Alien and Sedition Acts
Though he was out of office, Madison remained a prominent Democratic-Republican leader in opposition to the Adams administration. During the Quasi-War, the Federalists created a standing army and passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were directed at French refugees engaged in American politics and against Republican editors. Madison and Jefferson believed that the Federalists were using the war to justify the violation of constitutional rights, and they increasingly came to view Adams as a monarchist. Both Madison and Jefferson as leaders of the Democratic-Republican party expressed the belief that natural rights could not be infringed upon even during a time of war. Madison believed that the Alien and Sedition acts formed a dangerous precedent, giving government the power to look past the natural rights of its people in the name of national security. In response to the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson wrote the Kentucky Resolutions, which argued that the states had the power to nullify federal law on the basis that the Constitution was a compact among the states. Madison rejected this view of a compact among the states, and his Virginia Resolutions instead urged states to respond to unjust federal laws through interposition, a process in which a state legislature declared a law to be unconstitutional but did not take steps to actively prevent its enforcement. Jefferson's doctrine of nullification was widely rejected, and the incident damaged the Democratic-Republican Party as attention was shifted from the Alien and Sedition Acts to the unpopular nullification doctrine.