Anthony Haswell

Anthony Haswell (6 April 1756 – 26 May 1816) was an English immigrant to New England, where he became a newspaper, almanac, and book publisher, the Postmaster General of Vermont and one of the Jeffersonian printers imprisoned under the Sedition Act of 1798.

Immigration and revolution Anthony Haswell was born in or near Portsmouth, England, on 6 April 1756, the second son of shipwright William Haswell and his first wife Elizabeth Dawes. The father had been employed at the royal dockyard, but in 1769 resigned his position with the intention of emigrating. He took Anthony and his brother William with him to Boston and likely immediately apprenticed Anthony with a potter while young William trained as a shipwright under his father. Within a year, the father decided to return to England, apprenticing William to a Boston shipwright.

It is not known when, or under what circumstances, Haswell's first apprenticeship came to a premature end but in August 1771 he was apprenticed by Boston's Overseers of the Poor until the age of 21 to printer Isaiah Thomas, During Thomas's own service, the paper was leased, and from August 1777 to June 1778, Haswell published it under the banner of Haswell's Massachusetts Spy. He would initiate a plan to buy the press from Thomas, but skyrocketing labor costs, problems acquiring material, and difficulties receiving timely payment from subscribers would force him to return the paper to Thomas, who then rehired Haswell as his assistant. He alternated with a Windsor colleague as official government printer. In Bennington, he and David Russell founded the Vermont Gazette, which Haswell published with several breaks until the time of his death. The pair built the state's first paper mill. An attempt at a monthly magazine also failed.

Sedition As the politics of the early Republic developed, Haswell fell into the camp of Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party, becoming one of the leading printers of the movement. As such, he was targeted under the Sedition Act of 1798. Specifically, following the arrest of Congressman Matthew Lyon, Haswell published an advertisement for a lottery intended to raise the fine levied against Lyon, decrying the "oppressive hand of usurped power" from a "hard-hearted savage." Haswell also republished a claim made in Benjamin Franklin Bache's Philadelphia Aurora that the government had employed Tories. Though in neither case was the offending text of his own composition, his long-standing Jeffersonian partisanship marked him for prosecution. As a result, he was arrested, taken from his house in the middle of the night by Federalist marshal Jabez Fitch (the same "oppressive hand" Haswell had condemned) and immediately taken by horse to a jail in Rutland, some 50 miles away, to await adjudication.

The Haswell case has since been frequently mentioned in studies relating to freedom of the press, specifically with regard to the responsibilities of those who publish or repeat the words of others. It was cited by Justice Goldberg in his concurring opinion to the Supreme Court's New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision. Haswell's release was heralded by the residents of Bennington who, it is said, had delayed the Fourth of July celebration several days so that it would coincide with Haswell's liberation.

Subsequent life Haswell's arrest occurred during a period of crisis for himself and his family. His first wife, Lydia, had died the year before, in April 1799, and Anthony had remarried in September to Betsy Rice, adopting her two children. However, the death of their mother, along with his legal and financial problems led to his daughters by Lydia having been adopted out, and three died during this period. He indicated that, in spite of some community support, personal and family illness as well as the effects of his imprisonment left him unable to pay for new type, and he was considering abandoning printing in favor of becoming a farmer, although his concept of farming was more akin to that of the southern planter gentleman, envisioning long philosophical discussions while others supervised the farm work. He did receive the government printing concession, He experienced a religious conversion in 1803, joining the Bennington church after 20 years as a non-participant. In the same year, he became Clerk of the Vermont House of Representatives, serving for one year. He was also active in the Vermont Masonic movement. In April 1815, his wife Betsy died, never having recovered from the delivery of her youngest child just over a month before, and Anthony followed her the next year, dying 26 May 1816. He and both his wives are buried in the cemetery of the Old First Church of Bennington.

Haswell's children included Nathan Baldwin Haswell, a noted Vermont Masonic leader, James Madison Haswell, a Baptist missionary to Burma, and doctor and preacher Charles Salem Haswell of the California State Senate.