Charles Slack. Liberty’s First Crisis. New York: Atlantic, 2015. Print.

The subtitle of Liberty’s First Crisis is Adams, Jefferson, and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech. It is truly about the first crisis in the brand-new United States of America involving one of the basic liberties suggested in the Declaration of Independence and enumerated in the Bill of Rights. This book is about the fortunately brief record of the Sedition Act and especially about its victims.

The Sedition Act was passed by a Federalist Congress and signed into law by President John Adams. One interesting detail, which proved that its intent was to silence political opposition, is that it had a built-in expiration date, namely the day after Adams’ term would end.

Slack has written a few biographies and is a very good story teller. Liberty’s First Crisis is no exception. Fortunately, at least looking at the big picture, there were relatively few people who were arrested or harassed by the enforcement of the law. And they were a mixed bunch.

In some ways, the most outrageous was a sitting United Congressman who criticized the president and was jailed for nearly two years. He was actually re-elected by the people in his Vermont district while he was in jail. Ironically, he had originally emigrated from Ireland to America for the promise of freedom.

Matthew Lyon continued to write and speak while in jail. When he was released, two months into his new congressional term, he took his time going to Philadelphia. He knew he could not be rearrested because the Constitution protected senators and representatives while en route to the national capital.

One man who had had too much to drink at a tavern was fined for sedition when he made a joke about firing a gun at the president’s backside. Another, in Massachusetts, who was arrested and served jail time, had erected a liberty pole, trying to resurrect a patriotic symbol specifically to protest the Act.

Three men arrested or harassed by the law were printers or publishers and had significant connections. Both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were aroused by the injustice of the Sedition Act. J. T. Callender was a friend of Thomas Jefferson. Later they would have a falling out and Callender would write editorials attacking President Jefferson.

While Jefferson ignored the attacks, one of the accusations Callender made was that Jefferson had had children by one of his slaves. That was the only contemporary account which survived making such an accusation, and it may have been a politically motivated lie, but nearly two hundred years later it did result in a genetic investigation into the descendants of Sally Hemings.

Another person arrested under the Act was a close associate of scientist Joseph Priestly. Both men had come to America, partly because of the influence of Benjamin Franklin, and they, too, found that their freedom would be limited, at least for a while.

One person who perhaps struggled most valiantly against government censorship under the Sedition Act was Benjamin Franklin Bache, Franklin’s grandson who continued to operate Franklin’s Philadelphia newspaper. Bache died prematurely in a yellow fever epidemic, and his wife would continue the cause.

One very striking thing about articles and other publications on both sides of the aisle was their very strong language. A lot of the rhetoric is very crass and crude. Thirty years ago it would have sounded extreme, but nowadays it would fit in seamlessly on many Internet sites.

While the stories of these men makes for great reading, this reviewer makes one recommendation. Even if the reader is not interested in the book as a whole, I believe every American ought to read the last chapter. This makes the case that we still have to be wary and be wise about attempts to stifle free speech and the free press today.

Slack cites, for example, Cass Sunstein, a law professor who was President Obama’s chief regulatory advisor. Sunstein has proposed that “free speech ought to be regulated” and the new government regulations on the Internet appear to be headed in that direction. (266) An article in a recent issue of Harvard Magazine (issued after Liberty’s First Crisis had been accepted for publication) quotes Sunstein saying that the idea that “individuals are in the best position to know what is good for them” is wrong. Instead, individuals need a strong government to tell them how to behave!

I am reminded when I attended college and had a discussion with a fellow student. I expressed concern about political movements that would restrict freedom of religion and freedom of speech. His response — “So what?” — sounded just like Mr. Sunstein.

You’ve got to read Chapter 31 of Liberty’s First Crisis!

What follows is more of a rant than a review, but this is written in reaction to Slack’s book.

Liberty’s First Crisis tells the sad story of Col. Algernon Sidney, who was arrested in England in 1683 and convicted of treason against King Charles II. Although it was not published until 1698, he was found in possession of a manuscript he had written advocating freedom of speech. He would be executed by hanging for the “crime.” Jefferson would cite Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government as the best primer on government and natural rights. (97)

Since the book went back to the time of Charles II, I was a little surprised and perhaps disappointed that it did not mention John Milton’s Areopagitica. This is the seminal work on freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Indeed, Sidney quoted quite freely from Areopagitica in his Discourses. Milton would be tried in 1660 when the royalists first took over from the Puritans for being a regicide. He wrote several works defending the trial and execution of King Charles I by the Puritan Parliament.

Though Milton’s crime was punishable by death, some prominent Cavalier poets interceded on his behalf, and his sentence was modified. He lost all his money and extensive real estate holdings except one country cottage to the government. He had already been blind for a dozen years. Though he wrote political tracts up to the time he was arrested, afterwards he became best known for writing the epic Paradise Lost.

Slack’s last chapter expresses a valid concern that freedom of the press and speech could be endangered in the United States, not by laws, but by regulations such as those proposed concerning the Internet or the now-defunct Fairness Doctrine for broadcast media.

Liberty’s First Crisis, though, fails to mention the very strident ongoing censorship initiated not by legislation but by court rulings. Since 1963 all kinds of discussions have been censored or prohibited by court order, especially those in government schools and government facilities.

In Adams’ day, if you did not like what someone said or wrote, you could get a law passed. Now, it is really easier. Just hire an elitist lawyer and the threat of lawsuit silences most people, and those who continue get thrown before a judge who is a friend of the lawyer, and they are also effectively silenced or threatened with prison if they do not comply. We saw this with anti-abortion protestors and especially in the schools.

Let me give some examples.

The half life of Carbon-14 is about 5700 years. If you do the math, after 100,000 years there would only be less than 2¹⁷ or 1/131,000 of the original Carbon-14 atoms left, making them very rare. If we are talking a million years, then this would be 2¹⁷⁵ or about 479 followed by fifty zeroes. In other words if the universe were a million years old, Carbon-14 would be extinct or impossible to find. So if the universe is 12-14 billion years old, why can we even measure Carbon-14? (We could ask the same question about numerous unstable isotopes with measurable half-lives).

The loss of energy in the earth’s magnetic field is measurable over time. If we accept the current rate of loss as being uniform, when we extrapolate back 10,000 years, the magnetic field would have been more powerful than that of a star. The earth itself would have been so hot it would have been molten. How did all this come about in less than 10,000 years if the solid earth is supposed to be 4 billion years old?

Similarly, the salinity of the oceans is measurable and continue to increase as the world’s rivers continue to empty dissolved minerals into the seas. The changes are measurable, and if we measure the increase of sodium over time and extrapolate back, the seas would have had no sodium at all 10,000 years ago. For nearly all other elements, the numbers are smaller than that. If the seas are no older than 10,000 years, how then did life emerge from the seas 400 million years ago?

When human population is extrapolated back, it usually reaches its “zero” point or place of no growth at some time between 2500 and 3000 BC, depending on the model. If humans have been on the earth 40,000 to 200,000 years, where were they before 3000 BC?

Soft tissues have been found in fossil worms, sea scorpions, and dinosaurs (even a T-rex) some of which are said to be older than half a billion years. How is this possible?

The moon is said to be approximately 4 billion years old. It has no atmosphere and is subject to a “bombardment” of particles and meteors, especially during times of meteor showers. When NASA designed its fist lunar vehicle, it was given large, wide wheels like a dune buggy because it was assumed that the moon would be covered with a deep layer of dust from the billions of years of cosmic particles breaking its surface and adding to it. When man landed on the moon in 1969, there was a less than an inch of dust on the surface. How could that be if the moon is so old?

Darwin and other hypothesized that human races appeared at different times from different primates. Recent DNA studies have shown that all mankind had its origin with a single DNA type. Was Darwin wrong?

Scientists estimate that the average mutation rate in human mitochondria is about 0.5 per generation. This “genetic clock” dates the time when humans would have been “new,” i.e. free of mutations at some time between 5,115 and 8,892 years ago. This is a lot closer to what Moses said than was Darwin hypothesized.

Sadly, it is against court rulings to even raise these questions or discuss them publicly in schools and other government institutions. These are just samples. There are many others.

The First Amendment of the Constitution does say “Congress shall make no law…” and Congress has made no law restricting such things. But the courts have. Notice, too, that there is nothing specifically religious in what I wrote above, but such questions and observations are still banned, as are prayers and other types of directly religious references.

A Chinese scientist who was in the United States presenting some information about a fossil feathered dinosaur with soft tissue intact he had found, if I recall correctly, was surprised when after his presentation he received no questions or comments. When he asked his host about this, his host said no one in the audience wanted to appear as if he were questioning Darwinism.

The scientist said, “I see. In China we can criticize Darwin but get in trouble if we criticize our government. In the United States you may criticize your government but you get in trouble if you criticize Darwin.”

As the elites in American become more secularized, those who are even suspect of harboring beliefs in God or the supernatural are becoming more marginalized. It is not Congress, but the courts that have been leading the modern American march towards greater censorship in the last fifty years. Though, in fairness, it was the courts that overturned recent laws restricting speech during elections. Like the original Sedition Act, those had the effect of protecting incumbents even more than they already are protected.

Thank you, Liberty’s First Crisis, for making us more aware, but there is a lot more out there to bring in. As Slack himself wrote:

Still, the Bill of Rights is not the source of our rights but a reflection of them, a mechanism for protecting them. This, of course, is what the Founders meant by unalienable rights being derived from nature or the Creator, as distinct from privileges, which can be granted (or revoked) by men. (171)

Let freedom ring!