Report of 1800
Madison, a member of the Republican Party, was elected to the Virginia General Assembly from Orange County in 1799. At this time, most members of the General Assembly were Republicans. A major item on his agenda was the defense of the General Assembly's 1798 Virginia Resolutions, which Madison had written earlier. The Virginia Resolutions, usually discussed together with Thomas Jefferson's contemporaneous Kentucky Resolutions, were a response to various perceived outrages perpetrated by the Federalist-dominated national government. The most significant of these were the Alien and Sedition Acts, four laws that allowed the President to deport aliens at will, required a longer period of residence before aliens could become citizens, and made it a crime to publish malicious or defamatory material against the government or its officials. Republicans were outraged by the legislation, and Madison and Jefferson drafted the highly critical Resolutions adopted in response by the Virginia and Kentucky state legislatures.