The Alien and Sedition acts were meant to calcify the hold on America of the soon to be dead hand of the Federalist past. It was also the Whig descendants of the Federalists who spawned the anti-Catholic, anti-foreigner, xenophobic Know Nothings of the 1850s. See Millard Fillmore.
As to Jefferson:
1. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence as a young man and it is IMNSHO, the greatest document of the Revolutionary Era and probably in American history.
2. Whatever his own bizarre beliefs, he wanted his authorship of the Virginia statute guaranteeing religious rights to be on his tombstone as one of the three achievements in which he took greatest pride. You and I certainly have different religious beliefs as I am a Roman Catholic and you are not but each of us has freedom of worship thanks to men like Jefferson. As late as the eve of 1818's Connecticut constitution, it was a crime to celebrate Mass in Connecticut or to attend one. The Bill of Rights applied only to the Fedgov at that time. The Baptist Congregation at Danbury complained in 1811 in a letter to Jefferson that Connecticut only allowed Congregationalists to vote or hold land and Jefferson, in his reply, observed that the purpose of the First Amendment religion clause was to ensure freedom of worship and autonomy of religious institutions to guarantee that churches be free to hold government morally accountable without fear. This was not the reply of a man who favored a nude prostitute dancing as "the Goddess of Reason" on the altar of Paris's Cathedral of Notre Dame.
David McCullough's masterful biography of Federalist John Adams made him a vastly more appealing character than most had imagined. However, the historian has John Adams, while ambassador to Paris, attending Mass and writing to Abigail of the experience, saying that it was a good thing that the American people had not witnessed the majesty of that Mass or the reformed churches would be finished. I like to think that G-d forgave Adams his understandable Unitarian resistance to my faith which was not that of Adams.
In response to another post, as I have always told you, you cannot alienate me by sincerely holding faith views which differ from mine or political views that differ from mine for that matter. The circumstances of my life do not allow me to engage in the conversation with you as deeply as you would prefer but that does not mean that we cannot or do not share mutual respect.
Thanks for various expressions of respect on this thread.
Did you know that Robert Welch and his wife became Catholics and died Catholic???? Your local coordinator was admitting too much, illustrating the difference in the quality of thought between Belmont and many local poohbahs. I was never a member but occasionally a fellow traveler, subject by subject.
The faithlessness of today's New England is largely a product of the dual degeneration of the old Puritans. One group became self-worshipping "transcendentalists" and then Unitarian Universalists. The other became today's Congregationalists among whom the old Puritan faith is hard to find although a few congregations persist. Of course, in my own Church, Bernard Cardinal Law's colossally pathetic and probably criminal tenure at Boston has matched just about anything the descendants of the Puritans have been able to do to discredit faith in God
It is quite true that the northern Federalists were the ancestors of the "Know-Nothings." The South at the time was not the "Bible Belt" of today but very much under the influence of High Church Anglicanism and Catholicism, and the Southern aristocrats lamented the "Puritan religious ferment" as the source of all revolutionary tendencies. Yet today it is the South that is the scene of "Puritan religious ferment," and today's snake-handlers and "holy rollers" have much more in common with the old "burned over district" of northern evangelicalism than they do with the ante-bellum South. I am an old Southern Republican of the Puritan/Federalist school (no drinkin', smokin', or gamblin', Obadiah!) and the ante-bellum quasi European high church culture is absolutely alien to me. Naturally liberals like to blame slavery on today's Fundamentalist Protestantism, which they retroject into the Old South, but no honesty is to expected of them anyway. The Bible Belt I know is much more like Oliver Cromwell and even Ian Paisley than most conservatives like to admit or that you would be comfortable with.
Interestingly, another phase in the Federalist/National Republican/Whig/Know-Nothing/Republican development was the American Anti-Masonic movement, which was not in the least connected with conservative Catholicism but rather with anti-Catholic northern evangelicalism. The American Anti-Masonic movement was sort of a halfway house between old school conservative Federalism and radical abolitionism. In fact, it combined conservative elements who were opposed to the subversive tendencies of Freemasonry with egalitarians opposed to an American nobility (which Freemasonry basically was) and even with anti-religious types who were opposed to silly quasi-religious rituals and ceremonies.
Similarly, many other Puritanical tendencies (anti-Catholicism, temperence, prohibitionism, opposition to tobacco and gambling, etc.) historically have adherents on both the Left and Right (Prohibitionism, associated with rural America, Billy Sunday, and the Ku-Klux Klan in the minds of most today started out as a radical leftwing "reform" movement in league with abolitionism, world peace, labor unions, and women's rights). Although for religious reasons I can no longer accept the inherent sinfulness of beverage alcohol (the position of my own ancestral tradition), I continue to identify with the right wing of Puritanism and oppose gambling and tobacco and take pleasure in reminding today's ueber-libertarians of the Republican heritage. And while I certainly appreciate conservative Catholics like yourself (particularly when they are both creationist and pro-Israel), I personally continue to identify Catholicism, not with a threat to liberty (a la the British Unionists and the anti-clerical Left), but as an urban immigrant religion associated with labor unions, the inner city, the Democrat party, and all too often a liberal rationalism that manifests itself in evolutionism, higher criticism of the Bible, naturalism, and a prejudice against America's rural Fundamentalist Heartland. In other words, by ancestry and instinct I'm the kind of person you wouldn't like, but your combination of creationism and pro-Israelism simply swallows up all our differences as far as I am concerned.
I was unaware that the Robert Welch's converted to Catholicism. As you are probably aware, while he was raised a Fundamentalist Baptist he spent most of his life as a Unitarian and was as theologically liberal as he was politically conservative (he was an admitted evolutionist). However, like many palaeoconservatives, he appreciated the utility of the Catholic Church in supporting western civilization and opposing radical tendencies. I was first exposed to a positive view of Catholicism via the Society and believe my own eventual conversion stemmed from this original spark. However, my own experience leaves me wondering just what any conservatives, at least in the United States, see in the Catholic Church, which seems like a bunch of leftwing milksops compared to the humblest rural Fundamentalist Protestant church.
I would still like to know why so many palaeoconservative Catholics who defend the centralized statist regimes of Franco, Salazar, Petain, Stroessner, Pinochet, and Trujillo refuse to show similar understanding for the security measures of the United States.
Interestingly, despite his status as the leading Anti-Federalist in the country during the debate on ratification of the new Constitution, once it was ratified Patrick Henry actually became a loose constructionist, implied powers Federalist. His last public act was to argue against the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, drawn up by the legislatures of those two commonwealths and allegedly authored by Jefferson and Madison as protests against the Alien and Sedition Acts.