The Sedition Act Trials
Historical Documents
Charles Pinckney, “On the Election of the President of the United States”
The Sedition Act became an important issue in the presidential contest between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1800. As South Carolina legislators prepared to choose the state’s presidential electors, one of the state’s United States senators, Charles Pinckney, published a series of editorials in favor of Jefferson’s election. Pinckney’s editorial on the Sedition Act offered an articulate summary of Republican opposition to the act and the prosecutions in the federal courts. The act, he alleged, was a partisan effort to prevent public examination of the policies of the Adams administration and to extend the reach of the federal courts at the expense of state courts. To Pinckney and many Republicans, the federal judiciary was a pliant arm of the Federalist President Adams, who appointed the judges who presided over the cases, the marshals who selected juries, and the district attorneys who brought the indictments before the juries.
When prosecutions for libel were justified, they were the exclusive jurisdiction of state courts, according to Pinckney and many other Republicans. Pinckney was convinced that state courts, with their greater accountability to the public, were less likely to compromise the rights of citizens. He dismissed the supposed benefits of the liberalizations in the libel law, such as the truth as defense. As many of the defense lawyers had said in the sedition trials, it was impossible to prove the truth of what were essentially political opinions, particularly before a partisan jury.
[Document Source:
The Carolina Gazette
, Charleston, September 11, 1800.]
To make, therefore, their favorite object sure, and prevent an enquiry into the president’s administration as it progressed, and to prohibit that investigation of its measures; that appeal to the wisdom and republicanism of the people on the approaching election, from which they were afraid Mr. Adams, or the supporters of his measures, had every thing to dread, and nothing to hope; for these reasons they determined to create a new crime, and to give to their courts a new jurisdiction; to take from the state courts and juries their undoubted right to decide every question of libels, and give it to courts formed by judges appointed by the president, whose administration this act is intended to screen; and what, if possible, is still more intolerable, to juries packed by marshals who have received and hold their offices at the will of the same president. These, my countrymen, are the true objects of the sedition law. They know your state judges are impartial and independent men; that they neither fear the frown of power, nor court the smile of office; that your juries are either impartially drawn by lot, or selected by sheriffs elected by the people, and that they would be likely, upon every occasion, to discountenance any attempt to enslave the press; that these state juries, so far from considering as a crime, would view as a duty the investigation of public measures; . . .
It has been said, in extenuation of this law, that the parties accused are allowed to plead the truth of their charge in their defence, in extenuation of their punishment. Holding, as I do, the fixed and unalterable opinion that congress have no right to legislate at all upon the subject; that they possess the same right to tell me what God I shall worship, or in what manner adore him, as to say under what limitations I shall be permitted to investigate the conduct of our public servants; it is with difficulty I can bring myself to condescend to examine any part of the law; . . . I will, however, for a moment consider the nature of the defence, which is, that a person accused may plead the truth of what is charged as a libel; and I will ask, what safety or success he can promise himself by such a defence, and before a court constituted as I have mentioned, that is composed of judges chosen by the President, and juries packed by marshals appointed by and dependent on the President? . . .
I think you will confess, that men of such opposite opinions as I have stated, could never easily be brought to agree upon any public measure, where there was room for difference in opinion; and that to commit a man who is known to be in what is called the
republican interest
, to be tried for any political writing, by a jury of men known to be in the federal interest, and packed by a federal marshal, is allowing him that sort of defence which may be considered as something very like a solemn mockery of justice.