“A Vermont editor. A federal indictment. A story almost no one tells.”
This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed. Unfortunately, there is no portrait of Anthony Haswell – only a grave marker in Bennington, VT.
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Anthony Haswell was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1756, the son of a shipwright. His father brought him to Boston at thirteen, apprenticed him to a potter, and sailed back to England. The boy was alone in the colonies before he was fifteen.
He found his way to Isaiah Thomas, the radical printer who published the Massachusetts Spy. Thomas taught him typesetting, presswork, and something harder to learn — that a printing press was not a business. It was a weapon. Haswell was in Boston for the Massacre in 1770. He joined the Sons of Liberty. He composed ballads for the patriot cause and served in the Continental Army. By the time the war ended, he was a printer with ink in his blood and no particular place to go.
In 1783, Vermont’s legislature invited him to Bennington to establish the state’s printing office. He loaded a handpress, a case of type, his wife Lydia, and two infants onto an ox cart and headed north. He dug up a set of buried type in Albany — hidden there during the French and Indian War — and on June 5, 1783, published the first edition of the Vermont Gazette, the state’s first successful newspaper. Vermont also made him its Postmaster General. He promised his readers that “the freedom of the press shall be inviolably preserved.”
He meant it.
It would cost him everything.
The late 1790s were ugly. President John Adams and his Federalist Party, fearing war with France, pushed through the Alien and Sedition Acts in the summer of 1798. The Sedition Act made it a crime to publish “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government, Congress, or the president. The fine ran to five thousand dollars. The prison term ran to five years.
The intent was plain: silence the opposition press.
In all of New England, only one congressman was not a Federalist — Matthew Lyon of Vermont. Lyon had already called the Adams administration a circus of “ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice.” In October 1798, a federal court convicted him under the Sedition Act and sentenced him to four months in a freezing Vergennes jail cell. The fine was a thousand dollars. Lyon won reelection from prison by a two-to-one margin.
Haswell watched this from Bennington. He had known Lyon for years. He understood what the prosecution meant. The government was not merely punishing a congressman. It was sending a message to every editor in the republic: print opposition, and you are next.
He printed anyway.
In January 1799, Haswell published an advertisement in the Gazette for a lottery to raise money toward Lyon’s fine. The advertisement had been written and paid for by Elias Buell and Lyon’s son James — not by Haswell. But it ran in his paper, under his masthead, and it contained a sentence the government could not forgive. It described Lyon as “holden by the oppressive hand of usurped power, in a loathsome prison,” suffering under a “hard-hearted savage” — federal marshal Jabez Fitch.
Haswell also reprinted an article from the Philadelphia Aurora accusing the Adams administration of appointing Tories who had “fought against our independence.” He did not write that article, either. He reprinted it. In the eyes of federal prosecutors, republication was publication.
The carrier of the speech was as guilty as its author.
On a cold, wet morning in October 1799, two federal deputies arrived at Haswell’s door in Bennington. His daughter was gravely ill. He asked for time. They refused. They would not even tell him the charge. They rode him fifty miles through mud and rain to Rutland, arriving at one in the morning, where Marshal Fitch — the same man Haswell had called a savage — threw him into a dirty jail cell.
The indictment charged two counts of seditious libel: the lottery advertisement and the Aurora reprint. Haswell was released on two thousand dollars’ bail and ordered to stand trial the following May in Windsor — Federalist territory, where the jury pool would be stacked against him.
The trial lasted one day. Supreme Court Justice William Paterson presided — the same judge who had convicted Lyon. The jury was drawn from Federalist strongholds in Brattleboro, Putney, and Westminster. Haswell’s lawyers argued two things: he had not written the offending words, and they were true. On the truth defense, Paterson set an impossible standard. He demanded Haswell identify by name the specific Tory appointees, prove they had personally committed atrocities, and produce them in court. The Secretary of War had publicly admitted appointing former loyalists — but that was not specific enough for Paterson.
The jury deliberated briefly. Guilty on both counts. Two months in prison. Two hundred dollars in fines. John Spargo, Haswell’s biographer, later wrote that a greater travesty of justice had rarely taken place in a Vermont courtroom. Haswell had stood before a political inquisition, not a judicial tribunal.
The personal cost was staggering. His first wife, Lydia, had died in April 1799. He had remarried that September — weeks before the arrest. Three of his daughters died during this period. Others had to be adopted out. While he sat in prison, another daughter died. He was not permitted to attend the funeral.
He served most of his sentence in the Bennington jail — an ironic mercy arranged by Marshal Fitch, who allowed the transfer so Haswell could continue writing the Gazette and receive visitors. On July 9, 1800, he walked out of confinement and into a crowd of two thousand people. Bennington had delayed its Fourth of July celebration by five days so the town could mark its independence and Haswell’s liberation on the same afternoon. A cannon fired. The band played “Yankee Doodle.” Haswell marched at the head of the parade.
After Jefferson defeated Adams in the election of 1800, the Sedition Act expired, and Jefferson pardoned every person convicted under it. He called the law “a nullity, as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.” In 1844, Congress refunded Haswell’s fine to his heirs — with forty years’ interest — on the ground that the Act had been unconstitutional.
In 1964, Justice Arthur Goldberg cited Haswell’s trial in his concurring opinion in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the landmark decision that reshaped American press freedom law. The Sedition Act prosecutions, the Court declared, had been repudiated “in the court of history.” Haswell’s case mattered because it raised a question that remains live today:
When you punish the person who republishes criticism, you are not merely silencing one voice. You are severing the infrastructure of dissent.
Haswell died in Bennington on May 26, 1816, at the age of sixty. He had continued publishing the Gazette until the end. He is buried beside both his wives in the cemetery of the Old First Church. Near the Bennington Battle Monument, hidden behind a bush, stands a small granite marker erected in 1942 by the Society of Professional Journalists — the first historic site the organization ever named. The inscription reads: “Uncompromising in defense of freedom of the press.”
Lyon showed that a congressman could be jailed for speaking.
Haswell showed that even the editor who carried the words forward could be made to pay.
History remembers the congressman.
It usually forgets the printer.
This is his story.
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Sources: United States v. Haswell, Circuit Court, D. Vermont, May 5, 1800 (26 F. Cas. 218; Wharton’s State Trials 684); John Spargo, Anthony Haswell: Printer-Patriot-Ballader (Rutland, VT, 1925); Robert D. Rachlin, “The Sedition Act of 1798 and the East-West Political Divide in Vermont,” Vermont History, Vol. 78, No. 2; Geoffrey Stone, Perilous Times (2004); Anthony Haswell to Thomas Jefferson, May 10, 1801, Founders Online, National Archives.
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Next in this series: James Thomson Callender — The Trial Where the Judge Told the Jury: Law Is Not Yours.
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Charles C. Jett is an author, executive coach, and civic educator. A Naval Academy graduate, Harvard MBA, and former nuclear submarine officer, he writes about leadership, constitutional history, and the decisions that shape the people who make them. His work appears at criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com.