The most extreme accusations that Democrats and Republicans are leveling against each other today are familiar to the founding fathers.

The 1800 election alone featured almost everything that made President Trump’s three presidential elections a wild ride.

Accusations of foreign interference?

Check: The candidates in 1800, President Adams and President Jefferson, each believed the other was subject to a foreign power.

The French Revolution divided Americans as bitterly as any foreign policy crisis today.

Jefferson’s Republican Party, which is actually the ancestor of today’s Democratic Party, believed that Adams and his Federalist Party were monarchists and traitors to the American Revolution because they were pro-British and anti-French.

The Federalists believed that Jefferson’s pro-French party was as radical as the French revolutionaries: the term “godless communists” did not yet exist, but the Federalists perceived the Jeffersonians as atheists who would abolish private property if they did. had the opportunity.

The Federalists were undemocratic, the Republicans said.

The Republicans were against the Constitution, the Federalists fought back.

Each side firmly believed that the other was “illiberal” and in cahoots with foreign regimes contrary to American principles.

Immigration was also a hot-button issue at the time and linked to fears of anti-American influences from abroad.

Under Adams, Congress increased the number of years a foreigner would have to live in America before becoming a naturalized citizen.

Congress, controlled by the Federalists, also gave the president broad powers to deport immigrants – or “aliens,” as they were then called.

What about complaints that the government is being used against domestic opponents?

With the Sedition Act of 1798, Congress criminalized “false, scandalous, and malicious writings” critical of the government.

These days, administrations like President Biden’s rely on social media companies to censor for them, as critics of Covid policy like Jay Bhattacharya have discovered.

Jefferson and his supporters not only opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts, they were willing to resist them to the point of inciting states to defy the federal government.

The Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798 – the first written by Jefferson, the second by James Madison, both making their arguments anonymously – asserted that states could obstruct or even “nullify” federal law.

Progressive mayors of “sanctuary cities” say this in response to federal immigration restrictions that have precedent here.

However, a new twist comes when states like Florida and Texas find themselves forced to enforce immigration laws, which Mr. Biden will not do – when the president himself rolls back the laws, states must cancel them.

Jefferson had a more consistent state-centered philosophy of government than most politicians of his era, let alone ours.

However, Jefferson could be inconsistent when necessary, particularly with regard to respecting the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.

Negotiating the Louisiana Purchase and presenting it to Congress as a fait accompli while he was president in 1803 may have been beyond the bounds of his office, but Jefferson was happy to see the Senate ratify the treaty and its actions after made his decision. .

As for his commitment to civil liberties, here too, Jefferson was far from perfect: he opposed the Sedition Act but believed that the same crime, “seditious libel”, should be recognized and punished at the level of the ‘State.

Another parallel with modern politics is that the bitterness of the Adams-Jefferson struggle in 1800 did not end with the election itself.

And then as now, disgruntled members of their own party could be an acute source of embarrassment.

A former Jefferson supporter, James Callender, was the first to publish details of a long-running sex scandal that now tarnishes the third president’s reputation, when he claimed that Jefferson fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings.

Earlier, Callender had introduced an almost modern gender controversy into the 1800 campaign when he attacked Adams as a “hideous hermaphrodite character, who has neither the strength and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and the sensitivity of a woman” in a pamphlet which caused him to be prosecuted. under the Sedition Act.

Jefferson attempted to quell lingering partisan hostilities in his first inaugural address: “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” he declared.

Even those “who would wish to dissolve this Union or change its republican form” should be tolerated, he insisted, as “monuments of the security with which error of opinion can be tolerated where reason is free to fight it.”

The Constitution was not threatened by free speech.

And while Jefferson rejected the political violence of Daniel Shays’ Rebellion in the 1780s, he wrote to Madison: “I consider a little rebellion now and then a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical world. »

Conflicts as intense as ours are nothing new in American politics, and while we don’t have leaders like Jefferson or Adams, we have an advantage they didn’t: we have their history to inspire us .

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