This volume will enable readers to understand how the Revolutionary American society dedicated to the noble aspirations of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights could have adopted one of themost widely deplored statutes in American history, the Sedition Act of 1798. It demonstrates how the wholesale incorporation by the new states in 1776 of the full body of English law into the American law also meant the adoption of the English repressive common- law jurisprudence that had been fashioned to support the English monarchical political system that had been repudiated in the American Revolution. The unhappy result was that in the new nation as well.
