Credit: Luke Eastman
Posted inArts + Culture

Early Sedition: How a Thin-Skinned U.S. President Jailed a Vermont Newspaperman

The press is “the enemy of the American people”? Federalist authorities made much the same claim when they arrested my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Anthony Haswell, for criticizing a thin-skinned American president in Vermont’s first newspaper. The year was 1799, and the new nation was in the darkest days of what then-vice president Thomas Jefferson called “the reign […]

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