These Truths: A History of the United States

Passed by Congress in 1798, the acts granted the president “the power to imprison noncitizens he deemed dangerous and to punish printers who opposed his administration” (158). As a result, 25 people were arrested for sedition, 15 were indicted, and 10 were convicted. Of those 10, seven were Democratic-Republican printers who supported Thomas Jefferson. The acts were a means for John Adams, who was president at the time, to criminalize his opposition. Jefferson and James Madison believed that the Alien and Sedition Acts violated the Constitution, seeing them as examples of presidential overreach and Congress’s failure to uphold the principles within the founding document.

Another sedition act was passed by Congress in 1918 to suppress antiwar sentiment. While few people were arrested under the first Sedition Act, over 2,000 Americans were arrested under the Sedition Act of 1918, and the Justice Department convicted half of them.

The American Colonization Society was founded during a meeting at the Davis Hotel in Washington, DC. Its purpose was to create a colony in Africa to “rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of its population,” as the meeting’s leader, Kentucky congressman and Speaker of the House Henry Clay, defined the increasing number of free Black people who lived in the United States (176).