Albert Beveridge

I am not an advocate for the alien and sedition bills; had I been in Congress when they passed, I should, unless my judgment could have been changed, certainly have opposed them.

I believe that these laws, had they been opposed on these principles by a man, not suspected of intending to destroy the government, or being hostile to it, would never have been enacted.

In all respects the Capital during the first decades of the nineteenth century was a representation in miniature of the embryo Nation itself.

A greater number of newspapers, however, had profoundly affected public sentiment, and democratic views and conduct had become riotously dominant.

The Democrats are divided into speculative theorists & absolute terrorists.

We have a country governed by blockheads and knaves; our wives and daughters are thrown into the stews....

The most ignorant and degraded American felt himself far superior to the most enlightened European.

Conservatives believed that the youthful Republic was doomed; they could see only confusion, destruction, and decline.

In this wise, political passions were made to strengthen the general protest against riveting the common law of England upon the American people by judicial fiat and without authorization by the National Legislature.

Crime must be punished, said the judges; if Congress would not make the necessary laws, the courts would act without statutory authority.

The jury had no right to pass upon the constitutionality of the law--"such a power would be extremely dangerous.

The growing indignation of the people at the courts rose to a dangerous point.

Thus a popular conviction grew up that no man was safe who assumed to criticize National officials.

The people regarded those brought under the lash of justice as martyrs to the cause of free speech; and so, indeed, they were.

Thus, unhappily, democracy marched arm in arm with State Rights, while Nationalism found itself the intimate companion of a narrow, bigoted, and retrograde conservatism.

But the Republican condemnations of the severe punishment that the Federalists inflicted upon anybody who criticized the Government, raised fundamental issues and created conditions that forced action on those issues.

Yet at that time in America manhood suffrage did not exist excepting in three States, a large part of the people could not read or write, imprisonment for debt was universal, convicted persons were sentenced to be whipped in public and…

Hardly a protest against slavery was made, and human rights as we now know them were in embryo, so far as the practice of them was concerned.

The democratic revolution that overthrew Federalism was the beginning of the movement that finally arrived at the abolition of imprisonment for debt, the bestowal of universal manhood suffrage, and, in general, the more direct…

Morris expounded the conservative Federalist philosophy thus: "Governments are made to provide against the follies and vices of men....

I am more afraid of an army of judges, ... than of an army of soldiers....

What security is there to an individual," he asked, if the Legislature of the Union or any particular State, should pass an ex post facto law?

I know this doctrine is unpleasant; I know it is more popular to appeal to public opinion--that equivocal, transient being, which exists nowhere and everywhere.

Cast not away this only anchor of our safety.

Our children see this and learn to imitate it....