Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,466

This is the grave of Anthony Haswell.

Born in 1756 somewhere around Portsmouth, England, Haswell grew up the son of a shipwright. His father decided to move to the American colonies in 1769 and he took his family with him. Anthony was apprenticed to a potter. But pottery was not the future of Anthony Haswell. The father seems to have hated it and he moved back to England a year later. Even though Anthony was only 14, he stayed in Boston, while his older brother later moved back to and ended up in the Royal Navy for the next four decades. Anthony, well, his future would be slightly different.

In 1771, for reasons unknown today, Haswell was no longer apprenticed by the potter. In fact, because his father was gone, he was now under the supervision of the Boston Overseers of the Poor. They apprenticed him out again, this time to the printer Isaiah Thomas. That Isaiah could be a Bad Boy too, in favor of the radicals in Boston. Thomas printed the Massachusetts Spy, an openly anti-British publication that would push for revolution. Haswell soon bought into these politics. He followed Thomas to Worcester when Boston got too hot for him not to be arrested. It seems that the apprenticeship lasted until 1776. At that point, Haswell joined the Revolutionary Army. We don’t know anything about his time in the Army except that he was there for awhile.

By August 1777, Haswell was out of the Army and had taken over Thomas’ paper while the latter was spending his time fighting. He renamed it Haswell’s Massachusetts Spy. Wonder what Thomas thought about that rather cheeky move. He really wanted to buy the whole thing out but didn’t have the money and returned it to Thomas when he returned from service in late 1778. But they got along well enough that Haswell remained his top assistant.

Haswell finally went out on his own in the late 1770s, first to Providence, then to Hartford, then Springfield, and finally Bennington, Vermont. This was new territory for whites, recently carved out of indigenous lands in the genocide of the late 18th century. He arrived there in 1783 and was only the second printer in the new territory. He also became Postmaster General of Vermont, which he held until it became a state in 1791 and that job moved to the federal government. He started a newspaper of course, but also started a paper mill. He was a known Jeffersonian and printed deist tracts that seem pretty innocuous today but were unbelievably controversial back then, especially in a land where most of the settlers were descendants of Puritans. He became a harsh critic of the Adams administration.

Haswell was hardly the only printer who hated the Federalists. And the Federalists? Well, they didn’t believe such things as public criticism should be allowed. So in 1798, they passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which Adams somewhat reluctantly signed, but that reluctance is very much not to his credit. This was a major early attack on the American experiment. An unwillingness to tolerate dissent would have meant a country that did not work, but the Federalists did not really see it that way. They saw a bunch of liars who would not stop until Jacobin radicalism and atheism took over America.

Shortly after Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, a Federalist marshal woke Haswell up in the middle of the night and arrested him. With Supreme Court Justice William Paterson presiding over his case, he received a two month prison term and a fine. This made Haswell a martyr to free speech. This case has been cited in free speech and freedom of the press cases many times by liberals warning of government overreach. Moreover, this happened at the same time that Haswell’s personal life was in turmoil, with his first wife dying, his businesses failing, and then a marriage to a second wife. Three of his daughters, all of which were adopted out temporarily due to his poverty, died during this time.

So Haswell got out of prison and he had nothing but his good name as a Jeffersonian. Jefferson responded to his letters asking for help and he received a government printing contract for the area, which solidified his finances. He held that for the next fifteen years. He remained pretty radical in some ways, including volunteering his kids for smallpox inoculation when that was really controversial. But he gave up his atheism and converted to Christianity. He died in 1816, at the age of 60, shortly after the death of his second wife.

Now, I had never even heard of Haswell before seeing this. But if that’s your grave, well, it’s getting covered.

Anthony Haswell is buried in Old First Church Cemetery, Bennington, Vermont.

If you would like this series to cover other printers victimized by the Alien and Sedition Acts, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Matthew Lyon is in Eddyville, Kentucky and James Callender is in Richmond, Virginia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.