Alien and Sedition Acts
Jefferson's biographer Dumas Malone argued that the Kentucky Resolution might have gotten Jefferson impeached for treason if his actions had become known at the time. In writing the Kentucky Resolutions, Jefferson warned that "unless arrested at the threshold," the Alien and Sedition Acts would "necessarily drive these states into revolution and blood." The historian Ron Chernow stated that Jefferson "wasn't calling for peaceful protests or civil disobedience: he was calling for outright rebellion, if needed, against the federal government of which he was vice president." Jefferson "thus set forth a radical doctrine of states' rights that effectively undermined the constitution." Chernow argued that neither Jefferson nor Madison sensed that they had sponsored measures as inimical as the Alien and Sedition Acts themselves.