Failed Prosecutions

The Sedition Act prosecutions just discussed were not the full scope of Secretary of State Timothy Pickering’s plan for the first campaign to enforce the Sedition Act during the second half of 1798. There were a number of other targets eagerly aimed at by Pickering or by other zealous Federalist officials that did not work out. They included the only Republican in a high federal office, Thomas Jefferson; the noted poet and supporter of the French Revolution, Joel Barlow; the Republican editor of a Pennsylvania newspaper, John Israel; the writer of a “seditious” essay, Aristides; and an overlooked Georgian who