This was not a 1st amendment issue for Adams. It was something he did to save the country. It worked. It was political suicide and he knew it would be. Adams was a grumpy old self-righteous curmudgeon but he was honest to the core. How else could an honest man fight such calumniation? Opinions, criticisms or political correctness had nothing to do with it.

A total lie from beginning to end with the sole purpose of scarring everyone away for voting for Newt. That was precisely the type of thing that Jefferson and Madison were doing to Adams. The lies of Jefferson were about to destroy the economic system set up by Hamilton and also get this country involved in the French revolution. The truly sad thing is that Adams had to do what he did to protect the still fragile United States and its Constitution. Jefferson without any scruples at all did not care how he got the presidency, just so long as he got it. This was not a 1st amendment issue for Adams. It was something he did to save the country. It worked. It was political suicide and he knew it would be.

To criticize The Alien and sedition act is to tell the world you know very little of those times. The Anti-Federalist lead by Jefferson would stop at nothing to destroy the Constitution and unseat the Federalist. They printed the most slanderous lies one could imagine as facts. They wrote their slanderous essays under pen names. What if Herman Cain in collusion with a national newspaper wrote an essay under an assumed name and said that he was a personal friend of Newt Gingrich and knew for a fact that Gingrich had a secret plan to deport all the Muslims and make Christianity our national religion once he became the President. A total lie from beginning to end with the sole purpose of scarring everyone away for voting for Newt.