On March 4, 1801, John Adams rose before dawn. It was his last day as president, and he was leaving Washington in defeat.
Adams had no intention of staying for the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson, his political rival whom he’d narrowly defeated four years earlier. He missed his wife, Abigail, who had already departed for their Massachusetts home, and he likely wanted to avoid public attention and questions from reporters. So he departed the newly built White House before first light.
The loss was, in some ways, close. Jefferson had claimed nine states and 73 electoral votes to Adams’s seven states and 65 electoral votes. Yet the popular vote was a different story, with Adams receiving just 39.4%, and the loss must have stung the prideful president.
Adams is remembered fondly by historians today, but he deserved to lose if for no other reason than the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, authoritarian legislation Adams embraced that was used to suppress speech and persecute his political opponents.
The Alien Act empowered the president to deport noncitizens deemed “subjects of foreign adversaries,” but it was the Sedition Act that struck at the very heart of free speech and free press. The act criminalized criticism of the government and public officials, including Adams himself, though not Vice President Jefferson.
Adams wrote lovely things about free speech on America’s path to independence, but once in power, he passed arguably the most draconian federal speech law in U.S. history. And it was no idle threat. Scores were prosecuted for criticizing Adams, his administration, or Federalists in Congress.
Notable figures prosecuted under the law included James Thompson Callender; Benjamin Franklin Bache, Ben Franklin’s grandson; and Rep. Matthew Lyon, a Vermont newspaper owner elected to the House of Representatives in 1796 who wrote a public letter in which he referred to Adams as a man grasping for power “in an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, or selfish avarice.”
As if to prove Lyon’s point, the letter was entered as evidence in the first count brought against him under the Sedition Act.
Lyon went to trial, but First Amendment protections were weak in 1798, despite clear language stating that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” He was found guilty and sentenced to four months in prison and fined $1,000 — about $25,000 today.
Adams won the battle, but his heavy-handed tactics were not lost on the public, including the voters of Vermont, who overwhelmingly voted to send Lyon, who was behind bars, back to Congress.
The Biden presidency, which will end in less than two weeks, shares some remarkable similarities with that of America’s second president.
Like Adams, President Joe Biden was defeated by a political opponent he’d beaten four years earlier. And like Adams, Biden could not resist using his power to suppress free speech and persecute political opponents.
For all the chatter about President-elect Donald Trump posing an existential threat to democracy, it was Biden who waged what has been described as “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” The effort included leaning on social media companies to censor information that strayed from government narratives even when it was true, spending hundreds of millions of dollars fighting “misinformation,” and creating a Disinformation Governance Board.
Biden and his political allies also chose to prosecute Trump in several cases of dubious merit.
In May 2024, following a six-week trial that sidelined his presidential campaign, Trump became the first former president to be convicted of a felony. His political opponents celebrated as reporters read the verdicts. Few seemed to care about the contortions of the law Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had taken to get Trump on charges of falsifying business records.
Writing in New York magazine, CNN legal analyst Elie Honig explained that Bragg’s indictment was referred to as the “Zombie Case” for its legal infirmities, noting the case seemed to be “crafted individually for the former president and nobody else.”
Yet Biden made it clear where he stood.
“No one is above the law,” he posted following the verdict.
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If Biden had studied history more closely, he’d have learned that persecuting political opponents and suppressing civil liberties are not winning tactics in American politics.
Now Biden is being shown the White House door. And though he shares other similarities with Adams, including a fierce temper and an acerbic tongue, Biden’s presidency, which was plagued by economic distress, cronyism, and an erratic foreign policy, is unlikely to be remembered in a rosy light. But Biden holds one edge. Unlike Adams, who slunk away from Washington in the predawn to avoid the shame of seeing his rival inaugurated, Biden will attend Trump’s inauguration.
Jon Miltimore is a senior editor at the American Institute for Economic Research. Follow him on Substack.