American History!!??

Question

The debate over the Alien ans Sedition Acts of 1798 revealed bitter controversies on a number of issues. Discuss the issues involved and why these controversies developed?

Answer 1

While Jefferson did denounce the Sedition Act as a violation of the First Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights, which protected the right of free speech, his main argument on the unconstitutionality of the act was that it violated the Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." In 1798 when the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed, First Amendment rights did not restrict the states, as they now do. Jefferson more strongly argued the Federal Government had overstepped its bounds in the Alien and Sedition Acts by attempting to exercise undelegated powers. Apart from Virginia and Kentucky the other state legislatures, all of them Federalist, rejected Jefferson's position by resolutions that either supported the acts, or denied that Virginia and Kentucky could denounce it.[1]
The judicial redress for unconstitutional legislation under the doctrine of judicial review was not established until Marbury v. Madison in 1803; the Supreme Court in 1798, particularly Mr. Justice Samuel Chase, was openly hostile to the Federalists' opponents. The Alien and Sedition Acts were not appealed to the Supreme Court for review, although individual Supreme Court Justices, sitting in circuit, heard many of the cases prosecuting opponents of the Federalists.
In order to address the constitutionality of the measures, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison sought to unseat the Federalists, appealing to the people to remedy the constitutional violation, and drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which called on the states to nullify the federal legislation. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions reflect the Compact Theory, which states that the United States are made up of a voluntary union of States that agree to cede some of their authority in order to join the union, but that the states do not, ultimately, surrender their sovereign rights. Therefore, under the Compact Theory, states can determine if the federal government has violated its agreements, including the Constitution, and nullify such violations or even withdraw from the Union. Variations of this theory were also argued at the Hartford Convention at the time of the War of 1812, and by the Southern states just before the American Civil War.