How a Sitting Congressman Was Jailed for Criticizing the President — and Re-Elected While Still Imprisoned
This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed.
The warrant called him “a malicious and seditious person, of a depraved mind and a wicked and diabolical disposition.”
He was a sitting member of Congress.
Matthew Lyon had been in that cell for three weeks when the votes were counted. He was in Vergennes, Vermont, in a 16-by-12-foot room shared with felons, counterfeiters, and runaway slaves. 
The stove had gone cold. Someone had taken his paper and pen. Outside, in the same building, one of the judges who had sentenced him was jailed for debt — and given a private room.
The votes came in anyway. Lyon had received 4,576. His closest rival: 2,444. He had nearly doubled his opponent’s total. He would return to Congress. He was not yet free.
THE PERSON
Matthew Lyon came to America in 1764 as an indentured servant, fourteen years old, from County Wicklow in Ireland. His father had been killed — some accounts say executed — for political activity against the British. Lyon arrived with nothing. He worked off his bond, bought land, fought with Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys at Fort Ticonderoga in 1775, helped found the state of Vermont, built a paper mill, and ran a newspaper. He ran for Congress three times before he won, in 1796.
He was called “Ragged Matt the Democrat.” He was proud of it.
Lyon was not a cautious man. On the floor of the House in January 1798, he spat tobacco juice on a Federalist congressman from Connecticut who had mocked him. The Federalists moved to expel him. They failed. Griswold, the Connecticut man, retaliated weeks later by beating Lyon about the head with a wooden cane on the House floor. Lyon defended himself with fireplace tongs. That fight, too, resolved without expulsion.
He was the kind of man who survived things.
THE CONTEXT
In 1798, the country was at the edge. French warships were seizing American merchant vessels in the Atlantic. The Quasi-War had no declaration and no clear end. Federalist President John Adams and his allies in Congress were consolidating power. Democratic-Republicans like Lyon — who supported the French Revolution and opposed Federalist centralization — were seen not merely as opponents but as traitors.
On July 14, 1798, Adams signed the Sedition Act. It made it a federal crime to publish “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the government, Congress, or the president. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison privately denounced it as unconstitutional. Jefferson called it a disguised partisan weapon to kill the opposition press before the 1800 election.
He was right.
Lyon, while the bill was still being debated, wrote a letter to a Vermont newspaper. He said he would support President Adams if Adams used his power for “the promotion of the comfort, the happiness, and the accommodation of the people.” He said he would not support him if he saw “every consideration of public welfare swallowed up in a continual grasp for power, in an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, or selfish avarice.”
The letter was published after the Act took effect. The Federalists made sure of that.
THE DECISION
Lyon was arrested on October 6, 1798. The warrant’s language was extravagant in its contempt: malicious, depraved, wicked, diabolical. He was a congressman, facing re-election in weeks, charged with a crime for writing an opinion.
He defended himself at trial. He had difficulty finding an attorney — his old rival was running against him in the same election — so Lyon argued his own case. He challenged the constitutionality of the Sedition Act. He called witnesses to prove that Adams actually dined in luxury, trying to show his criticism was factual rather than scandalous.
The presiding judge, Supreme Court Justice William Paterson, cut it short. He told the jury: “You have nothing whatever to do with the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of the sedition law.” The jury’s job was only to decide whether Lyon had published the words. They deliberated one hour.
They convicted him.
Paterson sentenced him to four months in jail, a $1,000 fine, and court costs of $60.96. The judge lamented that the law did not allow him to impose more.
The marshal, exercising his own editorial judgment, forced Lyon to take a circuitous route to jail — displaying the convicted congressman before townspeople along the way. It backfired. The people along the road saw a man being humiliated for words. They were not pleased.
Adams offered Lyon one exit: sign a statement of contrition. Personal penitence before pardon.
Lyon refused.
THE AFTERMATH
Vermont voters re-elected him while he sat in that cell. Fifty-one point seven percent of the vote in a three-way race. The Federalists had expected his conviction to finish him. It did the opposite.
Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe contributed to the fund to pay Lyon’s fine. Vermont Senator Stevens Mason rode through brutal winter weather collecting donations. When Lyon walked out of jail, he told the crowd waiting for him: “I am on my way to Philadelphia.” The road back to Congress became a procession. Supporters lined the towns along the route. He was not a broken man. He was evidence.
In the House, the Federalists moved to expel him. The resolution stated he had been convicted of being “a malicious and seditious person, of a depraved mind, and wicked and diabolical disposition.” The vote was 49 for expulsion, 45 against. They needed two-thirds. They fell short.
Lyon took his seat.
Two years later, the presidential election of 1800 produced a tie in the Electoral College between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. Many Federalists preferred Burr. The House voted by state delegation, 35 ballots without resolution. Vermont was deadlocked — one Federalist voted for Burr, Lyon voted for Jefferson, no result, no winner.
On the 36th ballot, enough Federalists stood aside. Lyon cast his vote again. Vermont moved into Jefferson’s column.
Jefferson won the presidency.
The man Adams had jailed for speech helped place Adams’s successor in the White House.
The Sedition Act expired in 1801. Jefferson pardoned everyone convicted under it. In 1840 — eighteen years after Lyon died — Congress formally refunded his $1,000 fine to his heirs, with interest.
THE MEANING
The Sedition Act was never ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court while it was in force. No convicted defendant succeeded in appealing. The question simply expired with the law. Then in 1964, in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, Justice William Brennan reached back across 166 years. The attack on the Sedition Act’s validity, he wrote, had “carried the day in the court of history.”
Lyon is not well remembered. He appears in footnotes about the Alien and Sedition Acts and in Vermont local history. The full dimensions of what happened — a sitting congressman jailed by the administration for political speech, returned to office by his constituents while still imprisoned — have not entered the common national memory.
They should.
Lyon was not a dignified figure. He spat at a colleague, brawled on the House floor, and named his newspaper The Scourge of Aristocracy and Repository of Important Political Truth. He was rough and contentious and difficult. These things made him easier to prosecute and easier to forget.
But the voters of Vermont in 1798 did not require their congressman to be refined. They required him to be free. When he was not, they answered the prosecution with ballots.
They understood what was being done to him before the courts did.
They got there first.
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Sources: National Archives DocsTeach, Indictment in the Case of U.S. v. Matthew Lyon (arrest warrant, indictment, bill of costs, and mittimus); Lyon’s Case, 15 F. Cas. 1183 (C.C.D. Vt. 1798); Federal Judicial Center, The Sedition Act Trials; U.S. House of Representatives History, Art & Archives; First Amendment Encyclopedia, Middle Tennessee State University (Caryn E. Neumann); Vermont Secretary of State Official Election Archive, 1798 Western District run-off results.
Next in this series: Thomas Cooper — A One-Page Broadside That Triggered the State
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About the Author: Charles C. Jett is a Naval Academy graduate (Class of ’64), Harvard MBA, executive coach, and civic educator. He is the author of six books, host of three podcast series, and the author of 800+ posts on criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com. His Cold War submarine innovations inspired Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character, recognized by Secretary of the Navy John H. Dalton. His Field Studies educational methodology was endorsed by the U.S. Department of Labor and Harvard University.
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