Rogue History

- Matthew Lyon should have been thrilled.

He had just won reelection to Congress by nearly double the votes of his opponent.

And the people of Vermont loved him so much that they were writing letters to the president of the United States, or petitions, I suppose.

You see, Matthew Lyon was in jail when he was reelected, not for the fight he started in the halls of Congress, but for his willingness to criticize the relatively new government of the United States.

For the first time in American history, freedom of speech was up for debate, and Matthew "Spittin'" Lyon was just the guy to fight for it.

I'm Joel Cook, and this is "Rogue History".

(upbeat music) Rebels and Revolutionaries.

So what exactly is freedom of speech?

Well, if you took high school civics, you probably know that the First Amendment protects freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble, and the right to petition the government over grievances.

But when the amendment was presented to Congress in 1789, it wasn't exactly clear how broad or narrow those protections should be.

Heck, it wasn't even a sure thing that the First Amendment would make it into the Constitution at all.

When the Constitution was first introduced, the founder split into factions over the inclusion of not just the First Amendment, but the entire Bill of Rights.

On one side, you had the Federalists who believed the Constitution was good enough without all that Bill of Rights nonsense.

And on the other side, you had the anti-Federalists who thought that explicitly protecting things like freedom of speech and the right to a jury were pretty darn important.

And to be clear, this wasn't a new conversation.

In 1776, over a decade before the constitutional debate, Virginia became the first state to include a declaration of rights in their state constitution.

Less than a year later, Vermont became the second, technically.

When Matthew and friends ratified Vermont's constitution, Vermont wasn't even a state.

It was a frontier area called the Hampshire Grants.

And New Hampshire and New York were fighting over it.

The tug of war was broken up in 1764 when New York ran crying to daddy, also known as King George III, to get possession of it.

Residents in the Grants were told to either repurchase the land they already owned or surrender it to incoming New Yorkers.

So they did a secret third thing.

They organized a militia called the Green Mountain Boys, formed the Sovereign Republic of Vermont, and told New York to fuhgeddaboutit!

So where does our boy Matthew Lyon fit into all of this?

Well, everywhere.

Matthew's story wasn't all that different from Vermont's.

He was born in Ireland, came to this country as an indentured servant, and fought to earn the respect and recognition he deserved.

When his home in the Grants was threatened by New York and later by the British, he joined the Green Mountain Boys, fought in the revolution, and did everything he could to make sure scrappy little Vermont was as successful as he was.

Politically, he believed deeply in the sentiments laid out in Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.

He aligned himself first with the anti-Federalists and later with their successors, the Democratic Republicans.

In the winter of 1777, he helped Vermont pass the most Democratic constitution in the colonies.

At a time when slavery was commonplace and voting was tied to property ownership, the Vermont Constitution was the first to abolish slavery and guarantee universal voting rights to all free men.

Though Vermont would not earn statehood until 1791, the work of Matthew and his peers set a tone for what American democracy should look like.

But Matthew's interpersonal skills weren't quite as good as his statecraft.

When a wealthy Federalist lawyer named Nathaniel Chipman called him an ignorant Irish puppy in 1780, Matt snatched Chipman up by his ponytail.

Chipman, no shrinking violet himself, tried to stab Matthew.

The fight was broken up and Matthew tried to laugh it off, but the moment represented something much bigger.

Despite fighting a revolution against monarchy and class division, many wealthy Federalists scoffed at the Democratic Republican notion that all men were truly created equal.

In short, they didn't believe the United States should be a democracy.

They also believed that criticism of elected officials, commonly known today as free speech, was akin to treason.

So when a rags-to-riches Irishman with a democracy habit showed up in Congress in 1796, there was gonna be a showdown.

Matthew's first act after winning his congressional seat was to immediately start telling the Federalists just how bad they were at being in charge.

You see, two years before his election, Federalists negotiators signed the Jay Treaty with Great Britain tying up all the loose ends from the Revolutionary War.

The only problem was that France, the country that helped the US defeat Great Britain, took that very personally.

So the French Navy began attacking American commercial shipping in an undeclared war known as the Quasi-War.

Matthew publicly criticized the Jay Treaty as the bone of contention and chastised Federalist President, John Adams, for defending it.

In what was probably one of the first "saying the quiet part out loud" moments in American history, a Federalist congressman dismissed Matthew's perspective by stating that there was enough American blood and American accents in the House of Representatives to override his vote.

Despite his service as a combat veteran in the War of Independence, as an immigrant, he was now being condemned as not a true American worthy of criticizing the government.

Things got worse when the Federalists pushed through the Internal Security Acts of 1798, better known as the Alien and Sedition Acts.

They argued that the foreign new laws, which restricted the freedom of foreign-born Americans in criticism of the government, were necessary to protect the country from French influence.

But in reality, the laws were used to attack Democratic Republicans who criticized the government as disloyal, and just when it was in his best interest to lay low, our guy Matthew put himself on the front page of every newspaper in the country.

On January 30th, 1798, the Speaker of the House approached Matthew during a quiet moment to ask about Vermont's opposition to the new Stamp Act proposed by the Federalists.

Matt being Matt spoke his mind and Connecticut Congressman Roger Griswold insulted him deeply by accusing him of cowardice in the war.

When Matthew ignored him, Griswold got directly in his face and repeated the comments again.

So like any hotheaded, hair-pulling combat veteran would, Matthew spat tobacco juice in Griswold's face, creating one of the first public scandals in congressional history.

The Federalists naturally exploded.

A congressman called Matthew a kennel of filth and federalist newspapers called him Spitting Matt and the Spitting Hero.

But Democratic Republicans recognized this for what it was, a deliberate provocation intended to bait their fiery front man into slipping up.

Unfortunately, it worked.

Though he wasn't expelled, Matthew was forced to apologize to Congress.

He also chose to write letters of apology to his constituents.

But when he returned for the next session on February 15th, (people roaring) Griswold attacked him with a hickory cane.

The fight ended with Matthew fending off Griswold's attack with fire tongs?

But more than anything, it turned the most vocal critic of Federalist policies into a laughing stock.

With the papers making a mockery of him, Matthew is now vulnerable to attacks of a more sinister nature.

This is where the Sedition Act came into play.

This act made it illegal to write, print, utter, or publish any false, scandalous, and malicious writing with intent to defame the government.

And it was under this act that Matthew Lyon was arrested in October, 1798.

He was charged with intent to stir up sedition based on a June letter in which he described President John Adams as pompous.

Now, if you don't see calling the president pompous as a threat to national security, well, that's 'cause it wasn't.

And if the first charge didn't make it clear that Matthew was being targeted, everything else about the trial definitely did.

The Federalists pushed for a letter Matthew wrote before the Alien and Sedition Acts existed to be admitted as evidence so that he could be charged for that as well.

One of the two judges presiding over his trial was the man he defeated for his congressional seat.

And the prosecuting attorney was besties with Mr.

Wig-Snatch himself, Nathaniel Chipman.

It couldn't be any more obvious that the trial was a political attack on a vocal opponent of the Federalists, and he wasn't the only one.

Nearly all of the 27 people charged with sedition during John Adam's presidency were Democratic Republican journalists critical of his administration.

It wasn't the people who were on trial, it was free speech itself.

Matthew was convicted after just one hour of jury deliberation and given the outrageous sentence of four months in prison, court fees, and a fine of over $25,000 in today's money.

A little over 20 years after signing onto a declaration stating that all men were created equal, a faction of the founders were now imprisoning their political opponents for daring to stand on equal footing with them.

But Matthew wasn't gonna let it slide without a fight, and neither were the American people.

Matthew was intentionally imprisoned in the worst available room in a jail far away from his home.

But when outraged citizens threatened to break him out of jail, Matthew told them not to.

He recognized his position as a political martyr and chose to sacrifice his freedom to defeat an oppressive administration.

From within the jail, he continued to go incredibly hard, criticizing the administration in his new magazine, "The Scourge of Aristocracy".

And when he wasn't doing that, he was still running his reelection campaign from his jail cell.

In December, 1798, Matthew was reelected to Congress by nearly double the votes of his next closest opponent.

However, despite thousands of letters from the citizens of Vermont, John Adams refused to pardon Matthew, but he'd soon come to regret his treatment of the Congressman from Vermont.

The popular backlash against the Alien and Sedition Acts led to a runoff between Democratic Republicans, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, in the 1800 presidential election.

It was none other than Matthew Lyon, the Irish immigrant and first American jailed for free speech, who cast the final vote to help elect Thomas Jefferson as America's third president.

Matthew Lyons fight for free speech established that Democratic principles could and should apply to all of us regardless of where we come from.

In the face of oppressive laws from a powerful government, he chose to speak out anyway, knowing full well that he would be persecuted.

Though his actions effectively broke the party that enacted those oppressive laws, suppression of free speech has not gone away.

It remains the duty of not just Americans, but democracies all over the world to continue to protect these core principles.