710. John Adams, Free Speech, and the First Constitutional Crisis

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Way the World Works. Today is very, very exciting because today we are going to dive into a lesson coming to you from the third Tuttle Twins history book. This is brand new. So if you haven't gotten it already, don't sleep on this. This is great. This is going to pick up where the other books left off. So I want to kind of get into that. So let's talk about what we learned in the other history books. Now, in the first one, we learned about everything leading up to the American Revolution.

And then in the next book, we learned about the American Revolution and everything that came after that, which was, of course, the framing of the Constitution. And this was a huge deal, right? We saw everything that the founders fought for. And then we saw everything that the framers were working to correct with this new form of government. And so that kind of begs the question, what happens next, right? So the Constitution is supposed to limit power. It's supposed to help keep Americans free. It's supposed to, you know, correct the mistakes, not just of the British

government, but of every government that has ever oppressed its people. And so this was huge, right? This is this American experiment. And the beginnings are going to be a little bit rough. I know we'd like to think that the story ended happily ever after and everyone obeyed the Constitution, and it was great. But it's going to be a little bit of a rough start. So I want to pick up where the other book left off. Now, we talked before in an earlier episode about something called the Whiskey Rebellion. And the reason I'm bringing this up is it was a moment where we learned that

even under this new American government, you're going to see taxes being raised, something that they were very against for the revolution. And you're going to see the government become very powerful and start doing things that they probably would have rebelled against years earlier. You're going to see, and we did another episode on this, that George Washington was a great man. He was a great leader. But even he faltered a little bit, meaning he kind of messed up a little bit when it came to really encompassing, really, really embodying, really leading like a leader of a free world.

And that's natural, right? All human beings were all flawed. We all do things that maybe aren't so great. And the Whiskey Rebellion was kind of an example of that. And we can low key blame Alexander Hamilton for that. Go back in that episode and listen to that. But now what's going to happen next. So let's remember, Washington is again, very, very powerful, very great leader. He steps down, which is huge, right? And then the next presidential election is going to happen, and it's going to go to John Adams. And Thomas Jefferson is going to be his vice president,

which is weird because they ran in different parties. But back then, it used to be that the second place winner of an election became the vice president. So as you can imagine, that's going to cause some problems. And by this time, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson are not as friendly as they were during the revolution. Because remember, they were like best friends during the revolution. They were very close, even though they didn't always agree. Now things are going to get a little contentious, we'll say, and things are going to get a little, a little wild.

So country even under a unifying figure like George Washington was still divided, right? And listen, as long as there are people, there will always be diverse opinions and people will always be a little bit divided. But people were hoping that maybe things would calm down as Adam took office. Spoiler alert, things did not calm down. So let's talk about the state of things. So at this point in time, there were two rising political parties. You had the federalists, and you remember that from the federalist papers. And at this point in time, it's going to be like Alexander Hamilton

and John Adams. They're even though they didn't always get along, but they're going to be the two federalist figureheads of this time. And then you have the Republicans. And that's Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. And this is really interesting. And I want us to remember this. These words did not mean the same thing today as they meant then. You're always going to see political parties and names kind of changing over time. That's kind of why the word liberal used to mean something like an enlightened almost like a libertarian, like less government and free

markets. And now we hear the word liberal and it means something entirely different. It means, you know, a big welfare system, things like that. And so terms are going to change over time. And that's why it's really, really interesting. If you decide to be a historian someday or you want to really dig into history of this founding era, it's interesting to get a 18th century dictionary. The reason is because some words that mean something to us now might mean something a little different back then. So that's a really interesting little, little side quest for you. If you want

to be a historian, which is remember a detective who looks through time for things and understanding things and how they relate to each other. But all right, back to John Adams presidency. So remember the federalists, they're going to favor a stronger government, a bigger centralized government. And they also wanted to keep the door open to be friends with Britain. They wanted to keep them as someone they could be allies with. And that might sound crazy to you after we just fought a war, but the world goes on, right? And then you're going to have the Republicans now

Thomas Jefferson's a big part of this. And so it's going to be obviously this smaller government, this, you know, the opposite of centralized government, right? He wanted states rights. And what's interesting is you're going to notice I mentioned Madison's name as being a Republican. But Madison was one of the OG federalists, right? He wrote the federalist papers. And so it's interesting to see this switch. And he was also, you know, the federalists were pretty against the Bill of Rights. And we talked about that in other episodes, you can go back and check that out.

And then Madison ended up being the the drafter of the Bill of Rights. And so you see him kind of, I don't want to say switch. I think he was a man very committed to principles, but you see him start to become disillusioned with the way the federalists are acting. I think it might be easier for us to think that, oh, the Constitution was ratified. So everyone agreed on what it meant false. In fact, that's why we have the judicial system, right? The Supreme Court is constantly, you know, hearing cases that determine, oh, does the Constitution really mean that?

And so same thing. It goes all the way back to then. So there's going to be a debate, many debates over what the Constitution actually meant. Now, at the same time as America is embarking on this new experiment, right? There's a crisis in Europe. So Europe is at war. You have French revolutions, which even though they were inspired by our revolution, get completely out of whack. We've done episodes on that too. So you can check out those. So France is in a crisis. They're a war with Britain. We are just like, whoa, whoa, we're a brand new nation. We don't

need this. We need to stay out of foreign entanglements. Like this is not for us. Fight amongst yourselves. But sometimes staying neutral isn't as easy as you might think it is. And so you have, you know, friendships targeting American ships. And so things are getting a little bit chaotic and we're trying to stay out of it. And to John Adams credit, he did really want to stay out of it. Oh, John Adams, you know, we have a I love and respect him so much. He's one of my favorite founders, but his presidency is where things get a little weird. So Congress ends up passing

the Alien and Sedition Acts and John Adams is, you know, leading the country at this point. What did that mean? Well, that was making it harder for immigrants to become citizens over in America. And this was targeted directly at the French because they were worried, they meaning the federalists were worried that French agents were going to come over and stir trouble here. And remember, we just fought a revolution. We don't need another one, right? And that's very real fear. I get that. But they were also worried because the French and also the Irish

immigrants coming over here were strengthening Jefferson's Republican party. And you have federalists in power and federalists with a lot of pride because that was John Adams shortcoming. And he would admit that himself. He had a lot of pride. And you're having this, this, you know, crisis come about where all of a sudden things start becoming a little stricter. And politics, party politics is starting to come into play. So early on, we think it's bad now. It started then. At this point, we get very close to going to war again with France. And little

known facts, they thought it was the quasi war because we weren't actually in the war, but we were toying around with it. Here's the interesting thing. George Washington was actually going to come out of retirement. He was going to be a general again with the promise that he wouldn't be fighting active battle, but he would be leading the army if we were going to war. He was like kind of on standby. But then the war never came to a full war. And so that didn't happen luckily. Now I called it remember the alien and sedition acts. Now the alien part is alien is a term people

use for somebody that isn't from where you're from. So think of immigrant. So alien is a term, not somebody from outer space, but somebody who just isn't where you're from. So that's the alien part. What is sedition act, seditious act? That is someone, something you do that is against something, can someone in power maybe? So I want you to think about this because this to me is the worst thing John Adams ever supported. We have the First Amendment, which promises free speech, right? That's already in play. The sedition act is going to penalize, going to criminalize

anybody who speaks out against the president. This is crazy to pass a law like this after we have the First Amendment. And it wasn't just for insulting the president. It was for any government official. And it wasn't just like a bad law that was in place and wasn't acted upon. Journalists were being arrested. Newspapers were being penalized. This is something very real that was happening. And you have to step back and think, whoa, we're just getting started and already people are cracking down and abusing their power.

What's really interesting about this is this where the written constitution became so important because kings would, if it wasn't written down, like in England, it's a bunch of different things in the English Constitution. But if you had everything written down that the leaders would know, like, I can't do this. And then the Bill of Rights was to make that even stronger and to say, you absolutely can never do this. And here you have John Adams, who's flawed and other presidents who are flawed already going against this. And that's because men are flawed, right? Human beings.

When I say men, I mean men, women, human beings, mankind are flawed. And John Adams, like I said, has a lot of pride. And so when people start insulting him publicly, he doesn't like that. And so even the greatest leaders, even the smartest intellectuals, people who were so passionate for liberty and the revolution, are going to fall prey to the same things, you know, none of us like being talked badly about. But we know that First Amendment is very, very important. So Jefferson and Madison are not having it. They're like, no, they have crossed the line. The federal government has

already become exactly what the anti-feds, exactly what, you know, for Jefferson was exactly what he thought was going to happen. Now, normally the courts are supposed to interpret what the law means, but Jefferson and Madison didn't have a lot of faith in that because all the government entities were kind of overtaken by federalists. And so they didn't think that was going to do much help. So they draft legislation secretly, which ends up being called the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions. Now, these are passed in Kentucky and Virginia. These are not federal, this is just in the states.

And what these resolutions said is they said, hey, wait a second, if the federal government does something that we do not think is constitutional, then we don't have to follow that law. We're not going to do it. This is very pro states rights. This term, this idea is called nullification. Nullify means to kind of cancel, right? So what Jefferson and Madison were basically trying to say with these pieces of legislation is our check, remember checks and balances or how you check how you keep another government entity in line, our check on the federal government is going to be to

say, no, no, that's not constitutional. We're not doing it. And this brings up an interesting question, a question that we are still dealing with today. And that is, who has the final say when there are constitutional questions? Is it the executive? Is it the legislative? Is it the judicial branch? Is it the state? And so this is something that we've gone back and forth with for years. And nullification, state nullification is this idea that state should have the state rights that they were promised. And they should be able to say, no, we're not doing this. And you

see this happen now, you see this happening with immigration laws, you see some states saying we're not going to enforce, you know, or we're not going to let, you know, ice in here. Back in the day, you saw this happen with cannabis when that was being actually it's still happening, I guess, where some states are just saying whatever we're going to ignore the federal prohibition on it. So you have this back and forth between state rights and federal authority. And this is again, has been going on forever. The thing I want you to keep in mind is we're going through this next

part of American history is that you'll notice the Constitution didn't magically fix human nature problems. People are always going to want power. People are always going to have their pride wounded when people say bad things about them. That's going to happen. But it got us closer, got us at least to a better starting point in keeping them in line and rating them in. But the Constitution is only as powerful as the people who are willing to defend it. And, you know, here I would agree with Jefferson and Madison where they're saying, hold on, it's already getting out of control.

We need to bring the power to the people, which in this case, the closest way to do that was the states, right? And we were, you know, we need to say no if something is unconstitutional. So, you know, this really puts a responsibility on all of us to say we need to make sure our leaders are following the Constitution. So, this is the kickoff of this great American experiment where we're seeing if we can put our money where our mouth is, if we can see if we can agree on what the Constitution even means, spoiler alert, we never do. But it's just a really interesting

point of history. And, you know, we've been focusing a lot on the founding with America 250 and we'll continue to do that. But this is really interesting because now we see if it worked or what the shortcomings were. So, if you are also eager to know what happened in this interesting part of American history, pick up the new book. You guys, it's so great. I got it in the mail last week and I was just devouring it and taking notes and so excited to share with you guys. So, I will leave it there. As always, don't forget to like and subscribe to

the podcast. And until next time, I will talk to you later.