EVEN GEORGE WASHINGTON APPROVED OF THE 1798 SEDITION ACT

(h/t Freedom's Fetters, pp. 284-85)

George Washington approved of prosecuting William Duane, the editor of the Aurora, under the sedition act:

From Mount Vernon, too, came words of encouragement to Picker­ing. George Washington agreed that Federal officials should not remain silent "under the direct charge of bribery" by Duane. "The most dangerous consequences,"' he wrote, "would, in my opinion, have flowed from such silence, and therefore could not be over­ looked." He approved the sedition prosecution against the editor, "for there seems to be no bounds to his attempts to destroy all con­fidence that the People might and (without sufficient proof of its demerits) ought, to have in their government; thereby dissolving it, and producing a disunion of the States." That civil war was the object of the Aurora and other Republican newspapers, Washing­ton was firmly convinced.²⁵

Pickering was the US Secretary of State and the prime mover of enforcing the sedition act. The footnote (25) refers to the source: Washington to Pickering, Mount Vernon, Aug. 4, 1799, Pickering's Papers, XXV, page 72