Introduction

This chapter explores the history surrounding the nation’s first anti-immigrant movement in the late 1790s and early 1800s, resulting from a prevailing fear of an impending war with France. This fear led to a series of restrictionist immigration policies designed to limit the number of new people allowed to become American out of concern over sedition and espionage. Alexander Hamilton, himself an immigrant, became the leader of the anti-immigrant movement and one of the founders of the Federalist Party that supported a strong central government isolated from much of the rest of the world to be better protected from foreign threats.

The documents analyzed in this chapter are the Naturalization Act and the Alien and Friends Acts, all passed in 1798 and all motivated by an emerging nativist movement that feared immigration and sought to reserve the benefits of U.S. citizenship for those born on American soil. All of the laws enacted by the Federalists in 1798 were meant to limit immigration, to enhance national security, and to provide legal protection for the economic and ethnic hierarchies of power that were beginning to define the way that some Americans saw the nation’s culture.

Topics covered in this chapter include:

“1798 Alien Enemies Act.” UWB. University of Washington-Bothell Library. US Immigration Legislation Online. Session II, Chap. 66, Statute 570. 5^th Congress; 6 July 1798.

“1798 Naturalization Act.” UWB. University of Washington-Bothell Library. US Immigration Legislation Online. Session II, Chap. 54, Statute 566. 5^th Congress, 17 June 1798.

Friends and Enemies Immigration and National Security Collide (1798)

Four laws, all passed in 1798, set the path not only for America’s immigration policy in general, but also for the way that immigration could be curtailed in cases of national emergency or impending war.

There are direct parallels between the immigration debate of 1798 and the immigration debate of 2017–2018, as the Trump Administration’s proposals for a ban on Muslim immigration, a Border Wall between the United States and Mexico, and, in favor of more limited immigration of non-white foreigners in general, echo the same concerns and justifications raised by members of the 1798 Congress. Then, as in 2017–2018, legislators and politicians used the fear of an impending war (with France) as justification for new immigration restrictions as well as laws that increased the power of the federal government to prohibit and prevent the development of internal movements that might delegitimize or compromise the central government.

America’s First Anti-Immigrant Movement

Though they weren’t Americans before 1776, the descendants of the nation’s early colonies and those who fought in the American Revolution quickly began to see themselves as the “real Americans,” whereas the immigrants coming to the nation after the war, were increasingly seen as opportunists coming to reap the riches of the society they had created.

Alexander Hamilton, considered one of the founding fathers of the United States, was himself an immigrant, born on the British Leeward Islands to an unwed mother and abandoned, only to be adopted by a wealthy merchant. Sent to New York by his adopted father to receive an education, Hamilton became a major figure in the American Revolution and was known as a strong proponent of central government authority. His status as an immigrant was part of the reason Hamilton was chosen as the subject for the widely-lauded musical Hamilton (2015). Lines like, “Immigrants: We get the job done!” from the musical reveal the underlying social justice goals of the production, and also portray Hamilton as foreword-thinking people’s (and immigrant’s) hero.

Cartoon of the XYZ Affair, considered to be America’s first anti-immigration movement, via Wikimedia Commons

In reality, Hamilton was far from a man of the people. Raised rich, despite having been orphaned as a child, Hamilton developed into an economic elitist who cared little for income equality, the plight of the lower class, or of slaves and other races persecuted under the new republic. He was also an anti-immigrant ideologue responsible for starting one of the nation’s first anti-immigration movements.²²

George Mason University historian Phillip Magness writes of Hamilton, in his essay “Alexander Hamilton as Immigrant,”

“Measured in three dimensions—his use of political attacks on immigrant contemporaries, his role in the Alien and Sedition Acts, and his adoption of an aggressive anti-immigration position at the outset of the Jefferson presidency—Alexander Hamilton’s political career might legitimately be characterized as a sustained drift into nationalistic xenophobia.”²³

Although there are no public opinion polls from the 1790s to demonstrate how the average American citizen felt about immigrants, historians surveying the documents and records of the era report that nationalism and anti-immigrant attitudes were on the rise. At the time, anti-immigrant sentiment was directed at two categories of immigrants: the Irish and the French. In part, these attitudes were motivated by xenophobia and religious intolerance, with Americans (predominantly Protestant) objecting to what was sometimes called the “Catholicization of America” through the influx of Catholic immigrants from Ireland.

Anti-French sentiment of the era was more a matter of national insecurity. The French Revolution (1789–1799) resulted in the end of the Kingdom of France and the beginning of the French Revolutionary Government. Americans watching from abroad saw how France used espionage and hidden actors to weaken their targets before invasion and many feared that the French, who had ambitions in the new world as well, might try the same tactic against the newly emerging American republic. Fear of spies and saboteurs, therefore, motivated a strong anti-French sentiment among the American public and political body.

In 1794, The Directory (the French Revolutionary Government) issued an order allowing their naval forces to seize American merchant ships, the result of financial difficulties in funding the nation’s many overseas wars. John Adams (second president of the United States) sent three envoys to restore peace, Elbridge Gerry, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and John Marshall, but the three representatives were refused access to Foreign Minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, and instead were met by a series of intermediaries, Nicholas Hubbard, Jean Hottinguer, Pierre Bellamy, and Lucien Hauteval, later known as W, X, Y, and Z, respectively. The “alphabet envoys” told the American representatives that France would agree to their demands in return for a bribe to Talleyrand directly, and a low-interest loan to the French government.

The XYZ affair, as it came to be known, was a major controversy, and John Adams began preparations for war. The period from 1798 to 1800 is sometimes called the Quasi-War with France, though open military engagement never occurred. It was a cold war of economic weaponry that ultimately ended in a new peace agreement but forever altered American democracy.²⁴

With the threat of a war with France looming, America’s political parties began taking shape. On one hand there were the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, who favored a strong central government to provide a robust defense against foreign threats. State sovereignty was one of the first political controversies to emerge after the revolution and has remained a topic of legislative and political disagreement to the modern day. The Democratic Party of the era, championed by Thomas Jefferson, was skeptical of creating a strong central government, fearing that this could lead to tyranny, much like the governments that the Patriots struggled to escape in the revolution. Jefferson and the other Democrats thus championed state sovereignty and the rule of the common people, whereas the Federalists fought for stronger centralized power and a meritocracy in which the educated elite would be the primary source of political influence. In 1798, the potential war with France created sufficient paranoia and fear to give the Federalists an advantage with the public and in the legislature.²⁵

Naturalization Act 1798 Source Document

Whereas, under the Uniform Rule for Naturalization of 1790, a free white male was eligible for citizenship after being in the nation for two years and appearing before any state court, the 1798 law was far more severe, changing the residency requirements to fourteen years, which virtually guaranteed that few, if any, immigrants would become full citizens in the short term. The 1798 law also required anyone who wanted to become a citizen to submit formal notification of their intention to attain citizenship five years before appearing in court to obtain permission. Further, the law changes the authority responsible for approving citizenship from the courts at large to the federal courts, which were dominated by Federalist-appointed judges. Thus, the Naturalization Act gave the Federalists direct influence over who could become citizens, a barrier that they hoped could ferret out spies and saboteurs.

The next in the quartet of anti-immigrant laws was the 1798 Alien Friends Act, which granted power to the President of the United States to, at any time of his choosing, deport any alien deemed dangerous to the union. The goal of the act was to make it legal to throw spies and dissidents out of the country. The act also contained a records provision under which the federal government required all aliens to register with the state. This, they hoped, would make it easier to monitor the alien population and potentially to identify dangerous individuals for deportation. The following excerpt explains the purpose of the law:

An Act Concerning Aliens 1798 Source Document

Finally, the fourth law of the quartet was designed specifically for war time national security, providing the federal government with the power to immediately arrest, hold, and deport aliens from nations with which the United States was currently at war. This is essentially the same justification that was used to arrest and detain thousands of Japanese-Americans and immigrants during World War II, demonstrating how little changed between 1798 and the 1940s, at least in terms of how Americans react when they feel threatened. As the United States was contemplating a potential war with France at the time of the law’s passage, the law might have applied to thousands of French aliens then living in the nation. The following excerpt provides the basic aims of the act:

An Act Concerning Aliens, 1798, Library of Congress

An Act Respecting Alien Enemies 1798 Source Document

The Alien and Sedition Acts were a major turning point in U.S. immigration policy and philosophy. In some ways, the Federalists were taking positions similar to what might be associated with the U.S. Republican Party or more general conservative movement. However, the label “conservative” had little meaning at the time, as the history of the nation was so limited that there was little to conserve. The Democrats of the time also had much in common with conservatives of later eras in that they were trying to uphold states’ rights, thus preserving (or conserving) the system that evolved out of the original colonial arrangement in which each colony was essentially its own sovereign state.

However, like the conservative movement of the twenty-first century, the Federalists were motivated by fear, nationalism, xenophobia, and prejudice against other nationalities. Federalist politicians were quick to call out signs of possible treason or sedition and even believed that Thomas Jefferson’s inner circle of acquaintances and associates might contain French spies.

The Alien and Sedition Acts were essentially aimed at making life more difficult for immigrants and perspective immigrants such that they might choose to leave on their own or choose not to immigrate at all. Many did, with French aliens leaving in large numbers as they expected deportation might be coming soon, and thus fueling the growth of French Canada. The Alien and Sedition Acts created the nation’s first legal deportation system, as well as other penalties for those who refused to abide by an order to leave the nation, but the provisions of the four laws provided no due process. Under the Alien and Sedition Acts, there was no system for the accused to petition the government nor limit on the government’s abilities to arrest, detain, or deport any individual labeled a threat.

The fear that generated the Alien and Sedition Acts faded as it became clear that the United States was going to avoid war with France. In 1799, President Adams announced that he was going to resolve the crisis with France diplomatically, rather than militarily, and this weakened the Federalist cause considerably, as well as Adams’ position within the party. As fear of war abated, the American public had little interest in Federalist saber-rattling. Interestingly, Adams, who was then maligned by former allies in the Federalists, made the choice to sacrifice his own political power, and likely his future career, to avoid war.²⁹

Focus on immigration shifted many times over the first half of the nineteenth century. The Naturalization Law of 1802 formally eliminated the 1798 laws 14-year waiting period for citizenship eligibility, reducing the requirements to five years. However, anti-immigrant sentiment spread, motivated less by fear of war or sabotage, and, instead, by a quasi- religious nationalism that led to an anti-Catholic and anti-Irish movement.

Conclusion

Developed during a time when Americans were concerned about an impending war, the passage of the 1798 immigration and naturalization laws also demonstrate how attitudes and approaches to foreign policy and immigration can dramatically change when American politicians and/or the public perceive a threat to national security. The campaigns by the Federalists were a major factor in changing public opinion against immigration in the 1790s, but this was a short-lived movement. Many Americans still felt culturally linked to the European nations of their ancestors; and when the threat of war faded, groups of Americans identifying with these ethnic identities, like British-Americans, French-Americans, and German-Americans, more often favored liberalization of immigration, at least as far as admitting more of their specific “type” to become U.S. citizens.

Discussion Questions

Works Used