Federalist and Republican Views of Government

George Washington’s administration enjoyed many successes and few failures. The first president would easily have been reelected had he chosen in 1796 to seek a third term. President John Adams’s administration enjoyed one major success—peace abroad—but it split the party and was overshadowed by a number of failures. The second president was not reelected in 1800. A large part of the reason was the foremost of those failures, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which Adams signed into law and enforced. Those acts provoked the first battles over the Bill of Rights, the decisive battle over the