Alien and Sedition Acts Summary

Brief Summary

The Set-Up

A brewing war with France makes Adams crack down on immigrants and his political enemies. They happened to be a lot of the same people.

The Text

We're dealing with four different texts, all aimed at cracking down on people Adams and the Federalists weren't fond of. Three of them, the Naturalization Act, the Alien Friends Act, and the Alien Enemies Act, go after immigrants. The Sedition Act goes after specific forms of protest that should be protected by the First Amendment.

The Naturalization Act makes it more difficult for immigrants to become citizens. The biggest change is that it would them a lot longer to go through the process—longer in fact, than the country had existed at that time.

The Alien Friends Act allowed the president to deport or imprison people from "friendly" foreign countries, as long as he had some proof they were up to something. The Alien Enemies Act took it a step further to let the president do that to people from countries that the U.S. was at war with. The president didn't even have to prove anything. He could just say, "I just sorta figured this person was trouble," and bam: deported.

The Sedition Act is the most problematic of all the four acts, seeing as it explicitly contradicts the First Amendment.

All that freedom of speech and assembly you thought you had? Well, if it goes against the government, you don't actually have it. Yeesh.

  

TL;DR

The four acts severely restricted the rights of immigrants and curtailed First Amendment rights for everyone. These bad boys don't exactly go down in history for being awesome texts