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Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 by Wendell Bird

2022; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/eal.2022.0011

1534-147X

Alice Marie Hampton Henton,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Reviewed by: Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 by Wendell Bird Alice Henton (bio) Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 wendell bird Harvard University Press, 2020 560 pp. "The Federalist era started well," Wendell Bird begins chapter 1 of Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, before pivoting: "However, divisions were quick to appear" (10). This book exists firmly within the space of that "however," and in so doing it aims to contextualize and complicate the Federalist legacy by focusing on the true scope and impact of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. As Bird notes in his introduction, that legacy has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years, which adds even more weight to considering its history, as the question "Do the Federalists deserve their newfound popularity?" is one that has implications for the future as well as the past (1). The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 included three alien laws that extended the naturalization period for citizenship, authorized the detention [End Page 264] of subjects of an enemy nation, and authorized the chief executive to expel "dangerous" aliens at their discretion. The Sedition Act prohibited the publishing of false or malicious writings against the government as well as the incitement of opposition to acts of Congress or the president. Together, the acts represent a collection of powerful legal tools with the potential to silence opposition and dissent, and while there is no shortage of scholarship chronicling and analyzing the use of these tools, there is, Bird argues, a renewed need for scholarly scrutiny. Criminal Dissent intervenes into established understandings of the role(s) the Alien and Sedition Acts played in the "first battle over the Bill of Rights" (371). To that end, Bird recalibrates the documented number of prosecutions—both executed and planned—to include fifty-one cases targeting 126 defendants, expanding the understanding of the scale of the Acts' effects. Bird's understanding of these cases is compiled from a plethora of sources, including the papers of Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, court records, and other primary sources, some of which he marks as unavailable to and/or inadequately studied by earlier scholarly assessments. These sources are meticulously organized and documented within the book, which includes a detailed appendix of cases at the end. Bird marshals an impressive amount of information, and the lens through which he views that information puts the focus on the costs and consequences to individuals as well as on the totality of the historical record. While Bird argues in his epilogue that in some sense "everyone" was harmed by the Alien and Sedition Acts, which created a chilling climate for political speech, he is also careful to note specific people and the effects upon them (362). Much of the book chronicles individual cases, each painstakingly building toward an understanding of the imbalance of power that was often at the heart of enforcement: defendants were frequently obscure and often without the economic resources to contest or withstand the prosecutions, to say nothing of convictions. Their offenses, too, sometimes read as less-than-serious threats to national security, as in the case in which the defendants had, while inebriated, expressed a wish that a cannonball would strike the "the president's posterior" (130). The deftness with which Bird handles this example, acknowledging its humorous aspects while foregrounding the powerfully harmful nature of a law that enabled such a "ludicrous" prosecution, is characteristic of the tone of the book as a whole, which humanizes the defendants while underscoring the scope and power of the laws of which they ran afoul. [End Page 265] In addition to allowing for the prosecution of truly bizarre offenses, Bird establishes through these case studies that the targets of prosecutions, or planned prosecutions, were almost universally members of the opposition, a fact which brings into stark relief the targeted enforcement of the measures that the Adams administration employed to take aim at its Republican critics. A gauntlet of fines and imprisonments pushed individuals to ruin and presses to close, thus ending the "threat" to the establishment at a cost extremely high to those...