Note 292 — Chapter II

Anderson, who appears to have made a painstaking examination of the available records, states his conclusions thus: “I have made a special effort to discover every possible instance and to avoid confusing Federal and State cases. There appears to have been about 24 or 25 persons arrested. At least 15, and probably several more, were indicted. Only 10, or possibly 11, cases came to trial. In 10 the accused were pronounced guilty. The eleventh case may have been an acquittal, but the report of it is entirely unconfirmed.” (Report of the American Historical Association for 1912, p. 120. Cf. Bassett, The Federalist System, p. 264.) An important phase of the judicial aspects of the situation, as respects the forming of public opinion, was the widespread publication in the newspapers of the charges made to grand juries by Federal judges who exerted themselves to defend the alien and sedition laws, and whose utterances received caustic criticism at the hands of Democrat writers.