Matthew Lyon

Partisan tensions have been growing in Congress for several years, primarily over the issue of whether the U.S. should maintain neutrality and a good relationship with Britain, or whether it should deepen its ties with revolutionary France and join the effort to rid Europe of monarchy.

On January 30, 1798, these tensions turned physical when Congressman Roger Griswold of Connecticut used a cane to beat Vermont Congressman Matthew Lyon on the House floor.

This week, we're going to take a look at how things got that bad.

Back in Episode 398, we left off with newly inaugurated President John Adams calling a special session of Congress in May of 1797 to resolve the diplomatic crisis with France.

It picked up again in its regular session on November 13th.

During that session, on January 30th, 1798, the House voted on the impeachment of Senator Blount so tensions were already running high.

While everyone was standing around waiting for the votes to be tallied, freshman Congressman Matthew Lyon, a Democratic Republican, commented that the Connecticut Federalists here were all hypocrites who voted against the views of 90% of their constituents, and that if he opened a press in Connecticut, he could start a revolution there and get all of the Federalists thrown out of office.

Lyon and Roger Griswold, who was a Federalist representative from Connecticut, had been arguing for weeks over various issues related to the ongoing dispute with France.

and when he is beaten by a mob of young federalists in the paper's own courtyard he keeps printing and the government that meant to call the opposition press watches it multiply instead because every prosecution is an advertisement and by eighteen hundred there are more republican papers than existed when the act passed the club creates what it strikes The farm women of the Lehigh Valley pour their hot water, and the country, delighted, names the rising the hot water war, and mockery does to the window tax what muskets never could.

Vermont sends the government its answer in the person of Matthew Lyon, and Martin has been saving him, because Lyon is the whole second column in one man, born in Ireland.

Comes over at 15 as an indentured servant, his passage sold for a pair of bulls, a fact he wears like a medal.

Fights in the Revolution, builds mills, founds a town, gets to Congress, where the gentlemen regard him as the wild Irishman made flesh.

For that sentence, an opinion, a characterization, the kind of thing said about every president by every opposition in every free country on earth, the United States tries him under the Sedition Act, finds him $1,000, and locks him in a cell in Vergennes with an open privy in the corner of it, in winter, and the people of Vermont re-elect him.

from the cell, by the largest margin of his life.

His fine is paid by subscription, ordinary people's money gathered from as far as Virginia, and when his four months end, he steps out of the jail into a crowd of his neighbors, and the procession that carries him toward Philadelphia is said to stretch for miles, sleighs in the snow, and when the Federalists in Congress move to expel him, the seditionist the convict the wild irishman the motion fails and matthew lyon walks back into the house of representatives and takes his seat because the people of his district have overruled the government of the united states using no instrument but the one the system itself had left lying within reach a year later the whole country does what vermont did the election of eighteen hundred repeals the sedition act by the only procedure the act's authors had failed to criminalize Jefferson pardons the convicted.

Congress, decades on, refunds Lyon's fine to his heirs with interest.

Uh, there's a very amusing fellow from Vermont.

His name is Matthew Lyon.

Uh, he is a newspaper editor, um, a, uh, a colorful figure.

Uh, at one point, uh, he gets into a, uh, a real fight with a congressman from Connecticut, uh, in Congress.

Well, the president then sends a marshal up there to find the congressman and imprison him for his offense of bringing into disrepute the president of the United States.

So we see this is abrogation of freedom of speech, freedom of the press.

Matthew Lyon, ironically, is popularly elected back into Congress out of his jail cell.

So it's a funny little story that's incident here.

The Alien Act lengthened the period of time it took to become a citizen, and the Sedition Act made it a crime to criticize the government.

Among the more famous people prosecuted under the Sedition Act was Matthew Lyon, a congressman from Vermont who was jailed for saying that John Adams was maybe not the best president ever.

And while in jail, Lyon won reelection to Congress, which might indicate just how popular this law wasn't.

It was so unpopular that Virginia and Kentucky's legislatures passed resolutions against it, claiming that it violated Americans' liberties and that state legislatures had the power to overturn

I think very quickly people saw, and we've referred to a couple of the ways in which this played out, how the idea of a party and affiliation with a party can just ramp up and sort of widen the cleave between two people who may have philosophical or dispositional disagreements, but now all of a sudden they're not just fighting with each other about their ideas, but they're fighting on behalf of two opposing parties.

And so we mentioned, you know, in 1798, the Federalist Party, Roger Griswold of Connecticut attacks Matthew Lyon, who's a Democratic Republican, on the House floor with a wooden cane.

That's a very famous incident.

We've done an episode about that.