congressmen — who controlled both legislative houses along with the presidency — came to the defense of John Adams by passing a series of four laws that came to be known together as the Alien and Sedition Acts.

The vote was so narrow — 44 to 41 in the House of Representatives — that in order to ensure passage the lawmakers wrote a sunset provision into its most odious parts: Those laws, unless renewed, would expire the last day of John Adams’ first term of office, March 3, 1801.

Empowered with this early gift of presidential power, President John Adams ordered his “unpatriotic” opponents arrested, and specified that only Federalist judges on the Supreme Court would be both judges and jurors.

Bache, often referred to as “Lightning Rod Junior” after his famous grandfather, was the first to be hauled into jail (before the laws even became effective!), followed by New York Time Piece editor John Daly Burk, which put his paper out of business. Bache died of yellow fever while awaiting trial, and Burk accepted deportation to avoid imprisonment and then fled.

Others didn't avoid prison so easily. Editors of seventeen of the twenty or so Democratic-Republican-affiliated newspapers were arrested, and ten were convicted and imprisoned; many of their newspapers went out of business.

Bache’s successor, William Duane (who both took over the newspaper and married Bache’s widow), continued the attacks on Adams, publishing in the June 24, 1799 issue of the Aurora a private letter John Adams had written to Tench Coxe in which then-Vice President Adams admitted that there were still men influenced by Great Britain in the U.S. government.

The letter cast Adams in an embarrassing light, as it implied that Adams himself may still have British loyalties (something suspected by many, ever since his pre-revolutionary defense of British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre), and made the quick-tempered Adams furious.

Imprisoning his opponents in the press was only the beginning for Adams, though. Knowing Jefferson would mount a challenge to his presidency in 1800, he and the Federalists hatched a plot to pass secret legislation that would have disputed presidential elections decided “in secret” and “behind closed doors.”

Duane got evidence of the plot, and published it just after having published the letter that so infuriated Adams. It was altogether too much for the president who didn't want to let go of his power: Adams had Duane arrested and hauled before Congress on Sedition Act charges.

Duane would have stayed in jail had not Thomas Jefferson intervened, letting Duane leave to “consult his attorney.” Duane went into hiding until the end of the Adams' presidency.

Emboldened, the Federalists reached out beyond just newspaper editors.

When Congress let out in July of 1798, John and Abigail Adams made the trip home to Braintree, Massachusetts in their customary fashion — in fancy carriages as part of a parade, with each city they passed through firing cannons and ringing church bells. (The Federalists were, after all, as Jefferson said, the party of “the rich and the well born.” Although Adams wasn’t one of the super-rich, he basked in their approval and adopted royal-like trappings, later discarded by Jefferson.)

As the Adams family entourage, full of pomp and ceremony, passed through Newark, New Jersey, a man named Luther Baldwin was sitting in a tavern and probably quite unaware that he was about to make a fateful comment that would help change history.

As Adams rode by, soldiers manning the Newark cannons loudly shouted the Adams-mandated chant, “Behold the chief who now commands!” and fired their salutes. Hearing the cannon fire as Adams drove by outside the bar, in a moment of drunken candor Luther Baldwin said:

“There goes the President and they are firing at his arse.” Baldwin further compounded his sin by adding that, “I do not care if they fire thro’ his arse!”

The tavern’s owner, a Federalist named John Burnet, overheard the remark and turned Baldwin in to Adams’ thought police: The hapless drunk was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for uttering “seditious words tending to defame the President and Government of the United States.”

The Alien and Sedition Acts reflected the new attitude Adams and his wife had brought to Washington D.C. in 1796, a take-no-prisoners type of politics in which no opposition was tolerated.

For example, on January 30, 1798, Vermont's Congressman Matthew Lyon spoke out on the floor of the House against “the malign influence of Connecticut politicians.” Charging that Adams’ and the Federalists only served the interests of the rich and had “acted in opposition to the interests and opinions of nine-tenths of their constituents,” Lyon infuriated the Federalists.

The situation simmered for two weeks, and on the morning of February 15, 1798, Federalist anger reached a boiling point when conservative Connecticut Congressman Roger Griswold attacked Lyon on the House floor with a hickory cane. As Congressman George Thatcher wrote in a letter now held at the Massachusetts Historical Society:

“Mr. Griswald [sic] [was] laying on blows with all his might upon Mr. Lyon. Griswald continued his blows on the head, shoulder, & arms of Lyon, [who was] protecting his head & face as well as he could. Griswald tripped Lyon & threw him on the floor & gave him one or two [more] blows in the face.”

In sharp contrast to his predecessor George Washington, America’s second president had succeeded in creating an atmosphere of fear and division in the new republic, and it brought out the worst in his conservative supporters.

Across the new nation, Federalist mobs and Federalist-controlled police and militia attacked Democratic-Republican newspapers and shouted down or threatened individuals who dared speak out in public against John Adams.

Even members of Congress were not legally immune from the long arm of Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts.

When Congressman Lyon — already hated by the Federalists for his opposition to the law, and recently caned in Congress by Federalist Roger Griswold — wrote an article pointing out Adams’ “continual grasp for power” and suggesting that Adams had an “unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice,” Federalists convened a federal grand jury and indicted Congressman Lyon for bringing “the President and government of the United States into contempt.”

Lyon, who had served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, was led through the town of Vergennes, Vermont in shackles. He ran for re-election from his 12x16-foot Vergennes jail cell and handily won his seat.

“It is quite a new kind of jargon,” Lyon wrote from jail to his constituents, “to call a Representative of the People an Opposer of the Government because he does not, as a legislator, advocate and acquiesce in every proposition that comes from the Executive.”

Which brings us to today. The possible ray of light for those who oppose the attempts of Donald Trump to emulate John Adams is found in the end of the story of Adams' attempt to suborn the Bill of Rights and turn the United States into a one-party state:

— The Alien and Sedition Acts caused the Democratic-Republican newspapers to become more popular than ever, and turned the inebriated Luther Baldwin into a national celebrity. In like fashion, progressive websites and talk shows are today proliferating across the internet, and victims of Trump’s ending women’s right to abortion are often featured in the press.

— The day Adams signed the Acts, Thomas Jefferson left town in protest and never again saw John Adams face-to-face. Even though Jefferson was Vice President, and could theoretically benefit from using the Acts against his own political enemies, he and James Madison continued to protest and work against them. Jefferson wrote the text for a non-binding resolution against the Acts that was adopted by the Kentucky legislature, and James Madison wrote one for Virginia that was adopted by that legislature.

— Jefferson beat Adams in the election of 1800 as a wave of voter revulsion over Adams’ phony and self-serving “patriotism” swept over the nation (along with concerns about Adams' belligerent war rhetoric against the French).

— When Jefferson exposed Adams as a poseur and tool of the powerful elite, the rot within Adams’ Federalist Party was exposed along with it. The Federalists lost their hold on Congress in the election of 1800, and began a 30-year slide into total disintegration (later to be reincarnated as Whigs and then as Republicans).

— In what came to be known as “The American Revolution of 1800” (the title of a book by Dan Sisson and me), Thomas Jefferson freed all the men imprisoned by Adams as one of his first acts of office. Jefferson even reimbursed the fines they’d paid — with interest — and granted them a formal pardon and apology.

Two weeks before the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed, June 1, 1798, as Adams was already rounding up newspaper editors and dissidents in anticipation of his coming legal authority, Jefferson sat down at his desk and, heart heavy but hopeful, put quill pen to paper to share his thoughts with his old friend John Taylor, one of his fellow Democratic Republicans and a man also in Adams cross-hairs.

(Two decades later, Taylor would write down his thoughts on the issue of government in a widely-distributed book, “Construction Construed, and Constitutions Vindicated,” noting that: “A government is substantially good or bad, in the degree that it produces the happiness or misery of a nation...”)

Several states had gone completely over to Adam’s side, particularly Massachusetts which was filled with preachers who wanted theocracy established in America, and Connecticut, which had become the epicenter of the wealthy who wanted to control the government’s agenda for their own gain.

It was red states and blue states, writ large. There was even discussion of Massachusetts seceding from the rest of the nation, which had become too “liberal” (to use George Washington’s term) and secular.

“It is true that we are completely under the saddle of Massachusetts and Connecticut,” Jefferson wrote to Taylor, his friend and compatriot, “and that they ride us very hard, cruelly insulting our feelings, as well as exhausting our strength and subsistence. Their natural friends, the three other Eastern States join them from a sort of family pride, and they have the art to divide certain other parts of the Union, so as to make use of them to govern the whole.

“This is not new,” Jefferson added, “it is the old practice of despots; to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order. And those who have once got an ascendancy and possessed themselves of all the resources of the nation, their revenues and offices, have immense means for retaining their advantage.

“But,” he added, “our present situation is not a natural one.”

Jefferson knew that the theocrats and the rich did not represent the true heart and soul of America, and commented to Taylor about how Adams had been using divide-and-conquer politics, and fear-monger about war with France (the infamous “XYZ Affair”) with some success.

“But still I repeat it,” he wrote to Taylor, “this is not the natural state.”

Our nation’s wisest political commentator noted the problem of politics:

“Be this as it may, in every free and deliberating society, there must, from the nature of man, be opposite parties, and violent dissensions and discords; and one of these, for the most part, must prevail over the other for a longer or shorter time. Perhaps this party division is necessary to induce each to watch and delate to the people the proceedings of the other.”

“But,” Jefferson asked rhetorically, “will the evil stop there?”

Apparently he thought so, and his next paragraph to Taylor gives progressives a reminder for these times.

This must be our mantra, even as we work harder every day:

“A little patience,” Jefferson wrote, “and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolved, and the people recovering their true sight, restoring their government to its true principles. It is true, that in the meantime, we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war, and long oppressions of enormous public debt. ...

“If the game runs sometimes against us at home, we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost. For this is a game where principles are the stake.”

Ever the optimist and the realist, Jefferson ended his letter with both hope and caution.

“Better luck, therefore, to us all, and health, happiness and friendly salutations to yourself," he closed the letter. But under his signature, Jefferson added:

“P. S. It is hardly necessary to caution you to let nothing of mine get before the public; a single sentence got hold of by the Porcupines, will suffice to abuse and persecute me in their papers for months.”

It is time, now, for us to once again follow Jefferson’s wise advice. Hope for the best, organize for a better America, and recognize the power and evil unleashed by politicians who believe that campaign lies are defensible, laws gutting the Bill of Rights are acceptable, and that the ends justifies the means.

America has been through crises before, and far worse. If we retain the vigilance and energy of Jefferson and his contemporaries — as today we face every bit as much a struggle against the same forces that he fought — we shall prevail.

For the simple reason that, underneath it all, “this is a game where principles are the stake.”

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