Though he published fourteen books, and wrote newspaper articles as an editor and journalist weekly for eleven years, he is best known as an author for being the first person to define the word cocktail in print.

His immigrant ancestor Thomas Croswell (1633 – 1682) left Staffordshire, England, at the age of 22, and sailed to Boston, according to a biographer, "on account of the tumultuous state of affairs in that country, about the time of Cromwell's usurpation of the supreme power.

"[1] The family thrived: they eventually owned a farm with a large house or "mansion" on Prospect Hill in Somerville, Massachusetts, near Boston, which was later used by General George Washington as his headquarters during the 11-month siege of the British occupied city.

Harry Croswell, the fourth eldest son, was sent at age 10 as a servant in exchange for tutoring to a fellow native of West Hartford, the then lawyer but future lexicographer, Noah Webster.

Dr. Nathen Perkins, the West Haven Congregationalist minister, before being sent to Warren, Connecticut, as apprentice clerk in a store in the small town.

Croswell's older brothers Thomas and Mackay had moved to the then frontier town of Catskill, New York, on the banks of the Hudson River.

In the tradition of Benjamin Franklin, another man apprenticed to his brother, Croswell contributed anonymous humorous articles under the pseudonym "Titus Touchwood".

His combination of high-minded politics (the Titus) and fiery, even savage indignation over injustice and folly (the Touchwood), made Croswell a man of influence in upstate New York.

[5] This "led to the recognition of his promise as a writer and finally to his installment in the editorial chair":[6] In 1800, Croswell's name appeared alongside his brother as editor of the paper, now renamed The Western Constellation.

Thurlow Weed was a rival publisher to Edwin Croswell; as a founder and influential leader of the Republican party, he helped elect Abraham Lincoln president.

With two partners, Ezra Sampson, a retired Congregational minister, and George Chittenden, a paper maker, Croswell founded a book store and a print shop in the rapidly growing town.

Jefferson wrote to one of his party's governors: I have therefore long thought that a few prosecutions of the most prominent offenders would have a wholesome effect in restoring the integrity of the presses.

The state's Democratic-Republican attorney General Ambrose Spencer indicted Croswell for a seditious libel as: ... being a malicious and seditious man, and of depraved mind and wicked and diabolical disposition, and also deceitfully, wickedly and maliciously devising, contriving and intending, toward Thomas Jefferson, Esquire, President of the United States of America, to detract from, scandalize, traduce and vilify, and to represent him, the said Thomas Jefferson, as unworthy of the confidence, respect and attachment of the people of the said United States ...[12]The attempt to intimidate Croswell by prosecution for criminal libel backfired.

"[13] Croswell refused to back down, even after losing his first January 1803 trial at Claverack court house to political judges and packed juries.

Though defended by local Federalist layers, including his friend William Peter Van Ness, he lost the second appeal trial under prominent anti-Federalist Justice Morgan Lewis in June 1803 as well.

Justice Lewis again presided, and was unlikely to overrule his own previous ruling, so all three judges would have to vote to overturn the lower court's conviction.

Expecting to win the upper house the next year, the Toleration Party began plans to call a constitutional convention to revoke the establishment of the church in the old Connecticut Charter.

Obeying his own precept, Croswell never publicly commented on politics nor voted in an election in the 43 years he was Rector of Trinity parish.

[25] Croswell's 5,300 page diary, begun in 1821 when he was 41, is a largely untapped treasure found in manuscript form at the Yale library.

Harry Croswell, D.D., and his Diary", called it "a remarkable record of individual activity, and of the shrewd comments of a critical observer on persons and events within his daily experience.

"[26] According to the African-American history scholar Randall K. Burkett, Rector Harry Croswell was known to minister to blacks at a time when other white clergy did not.

[29] Yale historian Dexter, who knew Croswell, observed that ... in personal intercourse with his fellowmen he was uniformly genial and overflowing with practical beneficence.

[29]When he died, a local newspaper summed up his career: For over forty-three years, Dr. CROSWELL devoted himself assiduously to the arduous labors of a large and steadily increasing Parish.

In the Balance and Columbian Repository of May 13, 1806, after being queried by a reader on his use of the word in the previous week's paper, he wrote: Cock-tail, then, is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters; it is vulgarly called bittered sling, and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion, in as much as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head.