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An Editor Fades Away

By Andrew Smith | Staff Writer

David Frothingham's home on Main Street in Sag Harbor (Newsday Photo/Bill Davis)

David Frothingham's career -- and perhaps his life -- came to a tumultuous end soon after the Herald closed. What happened to him remains a mystery almost 200 years after he disappeared without a trace. Two days after he printed the last issue of Frothingham's Long-Island Herald, he attended an anti-Federalist political rally in Bridgehampton. Aaron Burr, who was planning to run for president against John Adams in 1800, offered Frothingham a job at the Argus in New York, a paper owned by one of his supporters. He left his wife and six children at Sag Harbor to take the job. Frothingham's role at the Argus was limited to running the printing operation. Nevertheless, when the Argus reprinted in its Nov. 6, 1799, issue a letter alleging that Alexander Hamilton was secretly using British money to suppress a newspaper critical of him, Frothingham became a target.

Hamilton had Frothingham arrested for libel under the Alien and Sedition Laws. Even though the letter had appeared in several other papers and even though Frothingham had nothing to do with the decision to reprint it, he was sentenced to four months in jail and fined $100. He was never heard from again.

Some historians have suggested that Frothingham and other political prisoners were taken out West and killed in the waning days of the Adams administration. A Boston newspaper in 1814 reported that a David Frothingham was on a ship that sank at sea. And in 1822, another Boston paper said that Frothingham died on the Congo River in Africa.

A gravestone in Sag Harbor bears his name and the date 1814 but there is no body beneath the stone.