These replies are identical, except in the matter of dates and names, and the vote upon them, unanimous in the Senate and lacking but one of unanimity in the House, would indicate that there was no debate.[1] The brevity of the replies, according to the Providence Journal, is due to the fact that other states having entered fully into the reasons for dissenting from Virginia and Kentucky nothing was thought necessary but "an expression of opinion, and of a few general principles on which that opinion was founded."[2]
In Connecticut the newspapers printed so many documents and articles bearing upon the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions that their readers must have become quite familiar with them. But among these articles I have been able to find no original discussions and but very little about the action of the state legislature upon the resolutions. While the legislature was in session none of the Connecticut papers published any accounts of its proceedings; after it had adjourned, the Connecticut Courant had a long account, evidently written by a member.[3] This article, copied by all the other papers, constituted their only account of legislative affairs. One paragraph in this article contains all that can be learned about the replies to Virginia and Kentucky, save what is shown by the documents themselves.
Opposition to these replies was expected by the Federalists, for there were some fifteen or sixteen "Jacobins" in the House, though some of these were "half-way characters." But the answers met with no resistance, most of the Republicans absenting themselves during the vote. The reply to Virginia[4] passed both houses unanimously, while that to Kentucky encountered but two negative votes in the House and none in the Senate. The reply to Kentucky[5] declares that attempts to form a combination of state legislatures for the purpose of controlling the policy of the federal government are foreign to the duties of state legislatures, contrary to the principles of the Constitution, and calculated to introduce anarchy by menacing the existence of the Union. But were the assembly permitted to pass upon the measures of the federal government, it would pronounce the Alien and Sedition Laws constitutional and meriting its entire approbation. In this reply, as also in that to Virginia, the Federalist members of the Connecticut assembly expressed their dissent to both the protest and the remedy of the
