Portuguese Colonies in Africa

Portuguese Colonies in Africa

Before the 1880s most African societies were independent of European rule. With particular reference to Africa south of the Sahara, colonial rule was confined to coastal patches and the Cape region, the latter being home to Anglo-Boer political rivalry.

As regards the Portuguese, their colonial interest was restricted to their colonies of Angola, Mozambique, and the tiny area of Portuguese Guinea. Interestingly, Portuguese rule in these areas was not strong. The reason was that trade, not political administration, dominated the purpose of their encounter with Africans during this period.

It was because of this that no major political responsibility was taken by Portugal, unlike the other European powers, with regard to colonies in Africa, creating the unique nature of Portuguese enterprise or activities in Africa between 1750 and 1900.


The establishment of colonies and colonial rule, as well as the strategies employed by the Portuguese to keep their holdings in Africa, have an interesting history, despite their dwindling fortunes during this period, occasioned by economic, political, and strategic factors.

Portuguese Enterprise

Between 1750 and 1900 the Portuguese did not achieve much as far as their attempt to establish colonial rule in Africa was concerned. But if colonialism is taken to mean the occupation and control of one nation by another, then some of the attempts made by Portugal to establish political control over some parts of Africa can be highlighted as examples.

It is important to stress that the driving force behind Portuguese enterprise in Africa, and elsewhere in the world, was trade and economic exploitation of their colonies, and it is this more than anything that drove Portuguese desire for political control of these areas.

Indeed, Portugal, like many of the other colonial powers, had always treated its colonies like private estates of the motherland, where resources had to be repatriated for the development of the latter.

No real political administration and structure were put in place in the colonies. In the case of East Africa, the area was more or less a stopping place for the Portuguese on their way to Asia. The chief result of their rule in this region was that it contributed greatly to crippling the old Arab settlements that were once the pride of the East African coast.

Portugal viewed its East African possessions with mixed feelings. While the area did not give them the wealth they had expected, they nevertheless wanted to contain Arab influence in the area and deal directly with the indigenous Africans. It was for this that the Portuguese attacked communities in the area and established a presence in Mombasa, Sofala, Kilwa, Mozambique, and Pemba.

There were many obstacles as far as its East African project was concerned. First, many of the Portuguese settlers in East Africa died from tropical diseases. Many others were killed in the continual fighting on the coast.

Second, due in large part to disease and fighting, Portugal never had a population large enough to carry out its colonial plans in East Africa. Most of its personnel were kept busy in Brazil and their empire in the Indian Ocean.

Third, competition from the British and the Dutch East India Company helped to weaken the Portuguese hold on the eastern shores of the Indian Ocean.

Then there were numerous revolts from the Arab leaders of the region. For instance, in 1698 Sultan bin Seif, the sultan of Oman, and his son, Imam Seif bin Sultan, captured Fort Jesus, which had been the military and strategic base of Portuguese holdings in East Africa.

Indeed, in 1699 the Portuguese were driven out of Kilwa and Pemba, thus marking the end of Portuguese colonial interest in East Africa north of Mozambique. Earlier in 1622 a revolt against the Portuguese led by a former Portuguese mission pupil, Sultan Yusuf, helped to prepare the disintegration of Portuguese military strength in Mombasa.

Consequent upon these issues, Portuguese holdings in East Africa were far from a successful colonial rule. By 1750 Portuguese interests in East Africa were replaced by a new socio-political order led by the leaders of Oman.

African Interior

In the interior of Africa, the Portuguese did not achieve anything substantial as far as colonial rule was concerned. The Mwenemutapa (known to the Portuguese as Monomotapa) did not provide fertile soil for the establishment of Portuguese colonization.

The Portuguese, for their part, were more interested in what they would get instead of what they would give. Besides, the area was already experiencing decline owing to the emergence of several dynasties in the region. This situation was not helped by contact with the Portuguese.

Elsewhere, in Guinea there was Portuguese influence, but it was not enough to be described as colonial rule. By 1750 Portuguese colonies in Africa were limited to Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea, but colonial rule was more pronounced in the first two colonies. The Portuguese also held important islands in the Atlantic off the coast of Africa.

During this period Portuguese colonies, especially Angola, remained the supply base for the Brazilian slave trade. The Portuguese sought to create a highly polished elite conditioned by their culture. This aspiration did not materialize.

Indeed, the Angolan colony, which was an example of Portuguese colonial interest in Africa, was a mere shambles, in which the criminal classes of Portugal were busy milking the people for their own benefit. To this end, Angola, like Mozambique, could be described as a trading preserve from which the interior could be reached.

Web of Misery

Politically, Portuguese colonies lacked effective administration. The historian Richard Hammond has painted the picture in a sympathetic way when he argued that Portugal could not effectively control its colonies.

He was merely echoing the voice of a Portuguese official, Oliveira Martins, who wrote that Portuguese colonies were a web of misery and disgrace and that the colonies, with the exception of Angola, be leased to those “who can do what we most decidedly cannot.”

The reason why Portuguese colonies were so painted is not hard to understand. A. F. Nogueira, a Portuguese official, said, “Our colonies oblige us to incur expenses we cannot afford: For us to conserve, out of mere ostentation, mere display, mere prejudice ... colonies that serve no useful purpose and will always bring us into discredit, is the height of absurdity and barbarity besides.”

In 1895 the minister of marine and colonies, the naval officer Ferreira de Almeida, argued in favor of selling some of the colonies and using the proceeds to develop those colonies that would be retained.

It is obvious from the issues Portugal contended with in Africa that the intent was to have a large space on the map of the world, but that Portugal was never ready to administer them practically.

This notwithstanding, it is safe to say that the Portuguese implemented the policy of assimilation in governing their colonies. The aim was to make Africans in the colonies citizens of Portugal.

Those who passed through the process of assimilation were called assimilados. It is important to note that the number of assimilados ceased to grow after the unsuccessful effort of the liberal Bandeira government to make all Africans citizens of Portugal.

It is not clear whether the Portuguese were sincere in their efforts to assimilate Africans in their colonies. It appears that the policy was a mere proclamation that did not have the necessary political backing.

Indeed, the idea of equality was a farce. The government did not provide the necessary infrastructure such as schools, finances, or other social institutions upon which such equality, demanded by true assimilation, could be built.

The process of education in Portuguese territories in Africa was far from satisfactory. The aim of Portuguese education was essentially to create an African elite that would reason in the way of the Portuguese. However, the Portuguese officials were not committed to the cause of educating Africans at the expense of Portugal.

Consequently, most schools were controlled by the Catholic Church, as a reflection of the relationship between church and state. This meant that the state was dodging its responsibility to provide education for the people of its African colonies.

Historian Walter Rodney has criticized the type of education in Portuguese colonies in Africa. He believed that the schools were nothing but agencies for the spread of the Portuguese language.

He argued further that “at the end of 500 years of shouldering the white man’s burden of civilizing ‘African Natives,’ the Portuguese had not managed to train a single African doctor in Mozambique, and the life expectancy in eastern Angola was less than 30 years ... As for Guinea-Bissau, some insight into the situation there is provided by the admission of the Portuguese themselves that Guinea-Bissau was more neglected than Angola and Mozambique.”

Later in the 20th century, the Portuguese encouraged state financing of education in the colonies and ensured that a few handpicked Africans were allowed to study in Portugal. Sometimes, provisions were made for the employment of such assimilados in the colonial administration. This development notwithstanding, Portuguese colonies in Africa did a poor job in education.

Slave Trade

Another important aspect of Portuguese colonial rule in Africa is its attitude toward labor and the recruitment of it. For a long time the slave trade provided an avenue for the recruitment of labor in Portuguese territories. However, in 1836, slave trafficking was abolished in Portugal’s colonies, although it continued in practice under the name of contract labor.

Under this new practice, every year the Portuguese shipped thousands of people from Angola to coffee and cocoa plantations on the island of São Tomé as forced laborers. Mozambique also offered an avenue for migration of labor to work in mines in British-controlled Rhodesia.

Sometimes, the migrants were happier working in the mines than being forced to work at home. All the same, the Portuguese controlled the recruitment of this labor to Rhodesia, taking revenue from each worker that they allowed to leave. This was another way to generate revenue.

The historian Basil Davidson has commented that a distinguishing feature of Portuguese colonies was the presence of large systems of forced labor put in place to exploit and oppress the indigenous people. There were reasons for this development.

First, in the case of Angola, the increasing prosperity of the cocoa industry and the attendant increase in the demand for labor made forced labor a desirable alternative.

Second, toward the end of the 18th century, the supply of labor was affected by the spread of sleeping sickness in the interior. Consequently, the Portuguese had to rely on forced labor for its supply.

The colonies were subjected to a great deal of economic exploitation. From the start, Portuguese enterprises in Africa were dictated by the desire to procure slaves. Indeed, slaves constituted almost the sole export of the colonies.

This continued up to the end of the 19th century. In Angola, the Portuguese established their rule of ruthless exploitation for the purpose of procuring large numbers of slaves for the Brazilian market.

The exploitation of Angola for slaves came to be known as the era of the pombeiros. The pombeiros, half-caste Portuguese, were notorious for their activities, which consisted of stirring up local conflicts in order to capture slaves for sale at the coast. The pombeiros were the masters of the interior whom the slave dealers relied on for procurement.

Intellectual Reaction

In 1901 a decree was issued by the government in Lisbon to put a stop to recruitment of labor by violent means. In Luanda, some pamphlets were published to denounce the practice of forced labor. This was an intellectual reaction to the phenomenon of forced labor. In practical terms, it did not have any substantial effect on the practice.

There was a violent reaction to the phenomenon of forced labor, starting with the Bailundo Revolt of 1902. In 1903 fresh regulations were issued to tackle the issue of forced labor, but they achieved little or no success.

Portugal’s objection to forced labor was not born out of their concern for Africans, but such a stance was taken whenever the authority felt that certain individuals were gaining too much local power. Indeed, the official view, embodied in a law of 1899, was that forced labor was an essential part of the civilizing process, provided it was done decently and in order.

The Portuguese attitude to race was one of superiority on their part and inferiority on the part of Africans. No colonial power was entirely free from racial prejudice.

Segregation, whether pronounced or not, was often used as a means of preserving the racial purity of European settlers in Africa. In the case of the Portuguese, the authority was interested in ensuring the racial purity of Portuguese agrarian settlers in Angola.

However, the conditions in the colonies did not favor or encourage Europeans to settle in large numbers. Consequently, white populations could be maintained only by settling convicts and by miscegenation.

Because of this, racial mixing in Portuguese colonies was accepted—it was necessary to maintain the population. Portugal’s colonial history provides a particularly illuminating case of Europe’s impact on the racial and ethnic character of Africa as far as racial-demographic engineering was concerned.

No substantial infrastructure development can be ascribed to Portuguese colonial enterprise in Africa. Even though the Portuguese treated their colonies as the “private estate of the motherland,” no major policies and programs were put in place to address infrastructural development. For instance, even though Angola produced excellent cotton, none of it was actually processed in Angola.

Additionally, communication was poor. The Portuguese settlements were isolated from one another. For instance, when Lourenzo Marques was engulfed in crises in 1842 and the governor was killed in a raid organized by the indigenous people, it took the authorities in Mozambique a year to hear of the happening by way of Rio de Janeiro. But Portugal was lucky to benefit from development initiated by other countries.

In 1879 the Eastern Telegraph Company’s cable, en route to Cape Town, established “anchor points” in Mozambique and Lourenzo Marques. In 1886 the telegraph line reached Luanda en route to the Cape. This provided the first major link between Portugal and its overseas colonies.

Furthermore, in 1880 Portugal and the Transvaal concluded a revised version of their existing territorial treaty of 1869, in which they agreed to build a railroad from Lourenzo Marques to Pretoria.

British control of the Transvaal stalled the progress of the work. Portugal on its own did not make efforts to connect its colonies in Africa in a manner that would make sense with regard to Africa’s needs and development.

Lastly, bureaucracy was not effective as far as Portuguese colonial rule in Africa was concerned. There was no regular cadre of trained civilian recruits on which to draw. The effect of this was that there was an almost complete absence of the routine competence that a good administration needs. This affected the coordination of Portuguese colonial activities in Africa.

Conclusion

Between 1750 and 1900 the Portuguese presence in Africa was one of economic exploitation much more than actual colonial rule. In fact, the Portuguese had no major administrative systems in place in their African colonies.

Instead, the primary motive for the creation of the colonies was economic, initially the slave trade and later other lucrative commodities. The Portuguese colonies lacked basic infrastructure and lagged behind European colonies in Africa.

Treaties of Aigun and Beijing

Treaties of Aigun

The Russian Empire made important gains at the expense of China between 1858–60. The Qing (Ch’ing) dynasty’s easy defeat by Great Britain in the first Anglo-Chinese Opium War had made its glaring weakness apparent to the world. Russian leaders, including Czar Nicholas I, feared British dominance in East Asia and resolved to expand into Chinese territory first.

In 1847 Nicholas appointed Nikolai Muraviev, an energetic proponent of Russian imperialism, governor of Eastern Siberia. Muraviev built up a large Russian force that included Cossack units, a naval squadron in the Far East, and set up forts and settlements along the Amur River valley in areas that the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) between Russia and China had recognized as Chinese territory.

The small and ill-equipped Chinese frontier garrison in the region was no match for the Russians when Muraviev demanded in May 1858 that China recognize Russian sovereignty on the land north of the Amur riverbank.


With more than 20,000 troops and naval support, he was able to force the Chinese representative to agree to the Treaty of Aigun, named after the frontier town where the meeting took place.

Under its terms, China ceded to Russia 185,000 square miles of land from the left bank of the Amur River down to the Ussuri River and agreed that the territory between the Ussuri and the Pacific Ocean would be held in common pending a future settlement.

The Chinese government was furious with the terms and refused to ratify the treaty but was helpless because of the ongoing Taiping Rebellion and others and a war with Great Britain and France, known as the Second Anglo-Chinese Opium War.

Events played into Russian hands in 1860, because resumed warfare between China and Britain and France had led to the capture of capital city Beijing (Peking) by British and French forces.

The incompetent Qing emperor Xianfeng (Hsien-feng) and his court fled to Rehe (Jehol) Province to the north and left his younger brother Prince Gong (Kung) in charge. Russia was represented in Beijing at this juncture by the wily ambassador Nikolai Ignatiev, who had recently arrived to secure Chinese ratification of the Treaty of Aigun.

Ignatiev offered to mediate between the two opposing sides; by deception, maneuvering, and ingratiating himself to both parties he scored a great victory for Russia in the supplementary Treaty of Beijing in November 1860.

It affirmed Russian gains under the Treaty of Aigun and secured exclusive Russian ownership of land east of the Ussuri River to the Pacific Ocean to Korea’s border, an additional 133,000 square miles, including the port Vladivostok (meaning “ruler of the East” in Russian).

In addition Russia received the same extraterritorial rights and the right to trade in the ports that Britain and France had won by war. China also opened two additional cities for trade with Russia located in Mongolia and Xinjiang (Sinkiang) along land routes.

Through astute diplomacy and by taking advantage of the weak and declining Qing dynasty Russia was able to score huge territorial gains from China without firing a shot between 1858 and 1860.

Alaska Purchase

Alaska Purchase

Alaska was purchased by the United States from czarist Russia in 1867. It had been occupied by Russia since the 18th century and exploited by Russian fur and fishing interests. However, by the 1860s the region was viewed by the Russian government as a strategic liability and an economic burden.

Suspicious of British intentions in the Pacific, and concerned with consolidating its position in eastern Siberia, the Russian government offered to sell Alaska to the United States.

Baron Edouard de Stoeckl, Russia’s minister to the United States, entered into negotiations with President Andrew Johnson’s secretary of state, William H. Seward, in March 1867.

Seward was a zealous expansionist. Throughout his tenure as secretary of state, which had begun during the administration of Abraham Lincoln, Seward was avid in his desire to advance American security and extend American power to the Caribbean and to the Pacific.


The American Civil War and the lack of political and public support for expansion in the war’s aftermath stymied his desires. He did succeed, however, in acquiring Midway Island in the Pacific and in gaining transit rights for American citizens across Nicaragua.

Seward and Stoeckl drafted a treaty that agreed upon a price of $7,200,000 for Alaska. For approximately two cents an acre, Seward had obtained an area of nearly 600,000 square miles. However, he encountered difficulty in obtaining congressional approval for the transaction.

Senator Charles Sumner overcame his initial opposition and sided with Seward. He gave a persuasive chauvinistic three-hour speech on the Senate floor that utilized expansionist themes familiar to many 19th-century Americans.

He spoke of Alaska’s value for future commercial expansion in the Pacific, cited its annexation as one more step in the occupation of all of North America by the United States, and associated its acquisition with the spread of American republicanism.

The Senate ratified the treaty in April 1867. Despite the formal transfer of Alaska in October of that year, the House, in the midst of impeachment proceedings against Johnson, refused to appropriate the money required by the treaty. It was not until July 1868 that the appropriation was finally approved.

The purchase was repeatedly ridiculed. Alaska was referred to as a frozen wilderness, “Seward’s Ice Box,” and “Seward’s Folly.” The subsequent discovery of gold in 1898 brought about a new appreciation for the area’s intrinsic value.

Alaska’s rich fishing grounds, its vital location during World War II, the discovery of oil and natural gas fields, and the recognition of its natural beauty as a source for tourism have allayed further criticism of its purchase. Its increasing population qualified it to become the 49th state in 1959.

Alexander I

Alexander I of Russia

Alexander I was the czar of Russia from 1801 to 1825, a rule during which he not only instituted widespread reforms but later reversed many of them. As a child, he was raised by his grandmother Catherine the Great in a liberal and intellectual environment.

She died when he was a teenager in 1796, and his father died five years later, most likely with Alexander’s complicity as part of a conspiracy to put him on the throne.

Alexander was deeply committed to reform and sought to bring Russia up to speed with the rest of Enlightenment-era Europe. Attempts at drawing up a constitution that could find support failed, and his early legal code was never adopted.


In many cases, Alexander called for reform and micromanaged its adoption, making it impossible for the reform to take place. Other reforms were simply poorly conceived, lacked a practical transition from the status quo, or were unimplementable in light of the existing bureaucracy.

His European contemporaries saw him as enigmatic and inconsistent. When Russia acquired Poland, Alexander approved their constitution, which provided many of the same things he wanted for his own country.

Reform efforts dwindled in 1810 because of the Napoleonic wars that consumed Europe. Alexander was intimidated by Napoleon I, and perhaps by the scale of the wars themselves.

He believed that at stake in the wars in Europe were the rights of humanity and the fate of nations and that only a confederation of European states devoted to the preservation of peace could prevent the dangers of dictators and world conquerors. Napoleon claimed Russia had nothing to fear from France and that the distance between the two nations made them allies.

Any ambitions this may have stirred in Alexander were crushed by the summer of 1812, when Napoleon invaded Russia. The results startled everyone; in preparation for the invasion of Moscow, Alexander ordered the city evacuated and burned.

Anything that could help the invading French army was destroyed. More than three-quarters of the city was lost. Napoleon began his long retreat, and by the end of the campaign, the French forces of nearly 700,000 had been reduced to less than 25,000.

It was a turning point for both men: Napoleon would ultimately lose, and Alexander would ultimately abandon his quests for reform. He initiated few new programs, failed to see older programs through, and by the end of his reign had reversed many of his early reforms rather than repair them.

Alexander died of sudden illness in 1825, on a voyage in the south. The circumstances of his death inspired rumors claiming that he had been poisoned or he hadn’t died at all and had buried a soldier in his place.

Algeria under French Rule

French troops in Algeria

France first occupied Algeria in 1830. During the Napoleonic era, France had bought Algerian wheat on credit. After the fall of Napoleon I Bonaparte, the newly reestablished French monarchy refused to pay these debts. The dey of Algiers, Husain, sought payment, and during a quarrel with the French consul Duval he allegedly hit the consul in the face with his flyswatter.

Duval reported the insult to Paris, and the French government sought revenge. King Charles X, who wanted to gain new markets and raw materials and deflect attention from an unstable domestic political situation, used the supposed insult as an excuse to attack Algeria.

As a result, a French fleet with over 30,000 men landed in Algiers in the summer of 1830 and Dey Husain was forced to sign an act of capitulation by General de Bourmont. The French pledged to maintain Islam and the customs of the people but also confiscated booty worth over 50 million francs.


The French government then debated what to do with the territory. France could keep the dey in power, destroy the forts, and leave or install an Arab prince to rule. The government also debated supporting the return of Ottoman rule, putting the Knights of Malta in power, inviting other European powers to establish some form of joint rule, or keeping the territory as part of the French empire.

By 1834 the French had decided on a policy of conquest and annexation of the Algerian territory. A French governor-general was appointed, and all Ottoman Turks were out of Algeria by 1837. The French government held that there was no such thing as an Algerian nation and that Algeria was to become an integral part of France.

Although assimilation of the predominantly Muslim and Arabic-speaking Algerian population into French society was ostensibly the policy of successive French regimes, the overwhelming majority of Algerians were never accepted as equals. Algeria became a French department, and the French educational system, with French as the primary language, was instituted.

In 1865 the French government under Napoleon III declared that Algerian Muslims and Jews could join the French military and civil service but could only become French citizens if they gave up their religious laws.

The overwhelming majority of the Muslim population refused to do so, and Algerian Muslims gradually became thirdclass citizens in their own country, behind the mainland French and the colons, or French settlers. In 1870 Algerian Jews were granted French citizenship.

Through most of the 19th century, the Algerians fought against the French occupation. Led by Emir Abdul Kader, the Algerians were initially successful in their hit-and-run attacks against the French.

Emir Abdul Kader

To gain the offensive, General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud created mobile columns to attack the Algerian fighters deep inside Algerian territory. With their superior armaments, the French put Abdul Kader’s forces on the defensive, and Abdul Kader was forced to surrender in 1847, after which he was sent into exile.

In 1870 another revolt led by Mokrani broke out in the Kabyle, the mountainous district of northeastern Algeria. A woman named Lalla Fatima also championed the fighters in the Kabyle, but by 1872 the French had crushed the revolt.

In retaliation, the French expropriated more than 6.25 million acres of land. Much of the expropriated land was given to French settlers coming from the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine that the French had lost to the Germans as a result of the Franco-Prussian War from 1870 to 1871.

These punitive land expropriations made most Algerians tenant farmers and led to further impoverishment of the indigenous population. By the end of the 19th century there were approximately 200,000 French colons living in Algeria.

Indigenous Algerians were forced to pay special taxes, and limitations were placed on the numbers of Algerian children who could attend French schools. In addition, the French judicial system was implemented.

In reaction to the growing social and political chasm between the colons and the indigenous population, a few Muslim leaders in the cities of Tlemcen and Bone sent a note to the government in 1900 asking for the right to vote.

Called the Young Algerians (Jeunes Algériens), these modernizers sought to narrow the gap between the two societies and had much in common with reformers in other parts of the Arab world. Although some liberals in mainland France supported reforms, the colons remained firmly opposed to any legislation that would lessen their favored positions.

U.S. Alien and Sedition Acts

U.S. Alien and Sedition Acts

In 1798 four federal laws restricting U.S. citizenship and severely curtailing the freedoms of speech, press, and assembly were adopted by a Federalist Party–dominated Congress and signed by President John Adams.

Sparked by mounting tensions between the United States and its former ally, France, these laws purported to be essential to the young nation’s security. In fact, they were mainly used to silence domestic critics as intense partisanship emerged.

War certainly seemed a strong possibility as the French seized U.S. ships and sailors, schemed to regain control of Spanish Louisiana, and blatantly demanded bribes in return for diplomatic recognition. As Americans expressed patriotic outrage, those who still viewed France as a key ally and hailed the French Revolution were painted as traitors.


Chief among these was Democratic-Republican leader Thomas Jefferson, who was both Adams’s vice president and chief political rival. As these laws were implemented by his Federalist foes, Jefferson would call the years 1798 to 1801 “the reign of witches.”

A new naturalization statute and two alien laws created major barriers to what had been an extremely liberal U.S. policy of welcoming and extending citizenship benefits to foreigners. Emerging nativist suspicions focused on French “Jacobins” and the supposedly “wild” Irish. The Alien Acts gave the president broad powers to have noncitizens arrested or deported in both peaceand wartime.

Anticipating deportation, French visitors chartered 15 ships to return to Europe. Soon after, Adams would personally prevent French scientist Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, whose son would later found a major American chemical company, from setting foot in the United States.

The effects of the Sedition Act would prove even more significant, posing a clear challenge to the First Amendment of the Constitution, adopted just eight years earlier. Zealously enforced by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, this act forbade utterances that might bring the president or Congress “into contempt or disrepute.”

It produced 17 known indictments, focusing on Republican newspaper publishers. One of these was Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the Philadelphia Aurora and grandson of Benjamin Franklin. Despite violent attacks on his home and person, Bache continued to publish until he died of yellow fever a month before his scheduled trial.

Politicians, too, were targeted. Matthew Lyon, an Irish immigrant and Vermont congressman who was one of very few non-Federalist politicians in New England, was convicted for calling the Sedition Law unconstitutional. Conducting his reelection campaign from jail, Lyon won easily and was freed when supporters paid his $1,000 fine.

Federalist Jedidiah Peck, a New York assemblyman, was dumped by his party and arrested for petitioning to repeal the Alien and Sedition Acts. He was also handily reelected, as a Republican.

Opponents got no help from the Supreme Court, where ardently Federalist Associate Justice Samuel Chase personally prosecuted several sedition trials. The predominantly Republican states of Kentucky and Virginia passed resolutions condemning the laws.

It took Jefferson’s narrow victory in the bitter presidential campaign of 1800 to assure that the acts, already set to expire in March 1801, did not continue. Jefferson also pardoned those still jailed for sedition. Years later, Charles Francis Adams, diplomat grandson of John Adams, would call the Sedition Act the fatal error that ultimately doomed the Federalist Party to oblivion after the War of 1812.

Aligarh College and Movement

Aligarh College, now Aligarh Muslim University, was the first institution of higher learning for Muslims in British India. Many prominent Muslim leaders and scholars have studied at Aligarh, and it served to provide an important focus for the development of Muslim unity and political awareness, particularly during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The college has its roots in the belief of Sayyid Ahmad Khan that there was no conflict between education in modern empirical science and belief in the Qur’an. Khan desired to educate young Muslims in English, modern science, and the principles of Western government so they could take a leading role in the contemporary world.

He was particularly interested in enabling them to compete with Hindus and other religious and ethnic groups for positions of power in British-ruled India. In order to prepare Indian Muslims to accept Western education, Khan first created the Scientific Society of Aligarh in 1864, which translated Western scientific, historical, and philosophical works into Indian languages.

Khan visited England in 1870, and his inspiration for Aligarh College was the universities at Oxford and Cambridge. He founded what was then known as the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh in 1875; it offered a Western curriculum similar to that of an English public (private) school, and the first principal, Theodore Beck, was British.

Aligarh College became the leading center for the education of modern Muslim leadership in India and helped to create an educated Muslim elite that held many political positions and were catalysts for change within the British system.

The college was particularly important in providing practical experience in politics through campus debating societies and student elections and in encouraging the formation of a collective and unified identity by the Indian Muslim community.

Aligarh College became a full-fledged university in 1920 and was renamed Aligarh Muslim University. The university is located in the city of Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, in northern India. It currently has about 30,000 students representing many religious and ethnic backgrounds and offers instruction in 80 fields of study, including law, medicine, and engineering.