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By Root 2015 0

Carey reprinted cosmology, meteorology, and geology, and made a point of including Benjamin West's call to reject the naming of the newly discovered "planet Herschel" (Uranus) after King George. And at the same time the Museum hailed American inventors, and promoted prizes for them. It even offered its own awards for essays on such subjects as the responsibilities of the press and the best policy for manufactures. And Carey undertook to reprint "authenticated" essays on both sides of such debates, arguing that the most fundamental kind of property was a citizen's in "his opinions and the free communication of them," and that this could only be preserved by not "making the printers despots." He also advocated extending this strategy to all other fields. He called on agricultural societies, for example, to reprint "extracts from foreign treatises" that might be useful in husbandry. Medical associations should do likewise. And America needed a "purely moral periodical publication" devoted to reprinting French and English writers like Addison and Steele.

Overall, the idea was for a cascade of reprinting to spread knowledge across the new country. Appearing first in the coastal newspapers, ideas would recur in the inland press, then in magazines, and would at length be preserved in the Museum. In this way the Museum would become the capstone to a nationwide, reticulated replication system dedicated to a rich, secure, and free republic. It articulated a new and aggressive national strategy, with three principal elements: to appropriate European inventions and reward domestic ones; to protect nascent manufactures; and to create a network of canals extending as far as the Great Lakes, thereby creating a truly united set of states.26

Prodded by the spread of this movement, Congress commissioned Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton to compile a report on manufactures in the new nation. Hamilton responded by calling to his aid the societies associated with Carey's journal. Coxe replied in detail, urging the need to build up manufacturing on the basis of"machines and secrets" adopted from Europe. Impressed, Hamilton appointed Coxe his assistant. He now used his new authority to gather much more testimony, from which he drafted a first version of the report.27 Coxe drew broadly on the American Museum to urge that manufacturing would facilitate military and political independence, foster the immigration of skilled workers and capital, and reinforce "individual industry and oeconomy" He not only advocated tariffs and premiums, but restated his suggestion of awarding land to "the first introducers or establishers of new and useful manufactories, arts, machines, & secrets."28And he proposed newlaws to grant introducers of European techniques exclusive rights-the equivalent of patents, but for introduction, not invention. The government should meanwhile impede the export of inventions developed at home. He finally recommended public investment in three great canal projects, including the Chesapeake and Delaware. A network of communication, Coxe declared, must underpin a successful industrial economy. Hamilton agreed. He took Coxe's text and edited it, discarding the land-award proposal but retaining most of the rest. When he had finished, what emerged was the blueprint for a future industrial, commercial, and financial society.29

Hamilton listed a number of specific manufactures that needed protection. Publishing was not among them. Printing houses had proliferated across the nation already. As Coxe had pointed out in the American Museum, printing had outpaced any other "branch of manual art" inAmerica, such that even a work like the Encyclopaedia Britannica could be produced domestically (it was in fact reprinted with embellishments by Thomas Dobson). But this self-sufficiency should now be put to use. Reprinting must become a lynchpin of the greater project of national development through appropriation. Americans, Coxe wrote, must insist upon "the opportunity of publishing immediately, for the American demand, all books in every