In 1799, a New York legislator was arrested in chains for circulating a petition against the Sedition Act. He never went to trial. The law did not survive.

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.

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There are no known portraits of Jedediah Peck. The only image that survives is his gravestone in the Peck Cemetery in Burlington, Otsego County, New York. The inscription reads: “In memory of the Hon. Jedediah Peck, a Revolutionary Patriot, who died Aug. 15th 1821, in the 74th year of his age. The annals of the State bear record of his public usefulness, and the recollection of his virtues bear testimony of his private worth.”

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He was not a publisher. He was not a lawyer. He was not, by any account, a gifted speaker. He had a nasal Yankee twang and saddlebags stuffed with political papers, and he walked the roads of Otsego County knocking on doors. What Jedediah Peck did in the spring of 1799 was simple. He carried a petition. He asked his neighbors to sign it. For that, the government of the United States put him in chains.

Peck was born in 1748 in Lyme, Connecticut, one of thirteen children. His education was limited to a country grammar school and what he could teach himself from the Bible. He went to sea as a young man and returned around 1771 to find that his parents, three brothers, and a sister had all died in his absence. The loss broke something in him and rebuilt something else. He became deeply devout, memorizing large portions of Scripture, and emerged as an unpolished but tireless lay preacher.

He served four years as an enlisted man in the Continental Army. After the Revolution, he settled in Burlington, New York, a raw settlement carved from the frontier of Otsego County. He became the town’s first supervisor. He worked as a surveyor, a millwright, a self-taught attorney, and an appointed judge. He signed his writings “the Plough-Jogger” — a farmer who walked behind his plow, wrestling it left and right around the rocks to keep a straight furrow. He was, in every sense, a man of the soil.

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The political world Peck inhabited in the late 1790s was poisonous. President John Adams and the Federalists were locked in a bitter struggle with Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans. An undeclared naval war with France had the country on edge. The Federalists feared that dissent at home would weaken the nation abroad. In July 1798, Congress passed the Sedition Act, making it a crime to publish “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the government, the president, or Congress. The vice president — Jefferson — was conspicuously exempt. The law carried an expiration date that matched the end of Adams’s term. Its purpose was not national security. Its purpose was political survival.

The Federalists used the law aggressively. Newspaper editors were arrested. Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont was convicted for criticizing Adams during his own reelection campaign, which he won from a jail cell. A total of thirty-two people were charged. Thirteen were convicted. The right to speak, to publish, to criticize — all came with a price tag.

But Jedediah Peck was not an editor. He was not a publisher. He was a sitting legislator who had been elected as a Federalist — and then broke with his own party over the very law that would be used against him.

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In April 1799, Peck began circulating a petition addressed to the House and Senate. It called for the repeal of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The petition was blunt. It described the Alien Act as cruel, unjust, and unconstitutional. It called the Sedition Act wicked enough to convert freemen into slaves. Witnesses later described him carrying a six-inch stack of handbills, moving door to door, telling his neighbors that Congress was threatening the liberties of the United States.

The petition was not editorial opinion. It was not a newspaper broadside. It was a direct exercise of the right guaranteed by the First Amendment — the right of the people to petition the government for a redress of grievances. That right traced back to the Magna Carta. It had been codified in the English Bill of Rights of 1689. It was written into the American Constitution less than a decade before Peck began walking the roads of Otsego County with his stack of papers.

Judge William Cooper did not see it that way. Cooper was the founder of Cooperstown, the most powerful Federalist in the county, a sitting congressman, and the father of the boy who would grow up to become the novelist James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper had once supported Peck. He had backed Peck’s appointment as a local judge. But the two men embodied competing visions of American politics. Cooper governed as a patriarch — the father of his county. Peck served as a democrat — a servant of the people. That collision was now inevitable.

Cooper had Peck arrested by a United States Marshal under the Sedition Act. The indictment described Peck as a “wicked, seditious, and ill-disposed person” who intended to defame the government and excite hatred among the people. The charge was seditious libel. The evidence was a petition.

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On a September night in 1799, a federal marshal came for Peck at his home in Burlington. He was shackled — irons on his wrists and ankles — and marched overland toward New York City for trial. He faced two years in prison and a two-thousand-dollar fine.

The journey took five days. And the Federalists discovered that they had made a catastrophic mistake.

The spectacle of a Revolutionary War veteran — small, aging, humble — being dragged in chains across the New York countryside for the crime of carrying a petition did more for the opposition than any newspaper editorial or stump speech could have accomplished. People came out to watch him pass. Protests erupted along the route. The image was devastating: a citizen in irons for asking his government to change a law.

A contemporary observer noted that a hundred missionaries stationed between Cooperstown and New York City could not have accomplished as much for the republican cause as the prisoner’s march from Otsego to the capital.

Peck never went to trial. The government, recognizing the scale of its miscalculation, dropped the case. The Sedition Act expired in 1801. Jefferson pardoned everyone who had been convicted under it.

Far from destroying Peck, the arrest made him. He was reelected to the New York State Assembly and later served in the State Senate. He sponsored legislation to abolish debtors’ prison. He introduced an amendment — a forerunner to the Twelfth Amendment — to separate the votes for president and vice president. He championed common schools in bill after bill, failing in 1800, 1803, and 1804. In 1811, after his retirement, Governor Daniel Tompkins appointed him to chair a commission on public education. The result was the Public Education Act of 1812, which divided New York’s townships into school districts, established public funding based on population, and required local governments to match state money. It became the foundation of the state’s public school system. Peck is remembered — when he is remembered at all — as the father of the common school system of New York.

At nearly sixty-five, he volunteered for the War of 1812 and appeared at the Battle of Queenston Heights in a cocked hat with a long sword and a broad white belt, preaching and praying to rally reluctant militia. A year and a half before he died, the seventy-two-year-old Plough-Jogger wrote to his friend Martin Van Buren to ask about the health of the state education fund.

He died on August 15, 1821. He was seventy-three years old.

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The right to petition is the most elemental mechanism in a republic. It does not require a printing press or a law degree or a seat in Congress. It requires only a citizen, a piece of paper, and the willingness to walk next door and ask a neighbor to sign. Jedediah Peck understood this. He understood it well enough to bet his freedom on it.

The government did not deny that he had petitioned. It criminalized what the petition said. That distinction — between the act and the content — is the fault line that runs beneath every free society. When a government decides that the words on a petition are too dangerous to circulate, it has declared that the right itself is conditional. And a conditional right is no right at all.

Peck knew something else, too. He knew that a republic that does not educate its citizens will not remain a republic for long. He spent more years fighting for common schools than he ever spent fighting the Sedition Act. Both battles were the same battle. Both were about whether ordinary people could be trusted to govern themselves.

His gravestone in the Peck Cemetery in Burlington carries an inscription that reads, in part: “The annals of the State bear record of his public usefulness.” It does not mention the petition. It does not mention the chains. It does not need to.

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Sources: National Archives, indictment in United States v. Jedediah Peck (DocsTeach); James Morton Smith, “The Sedition Law of 1798 and the Right of Petition,” New York History (1954); Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (1995); Throop Wilder, “Jedidiah Peck: Statesman, Soldier, Preacher,” New York History (1941); National Archives Education Blog, “A Seditious Petition” (2019).

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Next in this series: Anthony Haswell — The Editor Who Learned Criticism Had a Price Tag.

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About the Author

Charles C. Jett is a Naval Academy graduate, former nuclear submarine officer, Harvard MBA, and certified executive search specialist. He is the author of six books and more than 800 articles on leadership, civic education, and decision-making. He writes at criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com.