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“Reign of Witches”: Seditious Libel in early U.S. History (1)

The United States’ Constitution guarantees the right to free speech. What that means is not obvious and up for debate. However, it is generally understood that U.S. citizens, and the press, have the freedom to criticize the government and government officials. That, as I recently learned, has not always been the case. In 1798 Congress passed alien and sedition acts. The Sedition Act of 1798 punished writing, printing, publishing any kind of false, malicious or scandalous content against the United States government (Tedford & Herbeck, 29). Words like malicious and scandalous leave a lot of wiggle room and interpretation when it comes to enforcing the law. Thomas Jefferson described these actions as a “reign of witches” because he saw it as a push by the Federalists, the party in power, to punish political opponents (Tedford & Herbeck, 28).  That is essentially what they did. At least 24 newspaper editors were arrested and tried under this act, all of whom were supporters of the opposite party (Tedford & Herbeck, 29). This is evidence of the United States trying to figure out exactly what it means to give its citizens free speech.

This issue has been around since the United States founding, and I don’t believe will go away any time soon. In fact, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House Press Secretary, said during a press conference that an ESPN host, Jemele Hill, should be fired for calling Donald Trump a white supremacist in a tweet. I would argue that this behavior by the Press Secretary is a method of controlling speech.  While this is not a law that prohibits or punishes someone for criticizing the President, it calls to mind the Sedition Act of 1798. It is a White House official, during an official press conference, implying (if not directly calling for) someone to be punished for criticizing the President. It could have, and is probably intended to have, a chilling effect.           

I am not really claiming that enacting laws that can try and punish people for speaking out against the government, and the Press Secretary calling criticism of the president a “fireable offense” are the same thing because they aren’t: one is a codification of censorship; the other is an off-the-cuff remark. But there is something linking the two things. It almost feels like the White House wishes there was a law that would count Jemele Hill’s tweet as seditious libel and punish her for it. Trump said as much in 2016 when he was campaigning . He said he would like to punish media outlets for publishing “negative and horrible and false articles” which sounds awfully similar to the language in the Sedition Act of 1798. When Trump himself said this, and now his spokesperson is advocating the firing of one of his critics, one can’t help but wonder what kind of implications this has for the freedom of speech.




Tedford, Thomas L., and Dale A. Herbeck. Freedom of speech in the United States. 8th ed., State 
            College, PA, Strata Publishing, Inc., 2017.

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