Anthony Haswell and Freedom of the Press

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AnthonyHaswell and Freedom of the Press

Text of a talk Oct. 8, 2003, Bennington, Vt.
Sponsored by the Vermont Council on the Humanities

By Tyler Resch, Librarian, Bennington Museum

Copyright © 2003 by Tyler Resch – 4,700 words

AnthonyHaswell was a Bennington printer and publisher who was arrested, charged, tried, convicted, fined, and jailed by the United States government in 1799 and 1800 for publishing criticism of the government. Actually, it was a lesser offense than that. Haswell was arrested, charged, tried, convicted, fined, and jailed merely for publishing support of another editor who had been jailed for criticizing the president.

It was one of the lowest points in civil liberties in the history of this nation. It happened right here in southwestern Vermont.

Haswell had violated a law passed by Congress in 1798 called the Sedition Act. It was one element of a four-part law known generally, and infamously, as the Alien and Sedition Acts.

The Alien Act gave the president authority to expel any persons he considered "dangerous," although John Adams never invoked it. The Enemy Alien Act authorized the president to detain, deport or otherwise restrict the liberties of citizens of countries with which the U.S. was at war.

The Sedition Act provided for fines and imprisonment for any "false, scandalous, and malicious" writing against the government, Congress, or the President," or any attempt "to excite against them . . . the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition." But the real and obvious intent was to stifle the anti-Federalist or Republican press.

Those laws were allowed to expire a couple of years later, after the government changed hands for the first time in its brief history - from John Adams and the Federalists to Thomas Jefferson and the so-called Republicans (also called the Democratic-Republicans). But the very existence of laws of this nature, passed by an act of Congress - enforcing the concept that a citizen of the United States could be arrested and jailed because of what was said or written - became the first great test of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

If the Sedition Act could have been enforced, it would have prevented the formation of political parties and thus severely changed the character and energy of the new American nation. A curtain of orthodoxy would have smothered our republic and snuffed out the Bill of Rights.

The First Amendment says,

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

So this great amendment contains not only the guarantees of free speech and of the press, but also the vitally important separation of church and state as well as the right of assembly and of petitioning the government. It is the rock-solid core of basic American principles that many thousands have fought and died to uphold. But it has been subject to challenge and dilution repeatedly over the course of our history.
Fortunately, the First Amendment survived the test of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which provoked among the citizenry considerable resentment that contributed to the defeat of the Federalists in the 1800 election. President John Adams, the Federalist who succeeded George Washington, does not get high grades for his role in this episode, which will be addressed later.

John Adams' vice president was a figure of the opposite political party, the great Thomas Jefferson who, after he was elected in 1800, pardoned the editors who had been convicted, and the law was allowed to expire.

Let's start with some biography of Haswell himself. Much is known about him, but also much is not known and has been lost.

Haswell fully deserves a biography. There has been only one published, and that was written in 1925 by John Spargo, founder of the Bennington Museum, who assembled as much material as he could locate. Spargo's work is excellent in many respects and he dug up some valuable research, but you need to filter out a great many of Spargo's gratuitous adjectives and attitudes.

Spargo noted factually and regretfully:

"A strange fatality seems to have attended all efforts to write the biography of AnthonyHaswell, who was, taken all in all, one of the most interesting figures among the notably able and interesting men in and around Bennington in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, whose wisdom and courage established the State of Vermont."

After Haswell died in 1816 his sons announced their intent to collect and publish his numerous writings in prose and verse, with a formal biography, Spargo explains. But a disastrous fire in 1804 had destroyed a great many of those papers. Haswell tried to make up for some of those losses by dictating memoirs to his daughters. That material was gathered up by another son, Nathan Baldwin Haswell, who seems to have then scattered it despite his best efforts. Then a granddaughter devoted many years to culling together what was left, but all of that was destroyed by a fire in San Diego. Still another collection of family papers and copies was lost in another accident. And finally, what material remained, in the hands of another granddaughter, vanished in the famous San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

The fates did not treat well the memoirs of AnthonyHaswell. Yet his memory endures.

Therefore, what we can piece together of the life of AnthonyHaswell begins with his origins in Portsmouth, England, where he was born on April 6, 1756. His father, William, a Scot, had fought on the side of the Stewart Pretender to the English crown at the Battle of Culloden in 1745, and later escaped to a ship and ended up at Portsmouth.

In 1768, when Anthony was twelve, the father brought him and his brother William, age fourteen, across the Atlantic and settled in Boston, where the boys were to be apprenticed until they were 21. The elder William returned to England, expecting to come back to America with his family as soon as arrangements could be made. But war was declared with France and men were not allowed to leave England. Before the war ended, William Haswell had died.
In Boston, Anthony was apprenticed to a potter, where he was evidently influenced by talk of the injustices to the American colonies. He joined the Sons of Freedom, and using his gift for verse wrote some songs to support the cause. Benjamin Franklin reportedly heard some of his songs and was helpful in releasing Anthony from his indenture to the potter and instead apprenticed him to Isaiah Thomas, publisher of the Worcester Spy. Now, Anthony was under the tutelage of one of the strongest patriots in the colonies and he helped print a highly influential newspaper that upheld the cause of American freedom and independence.

Indeed, Haswell became a printer-publisher for life, and was imbued with the strong principles

that a few years later would make the new nation great.

While still an apprentice on Dec. 16, 1773, he joined the Boston lads who donned blankets, war paint and feathers and threw boxes of tea into the harbor to protest the hated English tea tax. Earlier he had witnessed the so-called Boston Massacre in 1771, where three patriots were killed and others wounded. When the Revolutionary War came, Haswell joined up and helped dig the redoubt on Dorchester Heights during the siege of Boston. He marched with a company from Springfield, Mass., and fought in the Battle of White Plains. He took part in the decisive fight at Monmouth, N.J. There is no doubt much more in his military record but the details have been lost.

While still in the American army in 1779 he married Lydia Baldwin, daughter of his employer. After the war he responded to a published request from the legislature of the new Republic of Vermont, which was looking for "a printer, to print the laws."

This new would-be state, west of the Connecticut River and east of the Hudson needed a printer because Vermont had resorted to using tradesmen in New Hampshire and Connecticut who possessed the metal type and printing equipment with which to press words onto paper. To bring us from the computer age down to the rustic realities of 1783, we must remember that there was no electricity, no radio or television, no power of any kind except that provided by muscle. It was a society carved out of the wilderness that depended entirely on the horse or navigable waters for all forms of communication as well as transportation.

Haswell arrived in the de facto capital of Vermont, Bennington, where the legislature met more often than in other towns. In 1784 the legislature established several post offices, and Governor Thomas Chittenden appointed Haswell the first postmaster. So as both printer and postmaster he was at the very center of this society's communications network. It might be well to recall that besides being de facto capital of Vermont - Montpelier was not named the capital until 1808 - Bennington was the principal settlement. The other towns one thinks of today as larger, Rutland and Burlington, awaited the railroads (and in the case of Burlington, shipping) to develop into dominant municipalities.

Haswell's first edition of the newspaper he called the Vermont Gazette made its appearance on Thursday, June 5, 1783. On its front page was a prominent notice "To the Public" that promised three important principles would be fulfilled. His own choice of goals deserves our attention:

First, wrote Haswell, "The Paper to be published regularly on such day as shall be found most likely to answer the principal end of publications of this nature, viz. the speedy conveyance of the most important intelligence."

Second, "The freedom of the press to be inviolably preserved, and the productions of the ingenious, on every subject, at all times gratefully received and duly tended to."

And third, "The price to subscribers in the town of Bennington, and its vicinity, to the distance of 20 miles, will be ten shillings per year . . . The papers will be assorted by post riders to towns more remote, at a price proportionately reasonable."

So that sounded like a really good deal: a free press, published regularly, and at a fair price. (It was also promising that it would heed "the productions of the ingenious on every subject." I wish that were true of more of today's journalism.)

That first edition happened to contain a most gruesome account of the death in a sawmill accident of Captain Elijah Galusha of Arlington. The article went into detail about how "some obstruction, under the water gate, prevented his shutting the gate down so as to stop the saw." When Captain Galusha tried to remove a log it kicked back in such a way that "The larynx, or upper part of the trachea arteria, or windpipe, was thereby lacerated, as also one of the jugular veins . . ."

Though he had a state-granted monopoly on government printing, and his position as postmaster placed him at the center of communications, Haswell still had a difficult time making ends meet financially, and he was in and out of debt repeatedly.

On June 25, 1792, he launched what might be called a satellite operation and started a newspaper in Rutland called "The Herald of Rutland - or Rutland Courier." But after only twelve weekly editions the print shop burned along with all his equipment. It was never clear whether the cause was arson, but that was the suggestion left to history. Ironically, today's Rutland Herald claims no link to Haswell's newspaper there because two years later, on December 8, 1794, two cousins, both Federalists, both named Samuel Williams, launched a weekly newspaper called The Rutland Herald that has continued unceasingly from that day to this. (The Herald moved from weekly to daily during the Civil War to meet the demands of news from the war between the states.)

A few words about Haswell's newspaper, the Vermont Gazette, which began publication in Bennington in June of 1783. I found a vivid description of the Gazette in a textbook titled Freedom's Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties, by James Morton Smith, published in the 1950s, one of several scholarly books on the subject. The author writes, "The leading Democratic-Republican newspaper in Vermont at the end of the eighteenth century was Anthony Haswell's Vermont Gazette in Bennington. One of the few Jeffersonian journals in Federalist New England, it stood out like a fire in the Green Mountains on a dark night. Long an ardent supporter of the Œimmortal Jefferson,' Haswell was a vigorous critic of President John Adams, his principles, and the policies of his administration."

In the Bennington Museum's library we have (virtually) the full set of the Vermont Gazette on microfilm and the ability to print out particular articles or pages. These newspapers are a bit difficult for us to read because of the custom of the 18th century to use the English s, which looks life an f. So for example the word "assistance" seems to come across with visual lisps as affiftance. There is a subtle difference between the s and the f, but it takes some adjustment to get beyond this image handicap. The English s was abandoned in the first decade of the 19th century.

Newspapers of that time also placed mostly international or national news on the front page and downplayed state and local articles. You have to take on a mindset that in the absence of radio or television or national newspapers, people were extremely interested in what was happening in the bigger world out there, and it was sort of assumed that in small communities everyone knew what was going on locally. Some of the most important local news was found in the ads - in terms of what shipments of shoes or pottery or textiles or spices had arrived in town. An important item in the newspaper was a list of persons who had letters waiting for them at the post office. (These lists are important for genealogists, who find proof that certain persons were indeed in the town on a certain date.) Deaths were recorded simply with a name, date, and town, and no other details.

Haswell's jailable offense is interrelated to that of Matthew Lyon, another anti-Federalist printer and a member of Congress, who was prosecuted and jailed for publishing criticism of President Adams in his newspaper in Fair Haven, Vermont. What Haswell did was to publish, on several occasions in early 1799, a defense of Lyon, and to promote a lottery designed to raise the $1,100 needed to free Lyon from the jail where he was held in Vergennes.

During debate in Congress, Lyon chose to use the press rather than the floor of the House, to argue against the Sedition Act. When the Rutland Herald refused to publish his letters he began his own newspaper in Fair Haven, called The Scourge of Aristocracy. In this journal and elsewhere, Lyon sought to expose the unconstitutionality of the Sedition Act; and after the act was passed he continued to consider it unlawful and he continued to criticize and argue for free speech.

As a result, Congressman Matthew Lyon was the first to stand trial under the Sedition Act. He was convicted and jailed in a judicial process that was fundamentally lacking in fairness. One of two presiding judges, Samuel Hitchcock, has been Lyon's principal opponent in a runoff election for Congress in 1796. The prosecuting attorney was Charles Marsh, a close friend and associate of attorney Nathaniel Chipman, a Federalist and leading critic of Lyon. The jurors were summoned by the infamous marshal Jabez Fitch, who was able to select political opponents of Lyon. And when Lyon sought to challenge these jurors he was overruled.

After a trial marked by acrimony and political persecution, Lyon was ordered to serve four months in jail and pay a fine of $1,000. He was taken to a notorious cold and smelly prison cell in Vergennes where he continued to be taunted by Jabez Fitch and was denied heat and a window that would close. (Lyon wrote that the cell afforded "a stench about equal to the Philadelphia docks in the month of August.") But instead of silencing Lyon, prison made a national martyr out of him. He waged a re-election campaign from his jail cell and won. (Many great details about all this are found in Aleine Austin's biography of Lyon, though you need to be aware of her confusion of the two Samuel Williamses.)

When Lyon was released triumphantly from prison in February 1799, he stopped at Bennington, where Haswell gave him a lengthy welcoming speech and condemned his imprisonment as the "unprecedented and cruel prosecution of our federal representative." (Most of the text of Haswell's exuberant speech is found in Spargo's biography.)

Haswell's principal offense - his sedition, so to speak -- was to publish, on three or four occasions in early 1799, a description of the lottery that was proposed to raise the $1,100 needed to release Matthew Lyon from prison on Vergennes. It began: