The deplorable language and tone of the partisan press during this period may properly be included among the very worst instances of this kind in the entire history of the country.54 For a while during his first adminis- tration, President George Washington was universally venerated and above criticism in the press. Soon, however, profound disagreements over the con- duct of the new American foreign policy overwhelmed whatever previous civility had existed. The ultimate cause of this conflict was the struggle of Britain and its allies to restore the Bourbons to the French throne.55 These noxious currents, accordingly, increased and persisted for more than a decade.
A useful way to appreciate the extent of the ugly, unrestrained newspa- per war between the contending forces is simply to examine the language employed to denounce the leaders of the day. Let us start with George Wash- ington. As Kent Newmyer observes, by1793, Washington’s efforts to preserve neutrality upon the outbreak of war between England and France rather than supporting the French (as the celebrated1778treaty with the French seemed to require the United States to do) for the first time led to open abuse of Washington in the press. This abuse continued for the balance of his presidency.
Freneau in the National Gazette was one of the first to criticize Wash- ington, and in John Marshall’s words, his paper “soon became a vehicle of
52 Letters from William Cobbett to Edward Thornton Written in the Years 1797 to 1800(G. D. H. Cole ed.1937).
53 James Morton Smith,Freedom’s Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Acts and American Civil Liberties 257–270(1956).
54 SeeMarshall Smelser, The Federalist Period as an Age of Passion,10American Quarterly, No.4, 391,396(winter1958) (“harshness of partisanship” and “some of the ripest vituperation in American literary history”).
55 The ramifications of the struggle on the American scene included the undeclared naval war with France and such unpopular presidential decisions as the Non-Intercourse Act, the Embargo, and the War of1812.
Virulent Speech and Demonization of Opponents 37 calumny.”56A few years later, Benjamin Franklin Bache took Freneau’s place as Washington’s leading Republican critic. In theAurora, Bache, even less restrained than Freneau, compared Washington to George III and abused him as “vain and inept with monarchical tendencies” who had managed “to debauch”and “to deceive” the nation. He also denounced him as a “perjured speculator and a wilful assassin.”57 James Thomson Callender, second to none in his scurrility over his professional lifetime, “call[ed] Washington a traitor, a robber, and a perjurer”58Others denounced him as a secret traitor.59 Thomas Paine turned against the President and assailed Washington: “You are treacherous in private friendship, and a hypocrite in public life.”60Writ- ing to Jefferson in 1796, Washington complained of the press descriptions of him and his administration “in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter, or even a common pickpocket.”61
In1797John Adams succeeded Washington as President and assumed his place as the leading object of Republican abuse. Bache assailed President Adams “as “old, blind, toothless, and decrepid” (sic).62In her running com- mentary on the events of the time, Abigail Adams commented to her sister Mary Cranch: “Yet dairingly [sic] do the vile incendaries [sic] keep up in Baches paper the most wicked and base, voilent [sic] & calumniating abuse.”
She was profoundly offended by the press treatment of her husband and expressed her outrage in letter after letter to her sister.63 As we will see, she repeatedly called for criminal libel prosecutions to bring such partisan abuse to a close.
That most abusive of Republican polemicists, the notorious James Thomson Callender, among other allegations assailed Adams as a “libeller,”
a “hoary headed incendiary” “with hands reeking with the blood of a poor friendless Conn sailor,” and a liar whose office was a “scene of profligacy
56 4Marshall,Washington, note3, at448.
57 See Gazette of the United States, Sept.9,1799; Rosenfeld, note18, at691.
58 1Julius Goebel, Jr.,The Law Practice of Alexander Hamilton: Documents and Commentaries 775–806(1964) (hereinafter Goebel,Hamilton Practice).
59 Fawn Brodie,Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History321(1974) (hereinafter Brodie).
60 2H. Adams,Jefferson Administration, note28, at328.
61 Letter, George Washington to Thomas Jefferson (summer1796),citedin J. Thomas Scharf &
Thompson Westcott,History of Philadelphia, 1609–1884,484(1884) (hereinafter Scharf & West- cott).
62 Gazette of the United States, Sept.9,1799;Aurora, Sept.9,1799; Rosenfeld, note18, at691.
63 Letters of Abigail Adams to Mary Cranch (Apr.26,1798, May10,1798, May26,1798, June19, 1798, June23,1798),New Letters, note10, at164,170,179,193,194. The flow of lamentations came to an end with the enactment of the Sedition Act of1798on July14,1798.
and usury” and whose purpose “was to embroil this country [in a war] with France.”64Still other Republican editors pilloried Adams as “a ruffian deserv- ing the curses of mankind.”65 For their part, the Federalist editors were no less restrained. The arch-FederalistGazette of the United Statesassumed an obligation “to watch with eagle eye, the misinterpretations, calumnies, and falsehoods of Jacobinical publications, whose filth and loathsomeness shall no longer screen them from exposure.”66
However, notwithstanding the revolting calumny incurred by prominent political figures of both parties, they were not free from much the same ugly prose in describing persons who had injured them. Thus, Adams described Benjamin Franklin Bache as “one of the most malicious libelers of me. But the yellow fever arrested him in his detestable career and sent him to his grandfather [Benjamin Franklin] from whom he inherited a dirty, envious, jealous, and revengeful Spight [sic] against me.”67 Similarly, he described Alexander Hamilton as “a bastard Bratt [sic] of a Scots Pedlar [sic]” and as a
“Creole Bastard.”68
Washington was so deeply wounded by the “calumnies” of Freneau and other Republican editors that he deemed it a national problem. Like Wash- ington and Adams, Jefferson was also wounded by the outrageous charges and epithets. In a letter in1804to his friend and fellow Virginian John Tyler, he lamented the “direct falsehoods, the misrepresentations of truth, the calum- nies and the insults resorted to by a faction to mislead the public mind.”69 Shortly thereafter in his Second Inaugural Address, he bitterly attacked the calumnies of the press and condemned the “licentiousness of the press.”70
64 Burns, note5, at111.
The reference to the sailor is to President Adams’s controversial decision to surrender a seaman, Jonathan Robbins, of disputed ancestry to the British for alleged desertion from the British Navy after his impressment. The disputed issue was whether Robbins was a British or American citizen.
SeeProceedings in the case of Jonathan Robbins on a Claim for Delivery to the British Government on Charge of Murder (D.S.C.1789), Wharton, note51, at392–457.
65 Brodie, note59, at321.
66 Gazette of the United States, reprinted in theConnecticut Courant, Jan.26,1801.
67 Letter, John Adams to Benjamin Rush (June23,1807), Rosenfeld, note18, at235.
68 SeeChernow, note10, at522,citingHistorical Magazine50–51(July1870–1871). For Hamilton’s indignant defense of the legitimacy of his birth and the distinction of his Scottish heritage,see Letter, Alexander Hamilton to William Jackson (Aug.26,1800), Alexander Hamilton,Writings 930(Libr. Am.2001).
For her part, Abigail Adams described Albert Gallatin as the “sly, artfull [sic], the insidious Gallatin.”SeeLetter, Abigail Adams to Mary Cranch (Apr.4,1798),Abigail Adams New Letters, note10, at151.
69 Letter, Thomas Jefferson to Judge John Tyler (June28,1804), Jefferson, Writings(Libr. Am.), note22, at32.
70 Thomas Jefferson, Second Inaugural Address, Mar.5,1804,ibid., at518,521–522(“whatever its licentiousness could devise or dare”).
Virulent Speech and Demonization of Opponents 39 As Clyde Duniway has concluded, this development of a scurrilous, abu- sive, partisan press bore bitter fruit. The support of public opinion for freedom of the press
was largely forfeited by the character of the newspaper press toward the end of the eighteenth century. The violence of the [Revolutionary] war spirit had encourage a habit of intolerance toward political opponents, and vindictive denunciation of all loyalists had been supplemented by rigorous suppression of all publications unfavorable to the Revolutionary movement. Now that the establishment of peace and the organization of settled government gave scope for the development of national par- ties, the vituperative powers of ardent partisans were employed against each other as domestic antagonists. Coarse personalities, vulgar ribaldry, malicious slanders, were poured forth until it seemed to sober-minded men that unrestrained freedom of discussion was leading to the triumph of anarchy.71
When civic temperatures rose with the bitter division of opinion on the likelihood of an outbreak of war with France and over the need for a compre- hensive series of defensive measures, the stage was set for consideration of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The war measures and the taxes to support them, the repressive statutes, and the bitter two-year experience of the criminal prose- cution and imprisonment of Republican editors and partisans contributed to the election of Jefferson in1800.
However, the abusive quality of the press not only did not abate with Jefferson in the White House, but grew worse. As Henry Adams observed, the year1802saw “an outburst of reciprocal invective and slander such as could not be matched in American history.”72 Indeed, it had become contagious and flavored even legal pleadings. Thus in1804, when the Republicans had come to control not only the national government but also the state courts in New York, the language employed in the indictment under New York com- mon law of an obscure, upstate Federalist editor, Harry Croswell, illustrates much the same violence of speech as had characterized the earlier exchanges between Federalist and Republican editors. In indicting Croswell for assert- ing that President Jefferson had paid James T. Callender for his scurrilous comments about President Washington and President Adams, the indict- ment further stated that Croswell, “being a malicious man and seditious man
71 Clyde A. Duniway,The Development of Freedom of the Press in Massachusetts 143(1906repr.
1969) (hereinafter Duniway).
72 See1H. Adams,Jefferson Administration, note28, at218–219. For a similar conclusion,seeLucius A. Powe, Jr.,The Fourth Estate and the Constitution: Freedom of the Press in America53(1991) (“Probably no period in our history witnessed such an irresponsibly abusive partisan press”).
and of a depraved mind and wicked and diabolical disposition . . . contriving and intending . . . to detract from, scandalize, traduce, vilify, and to represent him the said Thomas Jefferson, as unworthy of the confidence, respect, and attachment of the people of the said United States.”73