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By Root 2150 0

as a political economist he would write as "Hamilton" or "Colbert," and in politics he had sallied forth as "Harrington" (after the seventeenth-century author of Oceana, James Harrington). When writing on canals and improvement Carey adopted the persona of "Fulton." The choice was in homage to Robert Fulton, the Pennsylvanian credited with inventing the steamboat. Carey saw in Fulton a salutary lesson about improvers. The engineer had died while still fighting to protect his steam vessels- the latest ofwhichwas called the Olive Branch, after Carey's hugely successful tract from the War of 1812-from what he called "pirates who have clubbed their purses and copied my boats." In Carey's view America had never witnessed "a more infamous and outrageous attack upon mental property."65 Moreover, Fulton had also been an adept at industrial appropriation from Britain, withJoshua Gilpin, by now Carey's closest ally, as his surreptitious sidekick. Above all, however, he had been a visionary proponent of canals as the keys to a great future society. Since the beginning of his engineering career, he had envisaged canals (not just a few grand waterways, but scaled capillary networks) facilitating a commercial utopia of free trade, public reason, and open knowledge that would extend from metropolis to deepest province. He had told Napoleon that canals would complete the French Revolution, George Washington that they would complete the American. Thomas Mifflin, governor of Pennsylvania, heard they would "bind the whole country in the bonds of social intercourse."66

Carey shared this vision. For him too canals were the Western world's first network technology. He hoped to use them in America to "unite her people in one indissoluble bond of prosperity and sentiment, to make all parts of the commonwealth one flourishing and inseparable Wbole. "The rhetoric was utopian. With the publishers issuing forth knowledge, canals promised to spread that knowledge and thus eliminate ignorance. They would turn the harmony of interests from a theory into a reality. In its very first issue, the Colnfnbian Magazine had carried a "Philosophical Dream" by Carey that envisaged the United States in 185o united into a single political and economic body by canals. The American Museum had played the same tune, repeatedly hailing canals as "binding the union with the most substantial and certain cement."67 After 1812, this might actually be achieved. So Carey threw himself into what he saw as an essential component of a network that would eventually extend from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes. First dreamed of in the seventeenth century, and seriously projected in the eighteenth, the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal would finally be built in the nineteenth.68 It would cut the distance between Philadelphia and Baltimore by three hundred miles. But its engineer, John Randal, was a fellow visionary, later responsible for a utopian community along similar lines to Robert Owen's in Britain. Before long Randal fell foul of the canal's financiers. He was dismissed, much to Carey's outrage. The lawsuit he subsequently filed saddled the canal with debts so massive that it could never be made viable.69

Carey was tireless in pursuing canals and the idea of a networked nation. He slogged up and down the country, to New York, Boston, Salem, Hartford, New Haven, Providence, and Baltimore, seeking commitments for societies for manufacturing. In Washington he buttonholed the secretary of war. His words poured endlessly from the press-constitutions, open letters, advertisements, appeals, denunciations, defenses, treatises, polemical essays, replies to polemical essays, replies to the replies. He would rush his views into print on an almost daily basis, sending them page by page to be printed (on American-made "machine paper") as fast as he could write. He then sent them to every postmaster in the nation, distributing them gratis and pointedly declining to register them for copyright so that others could reprint them-which did happen, albeit not with the alacrity that he desired 70