Kentucky Virginia Resolution Essay Research Paper The

Kentucky Virginia Resolution Essay, Research Paper

The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions

The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were authored in secret by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in response to the repressive Alien and Sedition Acts passed in 1798. In the opinion of Jefferson and Madison, the Acts were unjust. They also represented a major victory for the Federalists. By writing the Resolutions, Jefferson and Madison spearheaded the protests of those against the Alien and Sedition Acts and those in support of stronger states rights. Although the Resolutions were successful in the two originating states, they did not have much success in the other states. Still, the new ideas presented in the Resolutions were almost revolutionary. Although the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799 were not very successful, they were important because they provided necessary arguments for the supporters of greater states rights against the proponents of a stronger central government.

The Alien and Sedition Acts played major roles in the coming about of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Passed in early 1798, the Acts laid down a number of harsh restrictions on foreigners. The Alien Act stretched the minimum years for eligibility for naturalization from five years to fourteen years. It also gave the President the power to expel any alien from the country. The Sedition Act was even harsher; it gave the government the right to arrest anyone accused of seditious activities. The Sedition Act thus cracked down on many Jeffersonian newspapers which criticized the government. Of course, Jefferson criticized these Acts; he even called them worthy of the 8th and 9th century (2 / p.174). With these laws the Federalists were thought to be stifling the power of the Jeffersonians.

Through the Alien and Sedition Acts, those in support of a stronger federal government achieved a major victory. The Acts gave new powers which were not dictated in the Constitution to both the executive and legislative branches. The Federalists were able to pass these acts with their logic based upon loose translations of the Constitution, especially the elastic clause. In peacetime, these Acts would not have had a chance in being passed, but the undeclared war with France had riled up Congress enough to accept these loose translations.

The opponents of the Alien and Sedition Acts were led by Jefferson and Madison; in response to the Acts the Republicans launched an attack on what they believed were breaches of the Constitution. The attack on the Alien and Sedition Acts was based upon the strict construction theory of the Republicans. To them, the government could not be given powers by implication; the jurisdiction of the federal government was plainly stated in the Constitution, and it had to be followed (4 / p. 162). Using this theory, Jefferson and Madison declared the Alien Act to be unconstitutional on two counts. The first count was the expansion of the powers of the executive branch, and the second was the extension of the authority of the federal government over aliens (4 / p. 163). Jefferson and Madison believed that these breaches of the Constitution attacked the powers of the individual states. The enlarging of the executive branch and the legislative branch shrank the states powers by stripping from each state the ability to offer protection to its people. The Republicans thus decried the Alien Act based on these two counts. The next target was the Sedition Act. Jefferson was especially angry at the Sedition Act; it denied the one principle which Jefferson held most sacred: knowledge and freedom of inquiry (2 / p.180). Without these two freedoms, the federal government could easily become tyrannical. The Sedition Act repressed freedom of speech and press; these two freedoms were obviously essential to the survival of inquiry and criticism. Jefferson with Madison thus set out soon after the passing of the Alien and Sedition Acts to pen the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions.

As said before, Jefferson and Madison wrote the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions as rebuffs to the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Resolutions stated several new theories in the relationship between the federal government and the states. The first and most important was the compact theory. In Jefferson and Madison s interpretation, the Constitution was nothing more than a compact between sovereign states which gave explicitly defined powers to the central government and retained all other powers (1 / p. 3). Here, Jefferson and Madison took the strict construction theory of the Republicans and defined it even further. Thus the Resolutions stated that the states had all residual powers and not the federal government. The second theory in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions was that the states were the true judges of a law s constitutionality and not the legislative or judicial branches of the federal government (4 / p. 170). If the legislative branch was the final judge of whether a law was constitutional or not, then the checks and balances of the branch would not be in place. Thus, since the compact theory declared that the states had created the government, they would also be in charge of judging a federal law s constitutionality. The third and final theory was put forth only in Jefferson s Kentucky Resolution; it was the theory of nullification. This theory stated that the states