• XYZ Affair
• Naturalization Act
• Alien Act
• Sedition Act
• VA & Kentucky Resolution

• XYZ Affair, name usually given to an incident
(1797–98) in Franco-American diplomatic relations.
• The United States had in 1778 entered into an
alliance with France, but after the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars was both unable and unwilling to lend aid.

• The anti-French Federalists gained the upper hand in the United States, and there was considerable antagonism toward France.
• The conclusion (1795) of Jay's Treaty with
England aroused French anger. Numerous
American ships were seized by French privateers, and the countries drifted into a mutually hostile attitude.

• President Washington sent Charles
Cotesworth Pinckney as minister to France, but the French government refused to receive him. Shortly afterward, President John Adams, sent John Marshall and Elbridge Gerry ,
Pinckney on a peace mission to France.
• This three-man commission was immediately confronted by the refusal of French foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand to receive it officially.

• Indirect suggestions of loans and bribes to
France were made to the commissioners through a friend of Talleyrand.
• Negotiations were carried on through her with
Jean Conrad Hottinguer and Lucien Hauteval, both Swiss, and a Mr. Bellamy, an American
banker in Hamburg; the three were called X, Y, and Z in the mission's dispatches to the United
States.

• The proposal that the Americans pay Talleyrand about $250,000 before the French government would even deal with them created an uproar when it was released in the United States, where the pro-British party welcomed the chance to worsen Franco-American relations.

• Meanwhile, an undeclared naval war ensued between France and the United States.
• Both Talleyrand and President Adams wished to avoid a declaration of war.

• The Naturalization Act, raising from 5 to 14 the number of years of United States residence required for naturalization, was repealed in 1802.

• Alien Act, 1798, four laws enacted by the
Federalist-controlled U.S. Congress, allegedly in response to the hostile actions of the
French Revolutionary government on the seas and in the councils of diplomacy, but actually designed to destroy Thomas Jefferson's
Republican party, which had openly expressed its sympathies for the French
Revolutionaries.

• Depending on recent arrivals from Europe for much of their voting strength, the Republicans were adversely affected by the Naturalization
Act, and by the Alien Act and the Alien
Enemies Act, which gave the President the power to imprison or deport aliens suspected of activities posing a threat to the national
government.

• Most controversial, however, was the Sedition
Act, devised to silence Republican criticism of the
Federalists.
• Its broad proscription of spoken or written criticism of the government, the Congress, or the
President virtually nullified the First Amendment freedoms of speech and the press.
• Prominent Jeffersonians, most of them
journalists, were tried, and some were convicted, in sedition proceedings.

• The Alien and Sedition Acts provoked the
Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and did much to unify the Republican party and to foster Republican victory in the election of
1800.

• Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, in U.S. history, resolutions passed in opposition to the Alien and
Sedition Acts, which were enacted by the
Federalists in 1798.
• The Jeffersonian Republicans first replied in the
Kentucky Resolutions, adopted by the Kentucky legislature in Nov., 1798.
• Written by Thomas Jefferson himself, they were a severe attack on the Federalists' broad interpretation of the Constitution, which would have extended the powers of the national government over the states.

• The resolutions declared that the Constitution merely established a compact between the states and that the federal government had no right to exercise powers not specifically delegated to it under the terms of the compact; should the federal government assume such powers, its acts under them would be un-authoritative and therefore void.
• It was the right of the states and not the federal government to decide as to the constitutionality of such acts. A further resolution, adopted in
Feb., 1799, provided a means by which the states could enforce their decisions by formal
nullification of the objectionable laws.

• A similar set of resolutions was adopted in
Virginia in Dec., 1798, but these Virginia
Resolutions, written by James Madison, were a somewhat milder expression of the strict construction of the Constitution and the compact theory of the Union.
• The resolutions were submitted to the other states for approval with no real result; their chief importance lies in the fact that they were later considered to be the first notable statements of the states' rights theory of government, a theory that opened the way for the nullification controversy and ultimately for secession.