Still, the Sedition Act did not succeed in quelling dissent. In the two and a half years it was in force, the number of Republican newspapers more than doubled.123 Before his untimely death in September 1798, Benjamin Franklin Bache wrote defiantly that his prosecution for seditious libel had only boosted his sales.124 And the Federalists were utterly trounced in the elections of 1800, losing the presidency—with Jefferson defeating Adams—and both houses of Congress to their Democratic-Republican opponents, not least because of popular backlash against the heavy-handed methods of the Sedition
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