iders the possible lengths to which an official, representing the
President, might go if instigated by private or party revenge, Edward
Livingston's declaration that they "would have disgraced the age of
Gothic barbarity" does not seem too strong.[87] Under the Alien Act
persons not citizens of the United States could be summarily banished
at the sole discretion of the President, without guilt or even
accusation, thus jeopardising the liberty and business of the most
peaceable and well-disposed foreigner. Under the Act of Sedition a
citizen could be dragged from his bed at night and taken hundreds of
miles from home to be tried for circulating a petition asking that
these laws be repealed. The intended effect was to weed out the
foreign-born and crush political opponents, and, the better to
accomplish this purpose, the Alien Act set aside trial by jury, and
the Sedition Act transferred prosecutions from state courts to federal
tribunals.

[Footnote 87: "Let us not establish a tyranny," Hamilton wrote Oliver
Wolcott.--_Works of_, Vol. 8, p. 491. "Let us not be cruel or
violent."--_Ibid._, 490. He thought the Alien Law deficient in
guarantees of personal liberty.--_Ibid._, 5, 26.]

Governor Jay approved these extreme measures because of alleged secret
combinations in the interest of the French; and, although no proof of
their existence appeared except in the unsupported statements of the
press, he submitted to the Legislature, in January, 1799, several
amendments to the Federal Constitution, proposed by Massachusetts,
increasing the disability of foreigners, and otherwise limiting their
rights to citizenship. The Legislature, still strongly Federal in both
its branches, did not take kindly to the amendments, and the Assembly
rejected them by the surprising vote of sixty-two to thirty-eight.
Then came up the famous Kentucky and Virginia resolutions. The
Virginia resolves, drafted by Madison and passed by the Virginia
Legislature, pronounced the Alien and Sedition laws "palpable and
alarming infractions of the Constitution;" the Kentucky resolutions,
drafted by Jefferson, declared each act to be "not law, but altogether
void and of no force." This was nullification, and the States north of
the Potomac hastened to disavow any such doctrine, although the vote
in the New York Assembly came perilously near indorsing it.

The discussion of these measures gave opportunity for the public
opening of a great career in New York le