Washington sent an army to squash the Whiskey Rebellion, and John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts into law. They were quite happy to go after threats to their power.
I’m not defending the sedition act, but it’s quite important that it was implemented during a quasi-war and was still barely passed. There’s also a reason that two hundred years later it’s constantly held up as a paragon of bad law and there’s no way it would pass judicial review at any point since then (it didn’t at the time either, because it expired 2 years after it was passed and before judicial review was established).