Editor’s note: This is one installment in a One Small Step series exploring how our founding principles apply to policy change movements. See the series introduction and full collection here.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Our Nation began with a Declaration. In the 250 years since, it hasn’t stopped talking. From Benjamin Franklin and his printing press to X and today’s non-stop discourse between anyone and everyone who chooses to chime in, free speech provides the bedrock on which our other freedoms thrive.
While the First Amendment’s original protection of speech rights was not as broad as the protection it supplies today—for example, by applying only to the federal government and not the states—over time, the phrase “I have First Amendment rights” has become such a rallying cry that people use it reflexively when they feel silenced. Much like the word “OK” the term “First Amendment rights” has circled the globe demonstrating the universal appeal of free expression.
Here we look at the contributions of some early proponents of free speech and how they influenced the concept as we understand it today.
James and Benjamin Franklin
James Franklin was a Boston printer. In 1721 he founded The New-England Courant, Boston’s third newspaper and one of the colonies’ first non-government-affiliated papers. The paper, which “featured local controversies, belletristic material, and news of New England events,” has been described as “the first literary, lively, entertaining, humorous, and proto-nationalistic American newspaper” (Lemay 2995, 109).1 James Franklin was the first American to print Henry Care’s English Liberties.2 He also printed some of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters,3 including their defense of freedom of the press.4 While James was jailed in 1722, and subjected to prior restraint, his sixteen-year-old brother Benjamin was listed as the editor of the Courant in his stead.5
Benjamin Franklin, while apprenticed to his brother James, anonymously submitted articles to the paper by slipping them under the door, using the pseudonym “Silence Dogood”6 and posing as a minister’s widow.7 His brother, unaware that Ben was the writer, published the letters; and later, after Ben confessed his identity, James was jailed after he declined to reveal the identity of the author.8 One of the letters contained the assertion: “WITHOUT Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such thing as public Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the right of every man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or control the Right of another.”9 Benjamin Franklin went on to purchase and publish the Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard’s Almanack.10 In 1731 he was one of several to begin the first public library, located in Philadelphia and in 1743 he founded the American Philosophical Society.11 And, along with John Adams, he assisted Thomas Jefferson in drafting The Declaration of Independence.
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison
The Sedition Act of 1798, criminalized “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the federal government, Congress, or the president—effectively restricting criticism and press freedom.12 In response, “Jeffersonians conducted a public campaign against the Sedition Act.”13 Thomas Jefferson and James Madison secretly wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798, which were passed by those states arguing that the federal government had no authority to exercise power not specifically delegated to it in the Constitution.14
“The Virginia Resolution, authored by Madison, said that by enacting the Alien and Sedition Acts, Congress was exercising ‘a power not delegated by the Constitution, but on the contrary, expressly and positively forbidden by one of the amendments thereto; a power, which more than any other, ought to produce universal alarm, because it is leveled against that right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon, which has ever been justly deemed, the only effectual guardian of every other right.’”15
“The Kentucky Resolutions, authored by Jefferson, went further than Madison’s Virginia Resolution and asserted that states had the power to nullify unconstitutional federal laws.”16
Although no other states passed similar resolutions, The Sedition Act was allowed to expire on March 3, 1801, the day before the inauguration of President Thomas Jefferson, due to a sunset provision in the law.
John Quincy Adams
John Quicy Adams, the sixth President of the United States and son of John Adams, finished his lengthy career as a Member of the House of Representatives representing Plymouth, Massachusetts. He earned the nickname Old Man Eloquent,17 during his time in the House due to his tenacious opposition to the “Gag Rules”—resolutions that prohibited all discussion of slavery (such as Abolition petitions) in the House of Representatives.18 To circumvent these rules and finally obtain their repeal, he used his position as Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman to debate a petition that allegedly sought his removal as Chairman, but which he used as the basis “to hold the floor for days delivering a far ranging harangue against ‘slave mongers,’ as one observer recalled, ‘till slaveholding [and] slave trading…absolutely quailed and howled under his dissecting knife.’”19 This was just the beginning of his use of assorted petitions to repeatedly raise the issue of slavery and overcome attempts to silence debate on abolition.20 The “gag rule” was repealed by the 28th Congress (or during its early session) by the motion/resolution to rescind that Adams drafted.
Frederick Douglass
Although Frederick Douglass is best remembered as a leader of the abolitionist movement in 19th-century America and an important figure in the fight for African American civil rights during that era, he was also a staunch defender of free speech. Indeed, speech was his tool of choice, and as such he was dedicated to its protection.
In November 1860, Douglass was invited to be a speaker at a Boston meeting to commemorate the first anniversary of John Brown’s death and address the question “How can American Slavery be Abolished?”21 The December 3 meeting at the Tremont Temple Baptist Church in Boston was overwhelmed by a violent mob who took over the stage and shut down the speakers.22 “Newspapers around the country reported on the near riot, with headlines in the New York Tribune blaring, ‘Freedom of Speech Violated in Boston . . . Police Powerless.’”23 Six days later, Douglass delivered his prepared remarks at Boston’s Music Hall in a lecture entitled, “A Plea For Freedom of Speech in Boston”.24 Here is what he said:
No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech. It was in their eyes, as in the eyes of all thoughtful men, the great moral renovator of society and government. . . . Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence. Slavery cannot tolerate free speech.
. . .
Equally clear is the right to hear. To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money.25
From before the Revolution through the dawn of the Civil War, freedom of speech was instrument of change and the foundation of our other freedoms. These men and many other advocates secured the right on which the others have been based. Today we celebrate the often noisy, frequently chaotic, but always necessary freedom to speak.
Cindy Crawford is Senior Policy Counsel at Americans for Prosperity.
Footnotes:
- https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/james-franklin/
- Ibid.
- https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/catos-letters/
- https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/james-franklin/
- https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/james-franklin/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New-England_Courant
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New-England_Courant#cite_note-41
- https://www.masshist.org/online/silence_dogood/essay.php?entry_id=203
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New-England_Courant#cite_note-41
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New-England_Courant#cite_note-40; https://books.google.com/books?id=bsc2AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
- https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/benjamin-franklin/
- Ibid.
- Howard Gillman, Mark A. Graber, Keith E. Whittington AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONALISM VOLUME II: RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES ,Chapter 4: The Early National Era—Democratic Rights/Free Speech/National Free Speech Controversies, p. 2, Oxford University Press (2013).
- Id. at 1.
- https://billofrightsinstitute.org/primary-sources/virginia-and-kentucky-resolutions/
- https://billofrightsinstitute.org/primary-sources/virginia-and-kentucky-resolutions/
- Id.
- https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/american-presidency/online/life-and-death/life-after-office/adams
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Quincy-Adams/Second-career-in-Congress
- https://history.house.gov/HistoricalHighlight/Detail/35497?current_search_qs=%3Fsubject%3DAdams%252c%2BJohn%2BQuincy%26PreviousSearch%3D%26CurrentPage%3D1%26SortOrder%3DDate
- Id.
- https://frederickdouglasspapersproject.com/s/digitaledition/item/10458
- https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/frederick-douglass-a-plea-for-free-speech-in-boston-1860
- https://lawliberty.org/frederick-douglass-plea-for-freedom-of-speech-in-boston/
- https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/frederick-douglass-a-plea-for-free-speech-in-boston-1860; https://lawliberty.org/frederick-douglass-plea-for-freedom-of-speech-in-boston/
- https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/frederick-douglass-a-plea-for-free-speech-in-boston-1860
