Articles

In 1806 the United States commenced common law prosecutions of six Connecticut citizens for seditious libel against President Thomas Jefferson. ¹ According to the indictments, two of the defendants had committed the crime in the course of preaching sermons and the others in newspaper print. The infamous Sedition Act of 1798 having expired, and Federalist party control of Connecticut stymieing state punishment, the government prosecuted the cases in the belief that the federal courts possessed jurisdiction over the common law crime of seditious libel. ² Eventually, political considerations also forced Jefferson's administration to reverse itself on the issue of a federal common law of crimes and to drop the prosecutions except for those against Barzillai Hudson and George Goodwin, the editors of a Federalist newspaper in Hartford. Prior to trial, their case was appealed to the Supreme Court for a decision on the question of whether the federal courts possessed jurisdiction over nonstatutory criminal offenses. Somehow a decision was deferred until Republican appointees dominated the Supreme Court, which finally ruled in 1812 against the existence of a federal common law of crimes. ³ The case was decided without argument by counsel and without reasoned consideration by a divided Court which did not note the fact of division. ⁴ It was decided against several circuit court precedents established by members of the Supreme Court who had been important Framers of the Constitution or closely associated with the Framers. ⁵ Although the bizarre prosecutions of 1806 came to nothing, they did not bespeak a broad Jeffersonian conception of the scope of political opinions or a fixed belief that the first amendment conflicted with the law of seditious libel.