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positions. Hamilton wanted peace, but Jefferson and his supporters argued for action, and Carey plunged headlong into their camp. He published his ownAccount ofAlgiers explaining why. In contrast to many, Carey did not condemn the corsairs as such. Instead he drew a moral about mediation: an African reading aWestern depiction ofAlgiers, he said, would treat it with as much "disdain" as an American coming across a "frothy" book about the United States published in London. But Algiers was a military dictatorship and a kingdom-"an epithet which might, without regret, be expunged from every human vocabulary"-and it colluded with Britain in "the general conspiracy of the Domitians and Caligulas of Europe" against Jacobin France. The United States should deploy a navy to deal with it for these reasons, not because its piracies reflected some deep-seated moral flaw35 In the event, President Washington appointed Chief Justice John Jay to negotiate a solution. When Jay returned with a treaty, Carey supported those who denounced it as a capitulation to a reactionary power. Moreover, he believed that the treaty implied a drift to aristocratic governance in the United States, because it required only presidential and senatorial confirmation. Carey sought to prevent ratification, not least by reprinting the treaty and circulating it through his established network with a long list of criticisms. He and Coxe thenwent on to campaign for theJeffersonians. His correspondence network became a tool for anti-Federalist coordination, and his premises in Philadelphia a clearinghouse for campaign communications.36

The transatlantic crisis not only transformed Carey's own political associations, but helped reprinting as apractice emerge as a conventional custom, Hamiltonian but not narrowly Federalist. The relative costs of manufacturing and importing shifted. "For many years," as striking Philadelphia printers later recalled, "books could be imported into the United States and sold cheaper than they could be printed here." The crisis evened the field. A little later, the introduction of copyright to Ireland tipped the balance even further by destroying the Dublin reprinters. Europe was at war, the seas were perilous, a duty had been imposed on imported paper, and now the Irish competitionwas gone.37 Organizations like the Charleston Library Society began to orderAmerican reprints in quantity because their traditional sources were cut off. Moreover, Americans increasingly felt that theyshouldnot look to Britain for books. A society formed for the importation of books in i8o5 was not a success, and in 1807 importing editions was actually made illicit by a nonimportation law.38 Reprinting grew into a standard practice. It was a way to make knowledge affordable, accessible, anduseful-in aword, republican.

The fortunes of the enterprise remained fragile, however. As was customary, nodal figures like Carey guaranteed the debts of many trade counterparts, some of them in towns far distant from Philadelphia. Doing so cemented bonds and sometimes allowed Carey to wangle lower rates when he hired those obligated to him. (We do not know if he repeated the initiative of another firm, which imposed a requirement not to pirate its books.) Even in the 182os, his firm would still have eight hundred active engagements in hand, for clients scattered across the nation. But "endors- ings" were not typically accounted as debts in a firm's books. A default might therefore have unforeseen and devastating consequences-with the potential to multiply into a cascade across the industry. Carey repeatedly lamented this "vile system." He could have been ruined, he later recalled, had just one creditor called in a debt on the wrong day, and twice he approached George Washington to borrow cash lest that happen. But to refuse to guarantee another's debt was almost unthinkable; it would show discourtesy, and might itself prompt a collapse. The memory of just one bankruptcy that Carey triggered in this way continued to haunt his conscience for years.39

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