French Threat.

When John Adams became president in 1797, the French were angry that although the United States was officially neutral in the war between France and England, the United States had made a treaty with England in 1795. France began seizing American ships which were trading with England and also tried to arouse American public opinion to favor the French against the English. Many Americans sympathized with the French Revolution, its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity and its attack on monarchy and aristocracy. Many Americans also distrusted England, and so the French had significant support in the United States.

Law of the Land.

The Adams administration received dispatches from France in 1798 in which a French agent boasted that France could turn the American people against their own government. This horrified the administration, which came to believe newspapers attacking the Federalists did so out of...