In Philadelphia and other American cities, the Federalist-controlled government used the Alien and Sedition Acts to prosecute newspaper editors, pamphleteers, and political speakers who criticized President John Adams and the Federalist Party. At least twenty-five people were arrested and ten convicted under the sedition provisions, which made it a crime to publish false, scandalous, and malicious writing against the government. The laws were intended to suppress the opposition Republican press but instead galvanized popular resistance.

The Sedition Act prosecutions directly targeted the literary and journalistic infrastructure of early American political culture, driving poets and editors to develop more subtle techniques of political critique. The laws' unpopularity helped inspire the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and influenced the politically engaged poetry of the early republic, establishing a tradition of First Amendment poetry that would later be invoked by poets from Walt Whitman to Allen Ginsberg when confronting state censorship.