Note 287 — Chapter II

At the time the country numbered among its population a very large number of aliens. French refugees from the West Indies, to the number of perhaps 25,000, were here. Cf. Report of the American Historical Association for 1912: “The Enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Laws,” by F. M. Anderson, p. 116. England, also, had her quota of citizens here, not a few of whom were fugitives from justice, and some of whom, like William Cobbett and J. Thomson Callender (cf. McMaster, History of the People of the United States, vol. ii, p. 338), either drew the fire of the advocates of French principles or busied themselves in the affairs of government on this side of the ocean. The amount of scurrilous abuse, aimed at the heads of government, which issued from the public press had become appalling. No innuendoes were too indelicate, no personalities too coarse, no slanders too malicious, no epithets too vile to be of service in the general campaign of villification. The prostitution of the public press in America has never been more abject than it was at the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. (Duniway, The Development of Freedom of the Press in Massachusetts, pp. 143, 144.) Unfortunately, Federalists compromised their position and scandalized their cause by writing as scurrilous and libelous articles as their enemies; but the agencies of administration were in their hands, and, as the Democrats charged, their offences were not noticed.