Biography
Anthony Haswell was an English-born printer and editor who emigrated to Massachusetts as a teenager, served briefly in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, and after the war moved to Bennington, Vermont, where he founded the Vermont Gazette in 1783. By the late 1790s the Gazette was the leading Democratic-Republican newspaper in Vermont and a vocal critic of the Federalist Adams administration.
In 1799 Haswell published an advertisement soliciting funds for the imprisoned Vermont congressman Matthew Lyon — already in his Sedition Act-driven federal prison sentence in Vergennes — that mocked the Adams administration's Federalist appointees. He was indicted under the Sedition Act in October 1799 and tried in Rutland in May 1800; the federal jury convicted him after a brief deliberation. Justice William Paterson of the U.S. Supreme Court, riding circuit, sentenced Haswell to two months in jail and a \$200 fine. He served his sentence at the Vergennes jail in Vermont. He continued publishing until his death in 1816.
Belt describes Haswell appearing before Justice William Cushing on October 9, 1799, where he learned the two counts concerned the Matthew Lyon lottery advertisement and a paragraph about appointments of Tories. Although he acknowledged publishing them, Haswell pleaded not guilty. Cushing is identified at this initial appearance, not established by this passage as the sentencing judge.
