On July 4, 1798, the citizens of the capital city of Philadelphia turned out in large numbers to celebrate the nation’s independence day. While militia companies marched through the streets, church bells rang, and artillery units fired salutes, members of the United States Senate were trying to conduct a debate on a critical bill. One senator noted ‘the military parade so attracted the attention of the majority that much the greater part of them stood with their bodies out of the windows and could not be kept to order.’ Once they resumed their deliberations, however, the Federalist majority succeeded in gaining passage of an implausible bill, one quickly approved by the House of Representatives and signed on July 14 by President John Adams.

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Ironically, as senators celebrated the freedom they had won from Britain, they approved a sedition bill that made it illegal to publish or utter any statements about the government that were ‘false, scandalous and malicious’ with the ‘intent to defame’ or to bring Congress or the president into ‘contempt or disrepute.’ This bill, seemingly a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment free speech protections, had a chilling effect on members of the Republican Party and its leader, Thomas Jefferson, who admitted that he feared ‘to write what I think.’

Support for this restrictive legislation had grown out of Federalist belief that the young nation was facing its gravest crisis yet, in the possibility of war with France and the spread of anti-immigrant feeling. The new law violated the beliefs of many Republicans, who regarded Federalists as reactionary defenders of privilege intent on bringing back the monarchy. Federalists saw their Republican opposites as irresponsible radicals eager to incite a social revolution as democratic as the one that had torn through France.

Nothing divided Federalist from Republican more than their response to the French Revolution. Republicans applauded the revolutionaries’ destruction of aristocratic privileges, the overthrow of the monarchy, and the implementation of constitutional government. Yet, Federalists saw the same dramatic changes as the degeneration of legitimate government into mob rule, particularly during the bloody ‘Reign of Terror’ when ‘counterrevolutionaries’ lost their lives on the guillotine.

Federalist fears deepened as they watched the new French republican government encourage wars of liberation and conquest in Belgium, Switzerland, Holland, and the Italian peninsula. Rumors were rampant in 1798 about a possible French invasion of America, one that allegedly would be supported by American traitors and a population of French émigrés that had grown to more than 20,000.

The nation’s rapidly growing immigrant population deeply troubled Federalists. One Pennsylvania newspaper argued that ‘none but the most vile and worthless’ were inundating the country. William Shaw, the president’s nephew, arguing that ‘all our present difficulties may be traced’ to the ‘hordes of Foreigners’ in the land, contended America should ‘no longer’ be ‘an asylum to all nations.’ Federalists worried about the 60,000 Irish immigrants in the new nation, some of whom had been exiled for plotting against British rule. These malcontents, they argued, along with French immigrants, and a sprinkling of British radicals like the liberal theologian and scientist Joseph Priestley, presented a grave challenge to the nation. The Federalists feared that the extremist ideas of the dissenters would corrupt and mobilize the destitute.

The British government, even more terrified than the Americans that ideas from the radical French regime might spread, had been at war with France for five years, trying to contain it. Both nations had seized neutral American ships headed to their enemy’s ports. President Adams initiated a two-pronged plan to stop the French from seizing any further ships. He sent three emissaries to negotiate with the French government, and he worked to push bills through Congress to increase the size of the navy and army. Federalist revulsion at anything associated with France reached a peak in spring 1798 when word arrived in Philadelphia that three French agents, identified only as X, Y, and Z, had demanded a bribe from the American diplomats before they would begin negotiations.

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