Word: jefferson
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...Jefferson, who was Vice President at the time, drafted his position in secret and wrote it into the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. James Madison, in collaboration with Jefferson, subsequently authored the Virginia Resolutions. In the second and fourth of the Kentucky Resolutions, Jefferson cited the 10th Amendment, which gives the states powers not delegated to the government by the Constitution, to declare the Alien and Sedition Acts unconstitutional. Jefferson feared that a strong central government might put an end to slavery. Jefferson's fight against the Alien and Sedition Acts is often placed in the context of free speech...
...After Jefferson defeated Adams and was elected President in 1800, the Alien and Sedition Acts were allowed to expire. Adams, looking to distance himself from the mess, blamed the whole idea on Alexander Hamilton--who by then had been murdered by Aaron Burr...
...effort with reports of racial dissension and demands for civil rights. It took Chief Justice Earl Warren's Supreme Court on March 9, 1964, in The New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, to finally declare unconstitutional the Sedition Act of the Adams Administration. Though the act had expired under Jefferson's Administration, the court's action buried that particular threat to free speech once and for all--or so people hoped. Writing for the majority, Justice William Brennan held that L.B. Sullivan, an Alabama official, had not been libeled in a New York Times ad that had been paid...
...only direct reference to God in the Declaration of Independence comes in the first paragraph, in which Thomas Jefferson and his fellow drafters of that document--including Benjamin Franklin and John Adams--invoke the "laws of nature and of nature's god." (The absence of capitalization was the way Jefferson wrote it, though the final parchment capitalizes all four nouns.) The phrase "nature's god" reflected Jefferson's deism--his rather vague Enlightenment-era belief, which he shared with Franklin, in a Creator whose divine handiwork is evident in the wonders of nature. Deists like Jefferson did not believe...
...first rough draft of the Declaration, Jefferson began his famous second paragraph: "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable ..." The draft shows Franklin's heavy printer's pen crossing out the phrase with backslashes and changing it to "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Our rights derive from nature and are secured "by the consent of the governed," Franklin felt, not by the dictates or dogmas of any particular religion. Later in that same sentence, however, we see what was likely the influence of Adams, a more doctrinaire product of Puritan Massachusetts. In his rough draft...