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By Root 2002 0

was halfway across the Atlantic. His subsequent landfall was inauspicious. A drunken pilot ran the ship onto the shoals, causing panic among passengers who believed themselves about to drown. When he reached Philadelphia his first efforts to establish himselfwere not much easier. He had arrived withvirtually no resources and absolutely no friends, and only a coincidence that became rather legendary enabled him to start at all. The Marquis de Lafayette happened to be at Mount Vernon at the time, and advanced him $400. Carey invested it in the accustomed fashion for an aspirant Dublin printer: he launched a newspaper. What followed was a sequence of near disasters. The practice of reprinting was central to all of them, as it was to Carey's successful emergence.

The only press Carey could find, first, was that which had belonged to Bell, whose effects were coming up for auction. One Eleazar Oswald, a veteran of the war turned newspaperman, tried to stymie a potential rival by bidding up the price, well aware that Carey would have to buy it at almost any cost.13 A short, sharp antagonism ensued, in which Oswald reprinted an extract from Carey's old Volunteers Journal to impute that Carey had endorsed British repression in Ireland and America. In fact, this was a typical (if deliberate) example of the confusion of meanings generated by reprinting. Carey's old paper had itself been reprinting a British journal in order to rebut it. He now counterattacked by charging in mock-heroic couplets that it was Oswald who made a habit of reproducing British works as if they were his own. Carey's Plagi-scurriliad (fig. 8.i) identified his antagonist as a borrower, descended directly from "the celebrated race of Grub-street Garretteers": "Regardless what the world may say," he cries, "Seize ev'ry thought falls in your way" Carey recited an ironic history of such `privateer" activities, pretending to laud a tradition of buccaneers who had struggled against monopolists of knowledge. A literary pirate was apparently the true revolutionary of letters, upholding "the liberty of picking, choosing, culling, seizing, and borrowing."14 Oswald took the heavy-handed satire as a public challenge and demanded satisfaction. Despite Carey's earlier repudiation of dueling, he now accepted the invitation-only to discover that Oswald was not only a veteran, but a sharpshooter. The two met on January 18,1786, close to where Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton would face off a few years later. Oswald probably took pity on his rival and shot low. Wounded in the thigh, it took Carey fifteen months to recover.'5

Meanwhile, Carey's newspaper was proving hard to sell. He needed something to excite readers. The answer he hit upon was to print unauthorized reports of the debates at the House ofAssembly, the unicameral body eventually replaced by Congress. It was a "maiden attempt," as he told Franklin, but that meant he enjoyed exclusivity. (Much later, Carey would recall owing his survival to the fact that "the printers had then more scruples about pirating on each other.") The initiative proved his salvation, and he reinvested the profits, first in a collaborative periodical entitled The Columbian Magazine, and then in a journal of his own, the American Museum.16 And at the same time he began to build up a substantial trade in imported volumes-science, philosophy, voyages, history-in a bid to don Rivington's old mantle as the intermediary to the old country. By 1796, when Rivington himself showed up offering access to London publications in return for a share in the reprint profits, Carey could afford to spurn him.17

The Museum found readers across the country, and as far afield as Jefferson in distant Versailles. But such success created its own problems. Subscribers were geographically dispersed, at a time when the infrastructure and credit facilities of the new nation were rudimentary. Signing up subscribers was easy; collecting subscriptions proved difficult and costly. When, in December 1792, the postal service raised its charges, the American Museum closed.18