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By Root 1988 0

But it had already had its effect, acting as a major stimulant of debates about the political economy of manufacturing and commerce. The new nation was weak in both. Its productive resources were rudimentary by European standards, and it had few financial mechanisms to help develop more. In Britain, Lord Sheffield had cast merciless light on the ex-colonies' predicament in his Observations on the commerce of theAmerican states. The question for those states was how to address their weakness. Doing so would require a reimagining of commercial, manufacturing, and military strategy19 Catching up with and surpassing European industry demanded invention, clearly, but Carey's camp insisted that that must be twinnedwith the appropriation of machines, methods, and ideas. Carey's periodicals became agitators for nonimportation pacts, tariffs on industrial imports, and programs of "improvement" intended to upend Sheffield's dismal appraisal and challenge British power.20 The very first issue of the Columbian called for a society to be formed to encourage arts, manufactures, and commerce, along with an essay by Carey advocating a new canal between the Delaware and Ohio Rivers -a scheme that would become an idee fixe for the next half-century21 And in the six years of its life the American Museum not only advocated improvement relentlessly, but adopted a strategy of appropriating knowledge to do so. Explicitly devoted to unoriginality-its motto (like Thomas's old motif) evoked the picking of choice flowers from others' gardens-the Museum existed to preserve texts by reprinting them.This it did freely andwidely, reproducing both fugitive articles and substantial works like Paine's Common sense and the Federalist Papers.22 By doing so it became the decade's most out- spokenvoice reconciling a demand for manufactures, natural science, and technology with a republican political vision. Carey prized a remark by George Washington that "a more useful literary plan has never been undertaken in America."

FIGURE 8.1. Mathew Carey, portrayed in 1786 as the radical newspaperman he had been in Dublin. M. Carey, The Plagi-scurriliad (Philadelphia: for the author, 1786), frontispiece. Courtesy of Brown University Library.

A key component of this project was a scheme for the encouragement of manufacturing devised byTench Coxe. A merchant with long-standing interests in manufactures, Coxe would be a congressional advisor on the first federal patent law23 Manufactures both offered "immense advantages" to the new nation, he believed, and were "full of danger" to the old colonial power. To realize their potential, Americans should welcome imports of raw materials from Europe while imposing tariffs on manufactured goods. And, he added, "we may certainly borrow some of their inventions." Indeed, Coxe argued for a systematic policy to that end. "We must carefully examine the conduct of other countries," he urged, "in order to possess ourselves of their methods of encouraging manufactories." Officials should meet every incoming ship, seek out immigrants who were skilled artisans, and offer them premiums for inventions that might benefit the nation. Perhaps land could be offered in thousand-acre parcels to artisans prepared to become citizens, as a way of recognizing their "merit and genius." (Coxe himself was a land speculator, so this was not exactly a disinterested proposal.) Such a policy, he thought, would also bolster the republican virtue of frugality by curbing the lust for European fashions.24

Soon Carey and Coxe had inspired societies for manufactures and improvements across the states, in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Baltimore, and elsewhere. These associations were linked through a network built partly on Carey's trade correspondence. They were also publicized more broadly through the American Museum.25 In other words, Carey and the American Museum became principal agents in developing a republican ideology of appropriating European knowledge while protecting domestic manufactures. Their actual reprinting demonstrated the scope of the enterprise.