Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm (December 6, 1815 – July 22, 1884) was an American Radical Republican journalist, publisher, abolitionist, and women's rights advocate.

While working for the federal government in Washington, D.C., during the administration of President Andrew Johnson, Swisshelm founded her last newspaper, Reconstructionist.

In 1823, when Jane was eight years of age, both her sister Mary and her father died of consumption, leaving the family in straitened circumstances.

[4] Jane worked at manual labor, doing lace making and painting on velvet, and her mother colored leghorn and straw hats.

That year, her family learned that her older brother, William, much loved by all, had died of yellow fever in New Orleans, where he had gone for work.

Prompted by the demise of the Spirit of Liberty and the similarly themed Albatross, Swisshelm founded the newspaper Saturday Visiter [sic] in 1847.

That jerking, nervous, half breathless excitement which would embarrass the narrative of a man only adds piquancy and grace to that of a woman.

Writing in The Saint Cloud Visiter, Swisshelm waged a private war against Sylvanus Lowry, a Southern slaveholder and Indian trader who had settled in the area in 1847.

[14] Writing in The Visiter, Swisshelm accused Lowry of swindling the local Winnebago as a trader, ordering vigilante attacks on suspected land claim jumpers, and abusing his slaves.

[14] After one of her fiery editorials, Lowry formed a "Committee of Vigilance", broke into the newspaper's offices, smashed the printing press, and threw the pieces into the nearby Mississippi River.

She toured major cities to raise public opinion about this issue and, while in Washington, D.C., met with Edwin M. Stanton, a friend from Pittsburgh and then Secretary of War.

She sold her Minnesota paper and continued to work as an army nurse during the Civil War in the Washington area until her job became available.

[7] Swisshelm published Letters to Country Girls (New York, 1853), a collection of newspaper columns she had launched in 1849,[19] and an autobiography entitled Half of a Century (1881).