Page:Contemporary Opinion of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, p1.djvu/1

CONTEMPORARY OPINION OF THE VIRGINIA AND KENTUCKY RESOLUTIONS

I. right to complete freedom in the utterance of political opinions has been so long a fundamental principle in the United States that probably few Americans will recall the fact that exactly a hundred years ago the controversy which eventuated in the complete triumph of that principle raged all over the Union. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, whatever their whole purpose, were designed primarily as a protest against the infringement of this principle by the recently enacted Alien and Sedition Laws. Incidentally they gave expression to a theory concerning the nature of the federal union which was of equal or perhaps greater significance than their protest against all interference with freedom of speech. It is singular that a controversy which involved an expression of opinion by the whole American people upon two questions of so much importance should have been treated by historians as this one has been. Enough and more than enough has been written about the authorship of the resolutions and their ultimate object; but little if any serious effort has been made to ascertain what the people of the United States thought about them. When Jonathan Elliot compiled his now celebrated Debates he was content as regards the Resolutions of 1798 and 1799 merely to reprint a pamphlet published in 1800 by direction of the Virginia legislature, adding the Kentucky Resolutions for both years. From this material one can learn next to nothing of the public sentiment in the two states which induced the passage of the resolutions and but little of the temper in which these resolutions were received in other states. None of the memorials addressed by the county courts to the two legislatures appear in the pages of Elliot; and of sentiment outside of Virginia and Kentucky one can judge only by the answers of the seven states whose legislatures sent to the Virginia legislature replies disapproving of its resolutions. Believing that these seven replies are not sufficient to represent adequately the public opinion of the entire country, I have attempted to extract from