The Lyon, Cooper, and Callender trials were the most publicized of the Sedition Act proceedings, all of which heightened Republican distrust of the federal judiciary. Many Republicans were convinced that the federal courts were dominated by Federalist partisans. Federal judges, particularly the Supreme Court justices serving in the circuit courts, had ardently defended the constitutionality of the Sedition Act and had urged grand juries to dismiss Republican arguments for a broader defi nition of freedom of speech. Justice William Cushing warned one grand jury that if “licentiousness” went unpunished it would enable “the worst men in a community, to overturn the freest government in the world.” Justice James Iredell told another grand jury that the First Amendment was not intended to protect seditious libel from punishment. The judges’ support of the Sedition Act helped to win convictions of some of the most outspoken Republicans, but the Federalists soon paid a heavy price. The number of Republican newspapers grew sharply during the time the Sedition Act was in effect, and these newspapers helped to mobilize support for Jefferson’s election as President. The sedition trials fed Republican suspicion of the judiciary, and when the Republicans came to power, they repealed the Federalist expansion of the federal courts. Chase’s conduct in the Callender trial became one of the foundations of the articles of impeachment voted against him by the House of Representatives in 1804. Although the Senate acquitted Chase, his impeachment marked the end of the kind of broad-ranging jury instructions that had occasionally politicized the courts in the late 1790s. Freedom of speech and political opposition in the early republic The expiration of the Sedition Act on March 3, 1801, failed to settle questions about the legal limits of political speech and the right of the political opposition to criticize offi ceholders and the government. When Republicans became the object of strident newspaper attacks during the following decade, some of them were willing to prosecute Federalist editors for seditious libel. President Thomas Jefferson, stung by relentless personal criticism, suggested that selected prosecutions in the state courts would help to temper the partisan press. The state prosecutions, however, remained relatively infrequent and largely ineffective in slowing the development of a partisan press. Although seditious libel prosecutions of partisan newspapers would not entirely disappear until the 1830s, more and more Americans accepted the right of the political opposition to criticize the government.
