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168 [฀5 ] States’Rights & the Rights of Man the opposition to the alien and sedition acts He asked if those laws were correspondent with human rights? Those rights he said, were, freedom of speech, freedom of person, a right to justice, and to a fair trial. if any alien possessed those rights, he asked, could he avail himself of them under the present law? could a citizen under the sedition law, exercise the freedom of speech, or of religion, which last, a few days before, he had heard called a social right? it was not so. . . . What would be the effect of those laws? They would establish executive influence, and executive influence would produce a revolution.—John Taylor of Caroline, introducing the Virginia Resolutions of 1798 Then freeman assemble at “liberty’s call,” resolve—and to congress petition, That the law called alien to nothing may fall, and also the bill of sedition. —“A needy war-worn soldier,” 1798 in the middle of August 1798, in Fayette County, Kentucky , thousands of people massed in the small town of Lexington to protest the alien and sedition acts. Unable to fit inside any public building, the crowd sprawled across the square at the center of town to listen to the local leadership of the republican Party, led by the distinguished colonel George nicholas. Like most of the leading figures in Kentucky, nicholas was a transplant from Virginia. He had served in the Virginia House of Delegates during the revolution, as a delegate to the Virginia ratifying convention for the U.s. constitution, and he was the brother of Wilson cary nicholas, friend and confidant of Thomas Jefferson. Perched atop a wagon that served as a makeshift stage, nicholas lectured for four hours about the dangers of the recent federalist legislation—to peace in the West, to the federal nature of the 169 states’ rights and the rights of man constitution, and to the preservation of the rights of man. one loving biographer called his oration “a speech of eloquence and power, scarcely ever equaled, and certainly never surpassed.”1 But when he finished, despite the Homeric length of his harangue (or perhaps because of it), the crowd wanted more. seizing the moment, twenty-one-year-old lawyer Henry clay mounted the wagon and earned his reputation as “another Patrick Henry” by assailing the pretenses of aristocrats.2 clay, himself recently arrived from Virginia, where he had trained in the law with Jefferson’s mentor, George Wythe, was a strong republican and as yet uninterested in compromise. after clay, a few daring federalists attempted to seize the stage, but they were pulled away, shouted down, and jeered. The assembled crowd then passed a set of ten angry resolutions, which pronounced the alien and sedition acts “void” and characterized the federalist agenda as “unconstitutional, impolitic, unjust , and a disgrace to the american name.” noting an impending crisis of the Union, the resolutions also asked each man to “furnish himself without delay” and “at his own expense” with arms for the defense of republican government. nicholas and clay were carried away in triumph .3 The meeting in Lexington was one of many similar mass meetings with participants in the thousands that were held across the state in the summer of 1798. The uproar in Kentucky, or what the easterners came to call “the Kentucky frenzy,” marked the beginning of the unmaking of the federalists’ national dominance. frontier Lexington was about as far from newburyport, massachusetts, as one could get in the United states, with dice, whiskey, and the code duello more evident to critics of the society than law and order. The Lexington resolutions exemplified the emerging character of the american West—confident, democratic, and defiant—and provided the early hints that the federalist policies of the spring of 1798 had overreached. But it would take more than a few boisterous complaints from the backwoods to shake the federalists from their triumphalism. Kentucky, that “new fledged state,” merely proved its own immaturity and “the height of insolence” by attacking the government and flying “in the face of a benevolent foster parent.”4 as one federalist noted,“it is probable Kentucky is yet semi-barbarian in its legislature, as in its morals, manners, and literature.”5 celebratory petitions lauding adams and his administration continued to pour into Philadelphia from across the Union, and the friends of government lavished in the “glow of patriotism ”which they continued to believe“pervades all our citizens.”6 Grand juries throughout the...

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