Anthony Haswell (printer)

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 Portsmouth, England on 6 April 1756, the second son of shipwright William Haswell and his first wife Elizabeth Dawes. In late 1769 or early 1770, following his remarriage, the father took Anthony and his brother William to Boston and apprenticed them before returning to Portsmouth: Anthony as a potter, William as a shipwright. William soon followed their father back to England and would serve for four decades in the Royal Navy while Anthony was left alone in America, his only local kin being his father's cousin, William Haswell, a Royal Navy Lieutenant with a young daughter Susanna Haswell (later Rowson) and son Robert Haswell.^[1]

Witnessing the Boston massacre, Anthony became interested in the politics of the time. He left his potter's position, in August 1771, and was apprenticed to printer Isaiah Thomas,^[2] who published the radical Massachusetts Spy at the Boston location currently occupied by the Union Oyster House. Haswell is said to have been a member of the Sons of Liberty and to have composed ballads for the movement. In April 1775 Thomas was forced to evacuate his press from Boston, moving to Worcester where publication continued. During Thomas's Revolutionary War service the paper was leased and from August 1777 to June 1778, Anthony Haswell published it under the banner of Haswell's Massachusetts Spy. Haswell also served in the Revolutionary War although the details of this service have been lost.^[3]

In 1778 Haswell married Worcester native Lydia Baldwin and following Thomas's return, the family went to Hartford and then Springfield, where in 1782 Haswell teamed with Elisha Babcock to found the Massachusetts Gazette.^[2] The following spring, however, he was enticed by the government of Vermont to relocate to Bennington.

Vermont

Haswell arrived in Bennington in 1783, becoming the second printer in Vermont. He had been offered the postal franchise and was shortly appointed Postmaster General of Vermont, in which role he continued until Vermont's admission to the Union in 1791 placed the mail under Federal control.^[4] 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. Haswell shortly gained a certain notorietry by publishing Ethan Allen's controversial deist tract, Reason, the Only Oracle of Man: Or, A Compendious System of Natural Religion in 1785. Over the following years he tried to extend his business, opening offices in Vergennes and Litchfield, Connecticut and founding the first Rutland newspaper, The Herald of Rutland, in 1792 only to have the printing office burn after just fourteen issues, dooming the project.^[5] 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."^[6] Haswell also republished a claim made in Benjamin Franklin Bache's Philadelphia Aurora that the government had employed Tories.^[7] As a result he was arrested, dragged from his house in the middle of the night by Federalist marshal Jabez Fitch (the same "oppressive hand" Haswell had condemned). Haswell was feeling ill, and felt the weather to be cold and moist; so he requested a chance to get his coat before riding to Rutland some 50 miles away to sit in a jail cell and await trial; this request was refused.^[2] In a trial conducted at Windsor on 5 May 1800 by Supreme Court Justice William Paterson he was found guilty of seditious libel, sentenced to a two-month imprisonment, and fined $200.^[8]

The Haswell case has since been frequently mentioned in studies relating to freedom of the press, and 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.^[9]

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 two of her children. However, his legal and financial problems led to his daughters by Lydia being adopted out; three died during this period.^[10]

In 1801, Haswell sent letters to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, requesting government printing work. He reported that while his paper's circulation had once been 1400 per week, "[t]he unhappy political divisions which for some years past have afflicted our country, have been peculiarly injurious to me," and that he had been "reduced to distress, and almost to penury."^[11] 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.^[12] He did receive the government printing concession, and continued as a printer for another decade and a half, briefly attempting another magazine as well as producing several books, notably Memoirs and Adventures of Captain Matthew Phelps.

Haswell took an interest in his community, allowing his son to be used as a test subject for smallpox vaccination in 1801.^[13] He experienced a religious conversion in 1803, joining the Bennington church after 20 years as a non-participant.^[14] 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.^[2] He and both his wives are buried in Bennington.

Haswell's children included Nathan Baldwin Haswell, a noted Vermont Masonic leader, James Madison Haswell, a Baptist missionary to Burma,^[14] and Charles Salem Haswell of the California State Senate.

References

Sources

• Robert J. Brugger, et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison, Secretary of State Series, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, vol. 1, p. 58
• John J. Duffy, Samuel B. Hand, Ralph H. Orth, The Vermont Encyclopedia, UPNE, 2003, p. 153
• Todd A. Farmerie, "The Family of William Haswell, Father of Immigrant Anthony Haswell of Bennington, Vermont", New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 155, pp. 341–352 (October 2001)
• Isaac Jennings, Memorials of a Century, Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1869, pp. 303–307
• Barbara B. Oberg, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Princeton: Princeton University Press, vol. 34, pp. 75–77, 601–601.
• John Spargo, Anthony Haswell: Printer — Patriot — Ballader: A Biographical Study with a Selection of his Ballads and an Annotated Bibliographical List of his Imprints. Rutland, VT: The Tuttle Co., 1925.
• Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism, W. W. Norton & Company, 2004, pp. 63–64.
• Jacob G. Ullery, Redfield Proctor, Charles H. Davenport, Hiram Augustus Huse, Levi Knight Fuller, Men of Vermont: An Illustrated Biographical History of Vermonters and Sons of Vermont, Brattleboro, Vt.:Transcript Publishing Company, 1894, p. 64
• Francis Wharton, State Trials of the United States during the Administrations of Washington and Adams, Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1849, pp. 684–687.