Biography
Charles Holt was an American printer and editor and the publisher of the Bee in New London, Connecticut, the leading Democratic-Republican newspaper in southeastern Connecticut. He had been a journeyman printer in New York before founding the Bee in 1797 at age 24 specifically as a Jeffersonian counter-weight to the Federalist Connecticut Gazette.
In May 1799 Holt published an editorial attacking the Federalist administration's military buildup against France, in particular the recruitment of a "standing army" he depicted as a tool to suppress political opposition at home. He was indicted under the Sedition Act in September 1799 and tried before Justice Bushrod Washington (nephew of George Washington) in Hartford in April 1800. The federal jury convicted him; he was sentenced to three months in the New London jail and a \$200 fine. After his release he continued the Bee for several more years and later moved to New York to edit the Columbian. Holt's case is one of the most cited Sedition Act prosecutions because the underlying editorial was specifically about whether peacetime conscription threatened civil liberties — a theme that has resurfaced in every American war debate since.
Belt identifies Justice Bushrod Washington as the judge at Holt’s April 1800 Sedition Act trial and states that Holt pleaded not guilty, relying on the statute’s unconstitutionality and the absence of evil intent. Holt resumed editorial work from his prison cell. This source’s six-month nominal sentence conflicts with the stored three-month sentence; no duration or endpoint is changed from this discrepancy alone.