This year is the bicentennial of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, the foremost formulations of the compact theory of the United States Constitution. By 1798, the Republicans faced an 11-year losing streak. Federalism had reigned supreme in American politics from the end of the Revolution. Even before the institution of the government of 1787, Republicans (the name used first by the And-Federalists and later by the larger but overlapping group of political allies of Thomas Jefferson) feared its consequences. Virtually all of their gloomy prognostications, as Virginia Federalist Henry Lee soon conceded, were borne out by the actions of the first Congress under the new Constitution.

The tariff adopted by that Congress was of precisely the sectional character that Virginia Republicans such as William Grayson, George Mason, and Patrick Henry had predicted during the Old Dominion’s debate over ratification. More importantly, despite his assurances to the contrary in the Richmond Convention of 1788, James Madison moved to insure that the first amendments to the Constitution would have no real substance.

Henry and Mason saw their pet proposals—a supermajority requirement for tariff legislation and reduction of the new Congress’s discretion to tax—go virtually unnoted. Virginia’s new senators, Grayson and former Continental Congress President Richard Henry Lee, were disgusted to note that they were the lone Republicans in the new Senate.

Federalism was ascendant, and some of the opponents of ratification resolved to let the new government collapse under its own weight. Thomas Jefferson was persuaded to become George Washington’s first secretary of state, but the brilliant, young Alexander Hamilton had outsmarted him. Following the example of former British Prime Minister Robert Walpole, Hamilton ensconced himself in the real locus of power in the new government: the Department of the Treasury.

Soon, the Federalist-dominated Congress had complied with Hamilton’s pleas to assume the states’ debts. Over the constitutional objections of Secretary Jefferson, it created the national bank Hamilton wanted. Eventually, excises were imposed, and President Washington rode out at the head of an army to enforce them. In foreign policy, Hamilton moved to cement America’s trade relations with Great Britain by toeing the English line vis-à-vis France.

Eventually, the Jay Treaty, negotiated by Chief Justice John Jay, carried tacit alliance with England to a point most Americans apparently interpreted as subordination. The treaty did virtually nothing to stop naval impressments or to provide Americans with compensation for slaves stolen by the British during the Revolution. The populace was incensed. France, America’s first foreign ally and the key benefactor of the Continental Army in the Revolution, reacted angrily, even aggressively.

Republicans were dismayed. Their preference for an agrarian polity had been subordinated to Hamilton’s preference for manufactures, mercantilism, and a strong military establishment. Virginia’s French tobacco market was threatened, to boot.

What could make matters worse? When George Washington retired after two terms as President, the throne was filled by John Adams. Adams had roused Republicans’ suspicions in several ways. As Vice President, he had initiated a movement in the first days of the first Senate to address the President (and thus, the Vice President) by honorific titles. He had himself driven in an ostentatious coach, and (unfortunately for his political career) he let slip to several prominent Republicans (including two Virginia senators) that he did not expect republicanism to survive in America without an admixture of hereditary tenure in the Senate and, perhaps, in the executive branch. Republicans, particularly Virginia Republicans (some of whom had helped to persuade an exhausted Washington to serve a second term as chief magistrate), knew that George Washington could have made a bid for monarchical power if he had wanted to, and they were grateful that he had not betrayed their trust. When John Adams aroused suspicions, he had no such reservoir of good will to sustain him.

French antagonism toward the new republic flowered in Adams’ term, and Adams and his Federalist-dominated Congress responded with extensive military preparations. They also enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts, a group of legislative measures whose ostensible aim was to allow President Adams to keep a tight rein on Frenchmen and other foreigners whose activities might threaten America in war-time.

The Alien Friends Act, which gave Adams untrammeled power over “threatening” aliens from friendly countries, was understood by Republican leaders as an attempt to intimidate one of their own, Swiss-born Congressman Albert Gallatin. The Sedition Act, which banned criticism of the President and criticism of Congress (though not criticism of Republican Vice President Jefferson), provoked a firestorm.

Several editors, and even a Republican member of Congress, served federal prison terms under the Sedition Act. The most inane comments about Adams landed men in the pokey. The two leading lights in the Republican galaxy, Jefferson and former congressman James Madison, corresponded in code or not at all for fear that censors were reading their private mail. Jefferson remarked that he was ashamed to think that the Vice President of the United States was not free to say what he thought in his own country.

Having failed to win elections for Congress and for President, the Republican high command fell back on what Jefferson called “the last ditch”: the Republican-dominated state legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky. It might be that Republicans were going to lose the argument in Congress, but if they could go over the heads of the Federalists (whose strength in Congress in 1798 was as great as it would ever be), directly to the people of the states, they might have their way.

Jefferson, ever sanguine about his fellow citizens, assumed that Americans had been duped by wily Federalists, especially by the clique around Alexander Hamilton. Unlike some of his leading lieutenants, such as Virginians John Taylor of Caroline and William Branch Giles, Jefferson thought that exposing Federalist “heresies” would bring the people to their senses.

Taylor and Giles both urged Jefferson to consider carving up the union. Jefferson believed that the fissioning process, once initiated, would not stop until Virginia was completely isolated, and he told Taylor that he would prefer to keep the union with New England. Unlike Jefferson, the philosopher from Caroline County would have preferred to bring matters to a head. Even if Republicans managed to supplant the ruling clique, he wanted thorough-going amendments to the Constitution, amendments forever precluding a resuscitation of Hamilton’s “corruption” of the Congress. A Southern despotism over the North, Taylor reasoned, would be as bad as a Northern one over the South.

Taylor sponsored the Virginia Resolutions, composed by Madison, in the Virginia House of Delegates, while Giles carried them in the Virginia Senate. Expecting further action later, Taylor willingly followed the tactical preference of his chieftain from Albemarle. Wilson Cary Nicholas saw to the adoption of Jefferson’s version by the legislature of Kentucky, then only recently elevated to the status of a state—and still dominated by Virginians.

Jefferson based his terse, forceful pronouncement on the First Amendment to the Constitution and on the compact theory of the federal government. He insisted, on grounds that now seem banal but which at the time were novel, that the free speech and press provisions of that amendment banned Congress from enacting the Sedition Act. That act, he declared, was nothing more than a usurpation, void ab initio, and—in a phrase dropped from the version finally adopted by Kentucky but judged by the Virginia House of Delegates to be implicit in claims of unconstitutional it)—”of no force or effect.”

Jefferson also argued that the Constitution’s very structure made the Sedition Act unconstitutional. The federal compact, like any other compact, was one solely of delegated powers. Since the power to enact a sedition act, to ban speech judged untoward or inconvenient by the government, had not been granted to the Congress, that body had no such power. Pace the Federalists, there was no general power of the federal government to legislate for the “common defense and general welfare.”

Jefferson pointed to the Tenth Amendment in support of this mode of reasoning, but his reading of the Constitution was based in a tradition that made the Tenth Amendment merely a truism. Of course the Congress did not have any powers that had not been explicitly granted. How else could a written constitution be understood? Jefferson may not have known that in the Richmond Ratification Convention of 1788 the Federalists had said that the Constitution would be interpreted as a compact among the states and that the Congress would possess only the powers “explicitly” delegated. (John Marshall, a leading opponent of the Virginia Resolutions, denied this reading’s legitimacy in 1798 despite his participation in the Richmond Convention.)

Faced with federal arrogations in the face of the Constitution’s explicit wording, the states had no alternative, as Jefferson saw it, but to prevent enforcement of the “nullity” Congress had enacted. Madison’s formulation, adopted by Virginia, said the states were “in duty bound” to “interpose” between their creature and their creators.

Madison’s word, “interposition,” would be picked up by Virginians a century and a half later in a different argument over local self-government, in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. Jefferson’s draft included a word, “nullify,” that was to have even more explosive resonance. While James Madison denied in the midst of the nullification controversy of the 1830’s that either he or Jefferson had ever contemplated action by a single state, various other actors in Virginia in 1798-1800 spoke openly of secession and of armed resistance to federal usurpation. Jefferson, however, explained in a letter written at the time that he intended the Kentucky Resolutions more as a threat than as a call to arms.

Americans today find the idea of state resistance to unconstitutional federal acts offensive, even seditious, but the Republicans of the 1790’s thought that the states’ primary duty was to maintain their citizens’ liberty. Patrick Henry told the Richmond Convention of 1788 that liberty, not union, must be their pre-eminent concern. While he and his allies lost on the question of ratification, they elicited the Federalist concession that the new Constitution was a compact. That concession was the basis of Virginia’s ratification, and it laid the groundwork for the “Principles of ’98.” Virginians ratified a union of states, not of provinces. John Adams was defeated in the “Revolution of 1800” on the basis of Virginia’s understanding of the Constitution, and thus of the union. The Virginia Doctrine lasted down to 1865, when it was defeated by force, not constitutional argument, but Jeffersonian republicans have continued ever since to base their argument for limited government on the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798.