Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (44 page)

It was ironic that the Federalists should have become frightened by the new immigrants of the 1790s. At the beginning of the decade it was the Federalists, especially Federalist land speculators, who had most encouraged foreign immigration. By contrast, the Jeffersonian Republicans had tended to be more cautious about mass immigration. Since the
Republicans believed in a more active hands-on role for people in politics than did the Federalists, they had worried that immigrants might lack the necessary qualifications to sustain liberty and self-government. In his
Notes on the State of Virginia
(1785), Jefferson had expressed concern that too many Europeans would come to America with monarchical principles, a development that was apt to make the society and its laws “a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.” By relying instead on a natural increase of the population, America’s government, said Jefferson, would become “more homogeneous, more peaceable, more durable.”
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Still, most Americans accepted the idea that America represented an asylum for the oppressed of the world, and during the 1790s nearly one hundred thousand immigrants poured into the United States.
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During the debates in the Congress over naturalization, Americans struggled with their desire to welcome these immigrants on one hand and their fears of being overwhelmed by un-American ideas on the other.

The radical Revolutionary commitment to voluntary citizenship and expatriation—the idea that a person could disavow his subject status and become a citizen of another country—aggravated this dilemma. Unlike the English, who clung to the idea of perpetual allegiance—once an Englishman always an Englishman—most Americans necessarily accepted the right of expatriation. But they worried that naturalized citizens who had sworn allegiance to the United States might later transfer their loyalty to another country. And they were troubled by American expatriates who wanted to be readmitted to the United States as citizens. With these kinds of examples America’s concept of volitional citizenship seemed alarmingly capricious and open to abuse.
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Although Congress in 1790 passed a fairly liberal naturalization act requiring only two years of residency for free white persons, it soon changed its mind under the impact of the French Revolution. Both Federalists and Republicans backed the Naturalization Act of 1795, which extended the time of residency to five years and required aliens seeking citizenship to renounce any title of nobility they may have held and to provide proof of their good moral character and their devotion to the Constitution of the United States.

It was not long, however, before the Federalists realized that most of the immigrants, especially those whom Harrison Gray Otis labeled the “hordes of wild Irishmen,” posed a distinct threat to the kind of stable and hierarchal society they expected America to become. By 1798 the Federalists’ earlier optimism in welcoming foreign immigration was gone. Since these masses of new immigrants with their disorderly and Jacobinical ideas were “the grand cause of all our present difficulties,” the Federalists concluded, in the most pessimistic refrain—one that virtually repudiated one of the central tenets of the Revolution—”let us no longer pray that America may become an asylum to all nations.”
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Some extreme Federalist congressmen, such as Robert Goodloe Harper of South Carolina, thought that “the time is now come when it will be proper to declare that nothing but birth shall entitle a man to citizenship in this country.”
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Although most congressmen thought Harper’s proposal went too far, they did eventually enact a fairly radical naturalization act. The Naturalization Act of June 18, 1798, extended the period of residence required before an alien could apply to become a citizen from five to fourteen years, compelled all aliens to register with a district court or an agent appointed by the president within forty-eight hours of arrival in the United States, and forbade all aliens who were citizens or subjects of a nation with which the United States was at war from becoming American citizens.

The Federalists also laid plans for dealing with the aliens who were already in the country. Even the Republicans feared some aliens. Consequently, they had no serious objection to restraining enemy aliens during wartime and, mainly in order to prevent worse legislation, virtually took over the passage of the Alien Enemies Act of July 6, 1798—an act that is still on the books. But the Federalists wanted an even wider-ranging law to deal with aliens in peacetime as well as wartime, because, as Abigail Adams put it, even though the United States had not actually declared war against France, nonetheless, “in times like the present, a more careful and attentive watch ought to be kept over foreigners.” The resultant Alien Friends Act of June 25, 1798, which Jefferson labeled “a most detestable thing . . . worthy of the 8th or 9th century,” gave the president the power to expel, without a hearing or even giving reasons, any alien whom the president judged “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” If such aliens failed to leave the country, they could be imprisoned for up to three years and permanently barred from
becoming citizens. This extraordinary act was temporary and was to expire in two years.
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The Alien Friends Act and the Naturalization Act met strenuous opposition from the Republicans, especially from the New York congressmen Edward Livingston and Albert Gallatin. Denying that a French invasion was imminent, the Republicans argued that the measures were unnecessary. They declared that the state laws and courts were more than capable of taking care of all aliens and spies in the country. They claimed that the acts were unconstitutional, first, because Article V of the Constitution, made with the slave trade in mind, prevented Congress prior to 1808 from prohibiting “the Migration or Importation” of persons coming into the United States, and, second, because the acts gave the president arbitrary power. Gallatin in particular argued that the Alien Friends Act violated the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that “no person shall be deprived of his life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” pointing out that this right extended to every “person,” not just to citizens.
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Federalists, fearful, as Harrison Gray Otis put it, of “an army of spies and incendiaries scattered through the continent,” brooked no interference with their plans.
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Nevertheless, some of the Federalists were uneasy over the severity of the measures, especially those with large immigrant populations in their states, and the Naturalization Act and Alien Friends Act passed by only narrow margins. Still, most Federalists were pleased that the new measures would in the future deprive aliens from influencing America’s elections. Adams much later justified to Jefferson his signing of the Alien Friends bill on the grounds that “we were then at War with France: French Spies then swarmed in our Cities and in the Country. . . . To check them was the design of this law. Was there ever a Government,” he asked Jefferson, “which had not Authority to defend itself against Spies in its own Bosom?”
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R
ESTRICTING NATURALIZATION
and restraining aliens were only partial solutions to the crisis the Federalists saw threatening the security of the country. Equally important was finding a way of dealing with the immense power over public opinion that newspapers were developing in the 1790s. In fact, the American press had become the most important instrument of democracy in the modern world, and because the Federalists were fearful of too much democracy, they believed the press had to be restrained.

With the number of newspapers more than doubling in the 1790s, Americans were rapidly becoming the largest newspaper-reading public in the world. When the great French observer of America Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States in 1831 he marveled at the role newspapers had come to play in American culture. Since, as he noted, there was “hardly a hamlet in America without its newspaper,” the power of the American press made “political life circulate in every corner of that vast land.” The press’s power, Tocqueville suggested, flowed from the democratic nature of the society. An aristocratic society, such as that promoted by the Federalists, was tied together by patronage and personal connections. But when these ties disintegrated, which is what happened when the society became more democratic, then, said Tocqueville, it became impossible to get great numbers of people to come together and cooperate unless each individual could be persuaded to think that his private interests were best served by uniting his efforts with those of many other people. “That cannot be done habitually and conveniently without the help of a newspaper,” Tocqueville concluded. “Only a newspaper can put the same thought at the same time before a thousand readers.”
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Madison was one of the first to see the important role of newspapers in creating public opinion. Near the end of 1791 he revised some of his thinking in
Federalist
Nos. 10 and 51 and argued now that the large extent of the country was a disadvantage for republican government. In a huge country like the United States, not only was ascertaining the real opinion of the public difficult, but what opinion there was could be more easily counterfeited, which was “favorable to the authority of government.” At the same time, the more extensive the country, “the more insignificant is each individual in his own eyes,” which was “unfavorable to liberty.” The solution, said Madison, was to encourage “a general intercourse of sentiments” by whatever means—good roads, domestic commerce, the exchange of representatives, and “particularly
a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people
.”
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Even as Madison wrote, the press itself was changing. It began shedding its traditional neutral role of providing advertising, mercantile information, and foreign news to its readers. Editors such as John Fenno and Philip Freneau no longer saw themselves as mere tradesmen earning a living, as printer Benjamin Franklin had in the colonial era; instead, they became political advocates and party activists. During the course of the 1790s, these partisan editors, many of them immigrants, and their
news papers became essential to the emerging national parties of the Federalists and especially the Republicans.

In the generation following the Revolution, over three hundred thousand British and Irish immigrants entered the United States. Many were political or religious refugees, radical exiles driven from Britain and Ireland because of their dissenting beliefs, including the English Unitarian Joseph Priestley and the militant Irish Catholic brothers Mathew and James Carey. Since many of these radical exiles were writers, printers, and editors, they inevitably ended up in America creating or running newspapers. Indeed, they contributed in disproportionate numbers to the rapid growth of the American press. In the several decades following the end of the Revolutionary War, twenty-three English, Scottish, and Irish radicals edited and produced no fewer than fifty-seven American newspapers and magazines, most of which supported the Republican cause in the politically sensitive Middle States.
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Since in the early 1790s over 90 percent of newspapers had generally supported the Federalists, this surge of Republican papers represented a remarkable shift in a short period of time.
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These partisan newspapers gave party members, especially those of the opposition Republican party, a sense of identity and a sense of belonging to a common cause. Since there were no modern party organizations, no official ballots, and no lists of party members, newspaper subscriptions and readership often came to define partisanship; newspaper offices even printed party tickets.
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As these newspapers grew in number and partisanship, they became increasingly accessible to more ordinary people. Of course, by modern standards the circulation of individual newspapers remained small—from a few hundred to a few thousand for the most successful of the urban papers. Yet because they were often available in taverns and
other public places and were sometimes read aloud to groups, they did manage to reach ever larger numbers of people. By the end of the decade some claimed that newspapers were entering three-quarters of American homes.
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No editor did more to politicize the press in the 1790s than Benjamin Franklin Bache, Franklin’s grandson. Bache, called “Lightning-Rod Junior” by the Federalists, was the most prominent of the Republican editors, and he took the lead in arguing for a new and special role for the press in a popular republic. In 1793Bache’s paper, the
General Advertiser
(later the
Aurora
), claimed that the press provided “a constitutional check upon the conduct of public servants.” Since public opinion was the basis of a republic, and newspapers were the principal and in some cases the only organ of that opinion, the press in America, said Bache, needed to become a major participant in politics. Because the people could not always count on their elected representatives to express their sentiments, newspapers and other institutions outside of government had responsibilities to protect the people’s liberties and promote their interests.

Of course, nothing could be more different from the Federalists’ view of the people’s relationship to their republican governments. They assumed in traditional English fashion that once the people had elected their representatives, they should remain quiet and uninvolved in politics until the next election. But Bache’s
Aurora
and other Republican newspapers in the 1790s set about educating the people in their new obligations as citizens. In order to get people to throw off their traditional passivity and deference and become engaged in politics, the Republican editors urged people to change their consciousness. They relentlessly attacked aristocratic pretension and privilege and classical deference and decorum and implored the people to cast off their sense of inferiority to the “well-born” and their so-called betters and elect whomever they wished to the offices of government, including men like William Findley, Jedediah Peck, and Matthew Lyon.