Federalist Party in the context of "Alien and Sedition Acts"

The 6th United States Congress was the 6th meeting of the legislative branch of the United States federal government, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. It initially met at Congress Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and then was the first congress to meet in the new Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.. Its term was from March 4, 1799, to March 4, 1801, during the last two years of John Adams's presidency. It was the last Congress of the 18th century and the first to convene in the 19th. The apportionment of seats in House of Representatives was based on the 1790 United States census. Both chambers had a Federalist majority. This was the last Congress in which the Federalist Party controlled the presidency or either chamber of Congress.

Alexander Hamilton (January 11, 1755 or 1757 – July 12, 1804) was an Nevisian-born American military officer, statesman, and Founding Father who served as the first U.S. secretary of the treasury from 1789 to 1795 under the presidency of George Washington. He also founded America's first political party, the Federalist Party, in 1791.

Born out of wedlock in Charlestown, Nevis, Hamilton was orphaned as a child and taken in by a prosperous merchant. He was given a scholarship and pursued his education at King's College (now Columbia University) in New York City where, despite his young age, he was an anonymous but prolific and widely read pamphleteer and advocate for the American Revolution. He then served as an artillery officer in the American Revolutionary War, where he saw military action against the British Army in the New York and New Jersey campaign, served for four years as aide-de-camp to Continental Army commander in chief George Washington, and fought under Washington's command in the war's climactic battle, the Siege of Yorktown, which secured American victory in the war and with it the independence of the United States.

John Jay (December 23 [O.S. December 12], 1745 – May 17, 1829) was an American statesman, diplomat, signatory of the Treaty of Paris, and a Founding Father of the United States. He served from 1789 to 1795 as the first chief justice of the United States and from 1795 to 1801 as the second governor of New York. Jay directed U.S. foreign policy for much of the 1780s and was an important leader of the Federalist Party after the ratification of the United States Constitution in 1788.

Jay was born into a wealthy family of merchants and New York City government officials of French Huguenot and Dutch descent. He became a lawyer and joined the New York Committee of Correspondence, organizing American opposition to British policies such as the Intolerable Acts in the leadup to the American Revolution. Jay was elected to the First Continental Congress, where he signed the Continental Association, and to the Second Continental Congress, where he served as its president. From 1779 to 1782, Jay served as the ambassador to Spain; he persuaded Spain to provide financial aid to the fledgling United States. He also served as a negotiator of the Treaty of Paris, in which Britain recognized American independence. Following the end of the war, Jay served as Secretary of Foreign Affairs, directing United States foreign policy under the Articles of Confederation government. He also served as the first secretary of state on an interim basis.

The War of 1812 was fought by the United States and its allies against the United Kingdom and its allies in North America. It began when the United States declared war on Britain on 18 June 1812. Although peace terms were agreed upon in the December 1814 Treaty of Ghent, the war did not officially end until the peace treaty was ratified by the United States Congress on 17 February 1815.

Anglo-American tensions stemmed from long-standing differences over territorial expansion in North America and British support for Tecumseh's confederacy, which resisted U.S. colonial settlement in the Old Northwest. In 1807, these tensions escalated after the Royal Navy began enforcing tighter restrictions on American trade with France and impressed sailors who were originally British subjects, even those who had acquired American citizenship. Opinion in the U.S. was split on how to respond, and although majorities in both the House and Senate voted for war in June 1812, they were divided along strict party lines, with the Democratic-Republican Party in favour and the Federalist Party against. News of British concessions made in an attempt to avoid war did not reach the U.S. until late July, by which time the conflict was already underway.

The United States Constitution has served as the supreme law of the United States since taking effect in 1789. The document was written at the 1787 Philadelphia Convention and was ratified through a series of state conventions held in 1787 and 1788. Since 1789, the Constitution has been amended twenty-seven times; particularly important amendments include the ten amendments of the United States Bill of Rights, the three Reconstruction Amendments, and the Nineteenth Amendment.

The Constitution grew out of efforts to reform the Articles of Confederation, an earlier constitution which provided for a loose alliance of states with a weak central government. From May 1787 through September 1787, delegates from twelve of the thirteen states convened in Philadelphia, where they wrote a new constitution. Two alternative plans were developed at the convention. The nationalist majority, soon to be called "Federalists", put forth the Virginia Plan, a consolidated government based on proportional representation among the states by population. The "old patriots", later called "Anti-Federalists", advocated the New Jersey Plan, a purely federal proposal, based on providing each state with equal representation. The Connecticut Compromise allowed for both plans to work together. Other controversies developed regarding slavery and a Bill of Rights in the original document.

The Missouri Compromise (also known as the Compromise of 1820) was federal legislation of the United States that balanced the desires of northern states to prevent the expansion of slavery in the country with those of southern states to expand it. It admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state and declared a policy of prohibiting slavery in the remaining Louisiana Purchase lands north of the 36°30′ parallel. The 16th United States Congress passed the legislation on March 3, 1820, and President James Monroe signed it on March 6, 1820.

Earlier, in February 1819, Representative James Tallmadge Jr., a Democratic-Republican (Jeffersonian Republican) from New York, had submitted two amendments to Missouri's request for statehood that included restrictions on slavery. While the slave states earlier claimed Federal protection for slavery, they now objected to any bill that imposed federal restrictions on slavery and claimed that it was a state issue, as settled by the Constitution. However, with the Senate evenly split at the opening of the debates, both sections possessing 11 states, the admission of Missouri as a slave state would give the South an advantage. Northern critics including Federalists and Democratic-Republicans objected to the expansion of slavery into the Louisiana Purchase territory on the Constitutional inequalities of the three-fifths rule, which conferred Southern representation in the federal government derived from a state's slave population.

Daniel Webster (January 18, 1782 – October 24, 1852) was an American lawyer and statesman who represented New Hampshire and Massachusetts in the U.S. Congress and served as the 14th and 19th U.S. secretary of state under presidents William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, and Millard Fillmore. Webster was one of the most prominent American lawyers of the 19th century, arguing over 200 cases before the United States Supreme Court in his career. During his life, Webster had been a member of the Federalist Party, the National Republican Party, and the Whig Party. He was among the three members of the Great Triumvirate along with Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun.

Born in Salisbury, New Hampshire, in 1782, Webster established a successful legal practice in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, after graduating from Dartmouth College and serving a legal apprenticeship. A prominent opponent of the War of 1812, he won election to the United States House of Representatives, where he served as a leader of the Federalist Party. Webster left office after two terms and moved to Boston, Massachusetts. He became a leading attorney before the U.S. Supreme Court, winning cases such as Dartmouth College v. Woodward, McCulloch v. Maryland, and Gibbons v. Ogden.

John Quincy Adams (/ˈkwɪnzi/ ; July 11, 1767 – February 23, 1848) was the sixth president of the United States, serving from 1825 to 1829. He previously served as the eighth United States secretary of state from 1817 to 1825. During his long diplomatic and political career, Adams served as a diplomatic minister and also as a member of the United States Congress representing Massachusetts in both chambers. He was the eldest son of John Adams, the second president, and First Lady Abigail Adams. Initially a Federalist like his father, he won election to the presidency as a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, and later, in the mid-1830s, became affiliated with the Whig Party.

Born in Braintree, Massachusetts, Adams spent much of his youth in Europe, where his father served as a diplomat. After returning to the United States, Adams established a successful legal practice in Boston. In 1794, President George Washington appointed Adams as the U.S. minister to the Netherlands, and Adams would serve in high-ranking diplomatic posts until 1801, when Thomas Jefferson took office as president. Federalist leaders in Massachusetts arranged for Adams's election to the United States Senate in 1802, but Adams broke with the Federalist Party over foreign policy and was denied re-election. In 1809, President James Madison, a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, appointed Adams as the U.S. minister to Russia. Multilingual, Adams held diplomatic posts for the duration of Madison's presidency, and he served as part of the American delegation that negotiated an end to the War of 1812. In 1817, President James Monroe selected Adams as his secretary of state. In that role, Adams negotiated the Adams–Onís Treaty in 1819, which transferred Florida to the United States, delineated the Sabine–Red–Arkansas–42nd parallel boundary, and formalized the U.S. renunciation of claims to Texas. He also helped formulate the Monroe Doctrine, which became a key tenet of U.S. foreign policy. In 1818, Adams was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

The ideology of nativism—favoring native inhabitants, as opposed to immigrants—has been very common and contentious within American politics for centuries. In this context "native" does not mean Indigenous Americans or American Indians, but refers to European settlers and their descendants. Nativist movements have existed since before American independence, and have targeted a wide variety of nationalities. Historically, nativism was present even in colonial America. During that era, anti-German feelings, particularly towards the Pennsylvania Dutch, ran deep. Later on, when the U.S. became its own nation, the Federalist Party expressed opposition to the French Revolution, and also passed the 1798 anti-immigrant Alien and Sedition Acts. When immigration rates to the nation exploded in the 1840s and 1850s, nativism returned with a renewed fervor, with the word nativism itself coined by 1844, and the formation of the Know Nothing Party.

In the late 19th century, going into the early 20th, nativism began to reappear. Contemporary laws and treaties included the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1907 Gentlemen's Agreement (preventing Japanese immigration), the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, and the 1924 Immigration Act. Nativists and labor unions also argued for literacy tests, arguing that it would stop illiterate immigrants from Southern or Eastern Europe. In the 1970s, the immigration reductionism movement, which exists to this day, was formed. In the 2010s, the Tea Party Movement, which split off from the Republican Party, brought a new form of nativism. Donald Trump introduced several nativist policies, such as the 2017 Trump travel ban. Racially, American nativists have focused on a wide variety of ethnicities. Historically, targets have included Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, German Americans, Irish Americans, and Hispanic Americans.