<P> In response to the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts--advanced by the Federalist Party--John Taylor of the Virginia House of Delegates spoke out, urging Virginia to secede from the United States . He argued--as one of many vociferous responses by the Jeffersonian Republicans--the sense of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, adopted in 1798 and 1799, which reserved to those States the rights of secession and interposition (nullification). </P> <P> Thomas Jefferson, while sitting as Vice President of the United States in 1799, wrote to James Madison of his conviction in "a reservation of th (ose) rights resulting to us from these palpable violations (the Alien and Sedition Acts)" and, if the federal government did not return to </P> <P> "the true principles of our federal compact", (he was determined to) "sever ourselves from that union we so much value, rather than give up the rights of self government which we have reserved, and in which alone we see liberty, safety and happiness ." (emphasis added) </P> <P> Here Jefferson is arguing in a radical voice (and in a private letter) that he would lead a movement for secession; but it is unclear whether he is arguing for "secession at will" or for "revolution" on account of "intolerable oppression" (see above), or neither . Either way, some historians conclude that his language and acts were broaching the legal edges of treason . Jefferson secretly wrote (one of) the Kentucky Resolutions, which was done--again--while he was holding the office of Vice President . His biographer Dumas Malone argued that, had his actions become known at the time, Jefferson's participation might have gotten him impeached for (charged with) treason . In writing the first Kentucky Resolution, Jefferson warned that, "unless arrested at the threshold," the Alien and Sedition Acts would "necessarily drive these states into revolution and blood". Historian Ron Chernow says of this "he wasn't calling for peaceful protests or civil disobedience: he was calling for outright rebellion, if needed, against the federal government of which he was vice president ." Jefferson "thus set forth a radical doctrine of states' rights that effectively undermined the constitution". </P>

How did individual states secede from the union in 1861