Matthew Lyon

Matthew Lyon (July 14, 1749 – August 1, 1822) was an Irish-born American printer, mill-owner, and politician who represented Vermont in the United States House of Representatives, where he became the first person convicted under the Sedition Act of 1798 — and the only member of Congress ever re-elected while imprisoned.¹² Jailed for calling President John Adams's administration one of "ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice," Lyon won re-election from his cell in Vergennes, Vermont, by a landslide.³⁴ In 1801 he cast Vermont's deciding vote in the House election that made Thomas Jefferson president, and in 1840 — on the Fourth of July — Congress refunded his fine with interest, declaring his conviction unconstitutional.²⁵

Early life and indenture

Lyon was born in County Wicklow, Ireland, in 1749 and apprenticed to a printer in Dublin from about 1763.¹ Around 1764–65 he sailed for America as a redemptioner — an emigrant who contracted into indentured servitude to pay for passage — and worked off his indenture on a farm in Woodbury, Connecticut.¹ The formerly indentured servant would later sit in Congress facing men who never let him forget it.

Green Mountain Boys and the Revolution

By 1774 Lyon had moved to Wallingford in the New Hampshire Grants, where he organized a militia company and joined the Green Mountain Boys.¹ He served as adjutant in Colonel Seth Warner's regiment during the Canadian campaign, was present at the taking of Fort Ticonderoga, and was commissioned a second lieutenant in July 1776.¹ A disputed episode at a northern outpost that year ended in a discharge his political enemies would call dishonorable; the accusation — never a settled fact — became the standing insult of his congressional career.³

Fair Haven, the forge, and the press

After the war Lyon founded the town of Fair Haven, Vermont (1783), building sawmills, gristmills, a forge, and a paper mill, and serving roughly a decade in the Vermont House of Representatives.¹ In 1793 he established a printing office publishing the Farmers' Library (later the Fair Haven Gazette), with his son James Lyon as nominal publisher; equipment from his shop later helped establish the Rutland Herald.¹ Print gave Vermont's small farmers a political voice — and gave Lyon the weapon that would both convict and vindicate him.

Congress and the brawl

Elected in 1796 on his fourth attempt, Lyon entered the Fifth Congress as the only Democratic-Republican from all of New England.⁴ On January 30, 1798, after Connecticut Federalist Roger Griswold mocked his war record on the House floor — the "wooden sword" taunt — Lyon spat tobacco juice in Griswold's face, earning the nickname "the Spitting Lyon"; a motion to expel him failed.² On February 15, 1798, Griswold attacked Lyon at his desk with a hickory cane, and Lyon defended himself with fireplace tongs — the first physical brawl in the history of the House of Representatives.² Within weeks the fight was immortalized in the anonymous etching Congressional Pugilists, whose verse caption ran: "He in a trice struck Lyon thrice / Upon his head, enrag'd sir, / Who seiz'd the tongs to ease his wrongs, / And Griswold thus engag'd, sir."⁶

The Sedition Act trial

In July 1798, President Adams signed the Sedition Act, criminalizing "false, scandalous and malicious" writing against the federal government.³ On July 31, Spooner's Vermont Journal printed a letter in which Lyon accused the administration of "an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice."⁵ When Federalist printers closed their columns to him, he launched his own magazine that October — The Scourge of Aristocracy and Repository of Important Political Truths — and publicly read a letter from the poet Joel Barlow wondering why Congress had not sent the President "to a mad house."⁷

Indicted within days of the October 1798 circuit court session, Lyon was tried at Rutland before Supreme Court Justice William Paterson. Conducting his own defense, he argued that the Sedition Act was unconstitutional, that his writings were innocent, and that their contents were true. The jury returned its verdict — as the Vergennes Gazette reported, "GUILTY' about nine" — and Lyon was sentenced to a $1,000 fine plus costs and four months' imprisonment, to be served not locally but forty-four miles north in the Vergennes jail, a pointed humiliation.⁸⁴ Jefferson, then Vice President, wrote privately to Madison that "the words called seditious were only general censures of the proceedings of Congress & of the President."⁹

Imprisonment and re-election

Initially denied paper, pen, and heat in an unheated cell, Lyon continued publishing the Scourge from jail once public pressure forced his jailers to relent.¹⁰ Standing for re-election from his cell that December, he won by a landslide — the first and only member of Congress re-elected while imprisoned.¹¹⁴ When supporters threatened to tear the Vergennes jail down, Lyon talked them out of it.¹¹

Release and the election of 1800

Released on February 9, 1799 — his fine paid in gold carried north by Virginia Senator Stevens T. Mason — Lyon stepped out declaring, "I am on my way to Philadelphia," and a flag-led procession accompanied him from Vergennes.¹¹³ A second House attempt to expel him failed, 49–45.³ Two years later, when the deadlocked Jefferson–Burr election of 1800 fell to the House of Representatives, Lyon cast Vermont's deciding vote for Thomas Jefferson on the 36th ballot: the man jailed for criticizing one president had seated the next.³¹¹

Later life, Kentucky, and slavery

Lyon moved west, representing Kentucky in Congress from 1803 to 1811, building trade ventures on the western rivers, and dying in Arkansas Territory in 1822 while serving as a federal factor to the Cherokee.¹³ The record requires the whole man: in his Kentucky years, Lyon enslaved people.¹² This article records that fact rather than omitting it, consistent with this project's standard that its subjects' flaws are entered as evidence, not airbrushed.

The 1840 refund

On July 4, 1840 — Independence Day — Congress passed "An Act to refund a fine imposed on Matthew Lyon," repaying his heirs the $1,000 with interest and, through the accompanying Judiciary Committee report, treating his conviction as having been made under an unconstitutional law.¹³ The marginal note in the Statutes at Large reads: "A certain fine, with interest, to be refunded."¹³ Lyon's papers, including a letter in his own hand attacking the Sedition Acts, are held by the Vermont Historical Society in Barre (MSA 31).¹⁴

In popular culture

Vermont musician John Daly released Spit'n Lyon, a musical album about Lyon, in 2018, revisiting it publicly in 2025.¹⁵ Lyon's story is the subject of the musical sequence "Re-elected from Jail!" in Radical Vermont (2027).

See also

• Sedition Act of 1798
• Anthony Haswell (printer) — the Bennington printer jailed under the same act for defending Lyon; his fine was also later remitted⁴
• Vermont Republic
• Roger Griswold

External links

• Congressional Pugilists, high-resolution scans (public domain): Library of Congress — https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008661719/ · The Met — https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/388906
• Jefferson's letter reporting the conviction, in manuscript and transcription: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-30-02-0388
• The 1840 refund act, as printed: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-6/pdf/STATUTE-6-Pg802.pdf
• Matthew Lyon Papers finding aid, Vermont Historical Society: https://vermonthistory.org/documents/findaid/LyonMatthew.pdf
• Rachlin, "The Sedition Act of 1798 and the East-West Political Divide in Vermont": https://vermonthistory.org/journal/78/VHS7802SeditionAct1798.pdf