New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie recently recounted that last October, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump vowed on X that if elected he will invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to “liberate” the country from immigrants once and for all. In Trump’s words, “…we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them the hell OUT OF OUR COUNTRY.”

It was a neck-snapping flashback to my college government and history courses in which the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, under President John Adams, were depicted as a huge blot on our country’s civil liberty tenets. Unfortunately, however, I had forgotten the circumstances which prompted these enactments.

This column is not primarily about Donald Trump’s views on immigration. Those have been amply documented elsewhere. Instead, it is a summary of what led to President John Adams and his Federalist majorities in Congress to target foreign nationals in the U.S.

At the heart of the 1798 legislative kerfuffle was the raging war between Great Britain and France and the very real prospect the U.S. would be drawn into the conflict. The biggest worry of Adams’s Federalists was that Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans would side with the French revolutionaries who had overthrown the monarchy in 1789. The greatest internal threat, as the Federalists saw it, were the estimated 25,000 Frenchmen in........

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