Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [126]
Mathew did nothing of the kind. Instead, it seems he wrote a scathing denunciation of Henry for filial treason, rushed it to a printing house, and had it printed. Henry was incensed. His own father had printed a "monstrous libel, containing charges which, if true, would render me unfit to associate with gentlemen." Worse, he had entrusted this document to "a parcel of journeymen," who would surely already have circulated its contents among their counterparts across the city. In the world of printing there was more than one kind of publicity, as both Careys knew, and Mathew had "added to the scandal" by submitting the firm and family to the mercies of the chapel. "You cannot now be certain that there are not Soo or Sooo copies in circulation," Henry protested-a statement that constitutes a significant piece of evidence about the social uncertainties of publishing. He had "done me injury forwhichyou canmake no amends." Now that he had been brought before a newvariety of judges, it was "necessary" that he be "fully cleared of the charges." There is no mistaking the tone. Carey's public career in America had begun with a duel; now it looked like ending with one, and the challenge came from his own son. The prospect was unthinkable. A lawyer negotiated a fragile reconciliation, and the tract was withdrawn (no copy is now known to exist). When Mathew Carey died a few years later, his final publication was a set of "practical rules for the promotion of domestic happiness."81
Reading his complaints of the lassitude of manufacturers and improvers, it is easy to get the impression that even his allies treated Carey by this time rather as Franklin seems to have been treated by some younger politicians of the 1780s: as an embarrassing old codger. But he remained a respected figure whose opinions carried the heft of aveteran, and if anything it was Carey who had less of the Nestor about him. When tariffs were in fact imposed, he was chaired in triumph through paper mills in Ohio and greeted in Pittsburgh with cannonades and choruses of "Hail to the Conquering Hero." His funeral in 1839 provided a massive demonstration of his public status; nobody since the revolutionaries themselves had commanded such a huge attendance.82 What they were saluting was not really Carey himself, however, but the rise of a distinctive American industrial ideology, which denied class distinctions in favor of the "harmony of interests." After half a century, international reprinting and industrial appropriation had a secure place in this protectionist `American system."
That created a situation without precedent. In the eighteenth century, international reprinting had flourished, to be sure, and conflicts over cross-border "piracy" had flared up repeatedly. But in each case the struggle had been between a major power and a relatively minor rival on its periphery: between England and the Scottish reprinters, between Britain and the Irish, between France and the Swiss, or between rival German states. Now, for the first time a clash over reprinting was about to be triggered between two major industrial powers. And it was central to the selfimage of one as a modern, united, virtuous republic of industry. When Americans reprinted, what they reprinted came largely from the world's financial, imperial, and manufacturing center, London. And London publishers were already accustomed to seeing their reach in global terms. In terms of capital, organization, and markets alike, their interests stretched across the colonial and Anglophone world. The combination made reprinting politically volatile in a way it had never been before. The next generation would see an internationalization of the question of piracy, as calls multiplied for a unification