![]() ![]() ![]() He hoped that more states would respond in like-minded ways and that this would lead to more electoral victories over the Federalists. When the Federalists gained control of all three branches of the federal government in 1798, Jefferson struck on the idea of getting sympathetic state legislatures to pass resolutions as a way to respond to the acts. In fact, Jefferson and Madison kept their authorship of the resolutions secret because they feared arrest for sedition. The Democratic-Republicans, political opponents of the Federalists, felt threatened by these laws. The Sedition Act made it a crime to write, print, publish, or utter anything false, scandalous, or malicious against the U.S. Accused aliens were given no right to a judicial hearing or to hear the specific charges against them. Among other things, the Alien Acts granted the president the power to seize, detain, and ultimately deport any noncitizen he deemed dangerous to the United States, regardless of whether the nation was at war. Resolutions were written in response to Alien and Sedition ActsĪs noted, the resolutions were written in response to Alien and Sedition Acts, which were four separate laws passed in the midst of an undeclared war at sea with revolutionary France. They were an early defense of the Constitution’s protection of civil liberties, especially freedom of speech and of the press however, because they argued that the acts illegally usurped powers reserved for the states, they also became the founding documents in the states’ rights movement and were cited by antebellum supporters of state nullification and secession in the mid-nineteenth century and by advocates of resistance to federal school desegregation orders in the mid-twentieth century. The resolutions have a complicated history and legacy. The resolutions defended civil liberties and states' rights ![]() Drafted in secret by future Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the resolutions condemned the Alien and Sedition Acts as unconstitutional and claimed that because these acts overstepped federal authority under the Constitution, they were null and void. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 were Democratic-Republican responses to the Alien and Sedition Acts passed earlier that same year by a Federalist-dominated Congress. (Image via Library of Congress, public domain) This image is of the Kentucky Resolution of 1798, penned by Thomas Jefferson. ![]()
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