Anthony Haswell (printer)

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.^[1] The father had been employed at the royal dockyard, but in 1769 resigned his position with the intention of emigrating.^[2] 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.^[2] Haswell's brother would return to England for a visit on the eve of the Revolutionary War, the outbreak of which prevented his return to Boston, and he would serve for four decades in the Royal Navy.^[2] Also in the Boston area at this time was his father's cousin, Customs Service officer and Royal Navy Lieutenant William Haswell, who had a young daughter Susanna Haswell (later Rowson) and son Robert Haswell.^[1][2][3]

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,^[2][3] who published the radical Massachusetts Spy at the Boston location currently occupied by the Union Oyster House. Haswell had witnessed the Boston Massacre and developed an interest in the politics of the time, becoming a member of the Sons of Liberty and composing ballads for the movement.^[3] In April 1775, Thomas was forced to evacuate his press from Boston, moving to Worcester where publication continued,^[3] but within a year Haswell bought his way out of his apprenticeship early. He served in the Revolutionary War although the details of this service have been lost.^[2][3][4] 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.^[2]

In 1778, Haswell married Worcester native Lydia Baldwin, and Haswell the next year worked for several weeks in Providence as a journeyman printer with the Providence Gazette, before moving his family to Hartford to work for the publisher of the Connecticut Courant. There he formed a partnership with Elisha Babcock and the two relocated to Springfield, where in 1782 they founded the Massachusetts Gazette.^[2][3] The following spring, however, he was enticed by the government of Vermont to relocate to Bennington. He took the press by wagon to Bennington, and acquired his type by digging up a set that had been buried in Albany at the time of the French and Indian War.^[2]

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.^[5] 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.^[2] Haswell shortly gained a certain notoriety 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.^[2][6] An attempt at a monthly magazine also failed.

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."^[7] Haswell also republished a claim made in Benjamin Franklin Bache's Philadelphia Aurora that the government had employed Tories.^[8] 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.^[3] 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.^[9]

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.^[10]