SOURCE: Smith, James Morton. “The Aurora and the Alien and Sedition Laws: Part 1, The Editorship of Benjamin Franklin Bache.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 77, no. 1 (January 1953): 3-23.

In the following essay, Smith describes the events surrounding Bache's activities as a journalist, his arrest in 1798 for sedition, and the contemporary reaction.

The chief target of the Sedition Law of 1798 was Benjamin Franklin Bache, namesake of his illustrious grandfather and editor of the Philadelphia Aurora, the nation's most influential Republican newspaper.¹ So anxious were the Federalists to bring him to “condign punishment,”² however, that they moved to silence his criticism of their administration without awaiting the enactment of that law. On June 26, 1798, nearly three weeks before President John Adams signed the sedition bill, the Republican editor was arrested to answer a Federal common law indictment for seditious libels against the President and the executive branch of the government...