Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/213

Rh der the laws that he was charged with having inspired. Greenleaf's Daily Advertiser had been changed to the Argus and was then edited by David Frothingham; it was, as it had been during the administration of Washington, bitterly anti-Federalist. A paragraph appeared in this paper to the effect that Mrs. Bache had been offered "six thousand dollars down" to suppress the Aurora, but that the indignant widow had refused, declaring that she would never dishonor thus the memory of her husband, "nor her children's future fame by such baseness; when she parted with the paper it should be to Republicans only." Hamilton was named as the person back of the offer.

The day after this was printed Hamilton had Frothingham indicted and, despite the fact that it was shown that he had copied the paragraph from another paper, he was found guilty, fined $100, and sentenced to four months imprisonment.

By the Jefferson party the direct charge was made that the laws were an attempt to punish those who either sympathized with France or were in communication with French patriots, or, to be still more general, those who had attacked the Federalist administration.

The defense of the Federalists showed their failure to understand the seriousness of their transgression against modern political theory; the lack of understanding is nowhere better shown than in the defense, of the Sedition Laws by Oliver Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury under Washington and Adams. The fact that censorship of the press had, in the past, been tolerated and encouraged, gave them, as they believed, a historic justification for the violation of popular rights.

"Those to whom the management of public affairs is now confided," concluded Wolcott, "cannot be justified