Organized Crime

The defenders of centralized governmental power despise the Jeffersonian idea of nullification, that is, the idea that citizens of a state or states should have a say on the issue of the constitutionality of federal laws, and should be able to nullify those laws within their state if they are deemed to be unconstitutional.

This idea was popular among the American colonists, but is most closely associated with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, authors of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. Jefferson authored the “Kentucky Resolves” at the request of friends from Kentucky as a tool for nullifying the hated Sedition Act that was being enforced by President John Adams. The Sedition Act effectively made it illegal to criticize the federal government.

As soon as the Federalist Party gained power and George Washington went into retirement, it effectively outlawed free political speech in America in clear violation of the First Amendment. The spark that ignited this totalitarian impulse was an editorial by the grandson of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the Philadelphia Aurora newspaper. Bache was a follower of Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican party, and was outspokenly opposed to the Federalist program of economic statism, i.e., protectionist tariffs, a national bank, corporate welfare, high taxes, and a large public debt. In an editorial he called John Adams “old, querulous, bald, blind, crippled, toothless Adams.”

Abigail Adams is said to have been greatly upset over Bache’s characterization of her husband, and she and the Federalist-friendly newspapers began calling for Bache’s punishment. The result was the Alien and Sedition acts. The Sedition Act was enacted on July 14, 1798, and made it a crime to publish “false, scandalous, and malicious writing against the government or its officials.” Of course, government itself would decide what constituted improper and illegal speech, as would be the case in all future totalitarian societies. The law was written so that it would expire on the day that John Adams left office so that it could only be used against members and supporters of Jefferson’s party.

Many of the Jeffersonians resented the ostentatious displays of king-like grandeur that the Adams family was known for and were quite outspoken about it. In November of 1798 a man named David Brown put up a liberty pole in Dedham, Massachusetts with the words, “No Stamp Act, No Sedition Act, No Alien Bills, No Land Tax, Downfall to the Tyrants of America; Peace and Retirement to the President; Long Live the Vice President [Jefferson].” For this he was fined and sentenced to eighteen months in prison.

Several dozen newspaper writers who were supporters of Jefferson were arrested under the Sedition Act for criticizing the government. In addition, Federalist Party mobs often attacked newspapers and newspaper editors who were sympathetic to the Democratic-Republican Party or who criticized John Adams. Federalist Roger Griswold, a congressman from Connecticut, attacked fellow Congressman Mathew Lyon of Vermont by beating him with a hickory cane on the floor of the House of Representatives after Lyon criticized the Federalists as being “in opposition to the interests and opinions of nine-tenths of their constituents.”

After Lyons wrote a newspaper article suggesting that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice,” the Adams administration convened a grand jury and indicted Lyons. After forcing the Revolutionary War veteran to walk through the streets of his home town in shackles, he was imprisoned. He ran for reelection from prison and won handily.

This is the kind of despotic behavior that motivated Jefferson to author the Kentucky Resolution of 1798. Section One of his famous “Resolve” reads as follows:

Resolved, that the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principles of unlimited submission to their General Government; but that by compact under the style and title of a Constitution For the United States and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes, delegated to that Government certain definite powers, reserving each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self Government; and that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force. . . . That the Government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common Judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well as of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.

Madison’s Virginia Resolve was almost identical. When Jefferson was elected president the Sedition Act was ended. The new president immediately ended all ongoing federal prosecutions and pardoned those who had been convicted under the Sedition Act, including Congressman Lyon.

During Jefferson’s presidency the New England Federalists used the Kentucky Resolve to nullify enforcement of the trade embargo that President Jefferson had imposed after the British Navy began stealing American ships and kidnapping American sailors for use in its war against France. On February 5, 1809, the Massachusetts legislature declared that the embargo was “not legally binding on the citizens of the state” and denounced the law as “unjust, oppressive, and unconstitutional,” as described by James J. Kilpatrick in The Sovereign States. All of the New England states, and Delaware, nullified the Embargo Act.

When the War of 1812 broke out the New England Federalists effectively seceded from the union by not participating in the war. The political vehicle for their antiwar stance was nullification. As stated by the Connecticut state assembly, as described by Kilpatrick:

[I]t must not be forgotten that the state of Connecticut is a FREE SOVEREIGN and INDEPENDENT State; that the United States are a confederated and not a consolidated Republic. The Governor of this State is under a high and solemn obligation, “to maintain the lawful rights and privileges thereof, as a sovereign, free and independent State,” as he is “to support the Constitution of the United States,” and the obligation to support the latter imposes an additional obligation to support the former. The building cannot stand, if the pillars upon which it rests, are impaired or destroyed.

This statement echoed Jefferson’s states’ rights interpretation of the Constitution as a compact among the states. Similar reasoning was subsequently used by South Carolinians to nullify the 1828 “Tariff of Abominations”; by Ohioans in their battle against the Bank of the United States attempting to operate branches of the bank in that state; and by the governments of Wisconsin and several other states to nullify the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. It was never a ruse concocted by slave owners to “justify” slavery, as dishonest or inept contemporary historians have falsely asserted.