The Report of 1800 was a resolution drafted by James Madison arguing for the sovereignty of the individual states under the United States Constitution and against the Alien and Sedition Acts.The Report is also known as the Virginia Report of 1800, the Report of 1799, Madison's Report or the Report on the Alien and Sedition Acts. Adopted by the Virginia General Assembly in January 1800, the Report amends arguments from the 1798 Virginia Resolutions and attempts to resolve contemporary criticisms against the Resolutions. The Report was the last important explication of the Constitution produced before the 1817 Bonus Bill veto message by Madison, who has come to be regarded as the "Father of the Constitution."See, e.g., Brant's subtitle "Father of the Constitution."
The arguments made in the Resolutions and the Report were later used frequently during the nullification crisis of 1832, when South Carolina declared federal tariffs to be unconstitutional and void within the state. Madison rejected the concept of nullification and the notion that his arguments supported such a practice. Whether Madison's theory of Republicanism really supported the nullification movement, and more broadly whether the ideas he expressed between 1798 and 1800 are consistent with his work before and after this period, are the main questions surrounding the Report in the modern literature.
Background Madison, a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, was elected to the Democratic-Republican-dominated Virginia General Assembly from Orange County in 1799. A major item on his agenda was the defense of the General Assembly's 1798 Virginia Resolutions, of which Madison had been the draftsman.Madison initially decided to run for office mainly to counteract the strength of prominent Federalist Patrick Henry, who was set to be elected to the House. However, Henry died over the summer, leaving the Democratic-Republicans free to pursue their plans with no substantial opposition. Madison, 303. The Resolutions, usually discussed together with Thomas Jefferson's contemporaneous Kentucky Resolutions, were a response to various perceived outrages perpetrated by the Federalist-dominated national government. The most significant of these were the Alien and Sedition Acts, four laws that allowed the President to deport aliens at will, required a longer period of residence before aliens could become citizens, and made it a crime to publish malicious or defamatory material against the government or its officials. Democratic-Republicans were outraged by the legislation, and Madison and Jefferson drafted the highly critical Resolutions adopted in response by the Virginia and Kentucky state legislatures.
The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions had in the year since publication received highly critical replies from state legislatures. Seven states formally responded to Virginia and Kentucky by rejecting the ResolutionsThe seven states that transmitted formal rejections were Delaware, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont. See and three other states passed resolutions expressing disapproval,Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey passed resolutions that disapproved the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, but these states did not transmit formal responses to Kentucky and Virginia. with the other four states taking no action. No other state endorsed the Resolutions. The reason for the criticism was that the General Assembly, led in the effort by state-sovereignty advocate John Taylor of Caroline, had put a state-sovereignty spin on the Virginia Resolutions of 1798 despite Madison's hopes. These replies contended that the Supreme Court of the United States had the ultimate responsibility for deciding whether federal laws were constitutional, and that the Alien and Sedition Acts were constitutional and necessary.Madison, 303. At least six states responded to the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions by stating that the power to declare a law unconstitutional rested in the federal judiciary, not the states. For example, Vermont's resolution stated: "It belongs not to state legislatures to decide on the constitutionality of laws made by the general government; this power being exclusively vested in the judiciary courts of the Union." . The other states taking the position that the constitutionality of federal laws is a question for the federal courts, not the states, were New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. The Governor of Delaware also took this position. The Federalists accused the Democratic-Republicans of seeking disunion, even contemplating violence.Koch and Ammon, 163. At the time, some leading Virginia Democratic-Republican figures such as Rep. William Branch Giles (in public) and Taylor (in private) actually were contemplating disunion, and the Virginia General Assembly chose this juncture for finally constructing a new state armory in Richmond, so there was some truth to the charge.
Jefferson, the leader of the Democratic-Republican Party and then–Vice President, wrote to Madison in August 1799 outlining a campaign to strengthen public support for the principles expressed in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 (commonly referred to as "the principles of '98"):
In response to this letter, Madison visited Jefferson at Monticello during the first week of September.Madison, 304. Their discussion was important in that it persuaded Jefferson to depart from his radical stance on dissociation from the Union, which is expressed at the end of the excerpt above. At the very least, Virginia or Kentucky taking such a stance publicly would have justified the Federalist attacks against the secessionist tendencies of the Democratic-Republicans. Madison won over Jefferson, who shortly thereafter wrote to Wilson Cary Nicholas that: "From [this position] I retreat readily, not only in deference to [Madison's] judgment but because as we should never think of separation but for repeated and enormous violations, so these, when they occur, will be cause enough of themselves."Letter from Jefferson to W.C. Nicholas of September 5, 1799, quoted in Brant, 467. Adrienne Koch and Harry Ammon, examining Jefferson's later writing, conclude that Madison had a significant role "in softening Jefferson's more extreme views."Koch and Ammon, 167.
Jefferson hoped for further involvement with the production of the Report and planned to visit Madison at Montpelier on his way to Philadelphia, the national capital, for the winter session of the United States Congress. However, James Monroe, who would become Governor of Virginia before the end of the year, visited Jefferson at Monticello and cautioned him against meeting with Madison, since another meeting between two of the most important Democratic-Republican leaders would provoke significant public comment.Koch and Ammon, 169–170. The task of writing the Virginia Report was left solely to Madison. Jefferson underlined the importance of this work in a November 26 letter to Madison in which he identified "protestations against violations of the true principles of our constitution" as one of the four primary elements of the Democratic-Republican Party plan.Letter from Jefferson to Madison of November 26, 1799, quoted in Koch and Ammon, 170.
Production and passage The Assembly session began in early December. Once at Richmond, Madison began drafting the Report,Madison, 303. though he was delayed by a weeklong battle with dysentery.Brant, 467. On December 23, Madison moved for the creation of a special seven-member committee with himself as chairman to respond to "certain answers from several of the states, relative to the communications made by the Virginia legislature at their last session." The committee members were Madison, John Taylor, William Branch Giles, George Keith Taylor, John Wise, John Mercer, and William Daniel.Madison, 296, 304. The next day, Christmas Eve, the committee produced a first version of the Report.Neither this version nor any of Madison's drafts survive. The measure came before the House of Delegates, the lower house of the General Assembly, on January 2.
Though certain to pass due to the Democratic-Republican majority, which had recently been solidified by the election of a Democratic-Republican clerk and speaker of the House, the Report was debated for five days. The main point of contention was the meaning of the third of the Virginia Resolutions:
This resolution had been the principal target of the Federalist attack on the Resolutions.Gutzman, 582. Particularly at issue was the sense in which the states were parties to the federal compact. The Report was ultimately amended to provide greater clarity on this issue by emphasizing that when the Virginians claimed that the "states" were parties to the federal Constitution, the referent of the word "state" was the sovereign people of the particular state. Thus, to say that "the state of Virginia ratified the Constitution" was to say that the sovereign people of Virginia ratified the Constitution. The amended Report passed the House of Delegates on January 7 by a margin of 60 to 40. At some point in the next two weeks, it passed the Senate by a margin of 15 to 6.Madison, 305.
The Report was received warmly by Virginia Democratic-Republicans. The General Assembly arranged for five thousand copies to be printed and distributed in the state, but there was not much public response to the Report, and it appears to have had relatively little impact on the presidential election of 1800 (which was, nevertheless, a major victory for the Democratic-Republicans and a repudiation of Federalist policies). Parties outside Virginia seemed uninterested in the rehashing of the 1798 Resolutions, and in other states there was very little public comment. Jefferson eagerly sought copies for distribution to Democratic-Republican members of Congress departing for their home states, and when they failed to arrive he entreated Monroe for at least one copy that he could reproduce. Despite Jefferson's approval of and attempt to distribute Madison's work, the national reaction was tepid.Koch and Ammon, 171; Madison, 306. Though it had little impact on the immediate election, Madison's Report clarified the legal argument against the Acts and for states' rights in general, particularly in its advancement of the Tenth Amendment rather than the Ninth as the main bulwark against federal encroachment on state autonomy.Lash, 183–184.
Argument The general purpose of the Report was the affirmation and expansion of the principles expressed in the Virginia Resolutions. The first major goal of the Resolutions was to bring about the repeal of the Alien and Sedition Acts by generating public opposition that would be expressed through the state legislatures. Madison sought to accomplish this by demonstrating conclusively that the Acts violated the constitution. Laying into the Acts in his Report, Madison described many breaches of constitutional limits. The Alien Act granted the President the unenumerated power of deporting friendly aliens.The Democratic-Republicans did not oppose the Alien Enemies Act, which permitted the deportation of enemy aliens, and is still in force. Contrary to the Sedition Act, the federal government had no power to protect officials from dissent or libelous attack, beyond the protection it accorded to every citizen; indeed, such special intervention against the press was "expressly forbidden by a declaratory amendment to the constitution."Madison, 341. As well, Madison attacked Federalist carriage laws and bank laws as unconstitutional.