Ireland, America, and Mathew Carey

Home , Henry Charles Carey, Mathew Carey

Front Matter Source: Early American Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3, Special Issue: Ireland, America, and Mathew Carey (Fall 2013) Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23547676 Accessed: 30-08-2018 10:29 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Early American Studies

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:29:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Early American

An Interdisciplinary Journal

*5"r- •. ■ S> - ytA

Volume 11, Number 3 Fall 2013

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:29:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Early American Studies An Interdisciplinary Journal

Established at the University of Pennsylvania in 1978 as the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies, and renamed in 1998 in honor of its benefactor Robert L. McNeil, Jr., The McNeil Center for Early American Studies facilitates research and scholarly inquiry into the histories and cultures of North America in the Atlantic world before 1850.

THE MCNEIL CENTER FOR Susan E. Klepp, Temple University EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES Karen Ordahl Kupperman, New York University Daniel K. Richter, Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center Ned Landsman, SUNY, Stony Brook Amy L. Baxter-Bellamy, Associate Director Emma Jones Lapsansky, Haverford College EXECUTIVE COUNCIL Janet M. Lindman, Rowan University Susan E. Klepp, Temple University, Chair Mark Frazier Lloyd, University of Pennsylvania Wayne K. Bodle, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Christopher Looby, University of California, Los Angeles Kathleen Brown, University of Pennsylvania Bruce Mann, Harvard University Max C. Cavitch, University of Pennsylvania Cathy Matson, University of Delaware Elaine Forman Crane, Fordham University Stephanie McCurry, University of Pennsylvania Jeffrey Kallberg, University of Pennsylvania Michehe Craig McDonald, Richard Stockton College Kathy Peiss, University of Pennsylvania Roderick McDonald, Rider University ADVISORY COUNCIL Ratterson McPherson, American Philosophical Society Rosalind Remet, Remer andTalbott, Chair Jennifer Morgan, New York University Richard Beeman, University of Pennsylvania PhiHP Morgan, Johns Hopkins Umverstty Wayne K. Bodle, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Carla MuMord> ^ Pennsylvania State Univers,ty Toni Bowers, University of Pennsylvania John Murrio, Princeton University Douglas Bradburn, SUNY, Binghamtom Momca NW Lehl?h Umversltl Francis Bremer, Millersville University Mson Gi,ert 01son> Umverslty of Maryland Christopher Brown, Columbia University WAm A'Pencak-Pe[™ylvama State University Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Brigham Young University Kathleen Brown, University of Pennsylvania Lois Green Carr, St. Marys City Commission Lisa Rosner- **** Stockton C(%e of Newjersey Max C. Cavitch, University of Pennsylvania Timoth>'Shannon> GettysburS Co!lege Paul G. E. Clemens, Rutgers University J350" Sharpies,The CathoHc University of America Elaine Forman Crane, Fordham University David Silverman> GeorSe Washington University Toby L. Dite, Johns Hopkins University Robert Bkr St GeorSe' Umversity of Pennsylvania Richard S. Dunn, American Philosophical Society PageTalbott, Histoncal Society of Pennsylvania Antonio Feros, University of Pennsylvania John C Van Home' Llbrary ^P311/ of Philadelphia Ignacio Gallup-Díaz, Bryn Mawr College Da"11 Waldstreicher, Temple University Jack P. Greene, Johns Hopkins University StePhanie Grauman Wolf>MCEAS Stephen Hahn, University of Pennsylvania Michael Zuckerman, University of Pennsylvania C. Dallett Hemphill, Ursinus College EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES: Ronald Hoffinan, Omohundro Institute of AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL Early American History and Culture C. Dallett Hemphill, Ursinus College

Direct all submissions and editorial correspondence to C. Dallett Hemphill, Department of History, Ursinus College, RO. Box 1000, Collegeville, PA 19426-1000. Email: easjournal# sas.upenn.edu. For information on submitting articles, please visit http://www.mceas.org.

Direct all business correspondence to Journals Division, University of Pennsylvania Press, 3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-4112. Telephone 215-573-1295. Fax 215-746-3636. [email protected]. http://eas.pennpress.org.

Cover art: "Mr. Mathew Carey Printer," in Whitestone's Town and Country Magazine, or, Irish Miscellanyfor June, 1784, Dublin, 1784. Original in Marsh's Library, Dublin.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:29:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Early American Studies An Interdisciplinary Journal

Volume 11, Number 3 Fall 2013

Early American Studies (ISSN 1543-4273) is published triannually by The McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:29:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Early American Studies An Interdisciplinary Journal VOLUME 11, NUMBER 3 (FALL 2013)

ISSN 1543-4273 EDITORIAL BOARD

Copyright © 2013 The McNeil Center for Nicole Eustace, New York University Early American Studies. Edith Celles, Stanford University All rights reserved. Cathy Matson, University of Delaware Printed in the U.S.A. on acid-free paper. Roderick McDonald, Rider University EDITOR Carla Mulford, The Pennsylvania State University William Pencak, The Pennsylvania State University C. Dallett Hemphill Rosalind Remer, Remer & Talbott, Inc. Ursinus College Daniel K. Richter, The McNeil Center for Early American ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR Studies, University of Pennsylvania Sarah Rodriguez John Wood Sweet, University of North Carolina Stephanie Grauman Wolf, The McNeil Center for Early American Studies

None of the contents of this journal may be reproduced without prior written con sent of the University of Pennsylvania Press. Authorization to photocopy is granted by the University of Pennsylvania Press for individuals and for libraries or other users registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) Transaction Report ing Service, provided that all required fees are verified with the CCC and payments are remitted direcdy to the CCC, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923. This consent does not extend to other kinds of copying for general distribution, for adver tising or promotional purposes, for creating new collective works, for database retrieval, or for resale.

2014 SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION (USD) Print and electronic: Individuals: $37; Students: $20; Institutions: $78 Single issues: $25 International subscribers: please add $18 per year for shipping. Electronic-only: Individuals: $30; Institutions: $66

Prepayment is required. Please direct all subscription orders, inquiries, requests for single issues, address changes, and other business communications to the publisher's subscription service as follows: The Sheridan Press, Attn: Penn Press Journals, P.O. Box 465, Hanover, PA 17331. Phone: 717-632-3535, ask for subscriber services. Fax: 717-633-8920. Email: [email protected]. Orders may be charged to MasterCard, Visa, Discover, and American Express credit cards. Checks and money orders should be made payable to "University of Pennsylvania Press" and sent to the address printed directly above. For renewals and claims, please be sure to indicate your subscriber account number, invoice number, and journal name.

Postmaster: Please send all address changes to The Sheridan Press, Attn: Penn Press Journals, P.O. Box 465, Hanover, PA 17331.

Visit the Early American Studies website at http://eas.pennpress.org.

Special Issue: Ireland, America, and Mathew Carey

Contents

Special Issue Introduction Cathy Matson and James N. Green

Mathew Carey, Ireland, and the "Empire for Liberty" in America Maurice J. Bric

"A Reciprocity of Advantages": Carey, Hamilton, and the American Protective Doctrine Stephen Meardon

Mathew Carey's Learning Experience: Commerce, Manufacturing, and the Panic of 1819 Cathy Matson

The Statistical Turn in Early American Political Economy: Mathew Carey and the Authority of Numbers Martin Ohman

Trans-Atlantic Migration and the Printing Trade in Revolutionary America Joseph M. Adelman

"I was always dispos'd to be serviceable to you, tho' it seems I was once unlucky": Mathew Carey's Relationship with Benjamin Franklin James N. Green

Furious Booksellers: The "American Copy" of the Waverley Novels and the Language of the Book Trade Joseph Rezek

Afterword: Why Should We Listen to Mathew Carey? Martin J. Burke

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:29:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms THE McNElL CENTER FOR EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:29:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Ireland, America, and Mathew Carey: Special Issue Introduction Author(s): CATHY MATSON and JAMES N. GREEN Source: Early American Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3, Special Issue: Ireland, America, and Mathew Carey (Fall 2013), pp. 395-402 Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23547677 Accessed: 30-08-2018 10:27 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Early American Studies

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:27:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Ireland, America, and Mathew Carey

Special Issue Introduction

CATHY MATSON

University of Delaware

JAMES N. GREEN Library Company of Philadelphia

Mathew Carey (1760-1839) rose quickly as an influential journalist and editor in Ireland at the end of the eighteenth century, and he became the most important publisher living in America during the early nineteenth century. He was also one of the era's most significant political economists, and, although he generally labored behind the scenes and often wrote anon ymously, he had a profound effect in shaping the early republic's political culture. Indeed, Carey crossed paths with some of the most eminent figures in early American political, economic, and cultural affairs, and probably with all its printers and publishers. He lived during the rapid ascent of an Atlantic world of circulating print, as well as the heady era of transnational revolutions and developmental transformations, and Carey placed himself willingly, even urgently, at the center of this era's deepest controversies. So it was fitting to hold a major trans-Atlantic conference to explore the contributions of this remarkable figure. The first part of this conference was held October 27-29, 2011, cosponsored by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Program in Early American Economy and Society, the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, and the Library Company of Phil adelphia, which holds almost every printed piece published or written by Carey. Most of the contributions in this special issue have been drawn from the many papers presented in a two-day discussion that reflected on two overlapping themes in Carey's influential and multifaceted contributions:

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:27:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 396 I Early American Studies ' Fall 2013

his innovative strategies in the business of printing and publishing, as well as his role at the center of political and economic discourse during the heady years between 1780 and 1830. Another article was presented during the second leg of this trans-Atlantic conference, which was held in Dublin, November 17-19, 2011. The afterword weaves the articles' themes together and reflects on Carey's contributions to the worlds of print and political economy.1 As the authors in this issue make clear, Carey forged the ideological zeal and business strategies that catapulted him into North American promi nence while still in his native Ireland. Born in Dublin in 1760, he set his head and heart on becoming a printer while he was still quite young. But as he learned the skills of printing and publishing, Carey developed the intel lectual convictions that he would doggedly defend for the rest of his life. He also became convinced in these early years that injustices, whether stem ming from personal or governmental wrongs, must be brought into the light of public discussion and resolution. There was no better remedy for injustice than an informed citizenry instructing an enlightened government, and no better place for this to unfold, argued Carey, than in the era's flourishing print culture. Early in his career, while he was still an apprentice printer, Carey's intel lectual convictions, as well as his penchant for expressing them in print, put him at the center of a controversy over a proposed repeal of the Penal Laws that had long oppressed the Catholics of Ireland. In 1781 he wrote and began to print a pamphlet called The Urgent Necessity of an Immediate Repeal of the Whole Penal Code Candidly Considered. The mere advertisement of the title alarmed the Protestant ascendancy and rankled the Catholic establish ment, which was waging a more gradualist campaign for repeal. The pamphlet was suppressed before the printing was complete, and Carey was whisked off to Paris to avoid prosecution for sedition. He made the most of his time abroad by meeting (and doing some printing for) Benjamin Franklin and befriending the Marquis de Lafayette. By 1783 the threat of prosecution

1. The full program for the first part of this conference, in Philadelphia, can be found at www.hbrarycompany.org/careyconference. The second part of this confer ence took place at Trinity College Dublin, and it was a collaborative effort of the Centre for Irish-Scottish and Comparative Studies and Trinity College Dublin, the Trinity Long Room Hub, the National Library of Ireland, University College Dub lin, and the University of Aberdeen. The editors of this special issue wish to thank ah the authors for their stimulating papers and conference presentations in Philadel phia and Dublin.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:27:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Maison and Green • Special Issue Introduction \ 397 had dwindled, so he returned to Dublin and became the editor of the Volun teers Journal, the voice of the militias organized to defend Ireland from French invasion when regular British soldiers were withdrawn to fight in America. In 1784 his newspaper's staunch support of a protective tariff for Ireland, a measure that he believed would bolster the island's manufacturers and small producers in the face of historically harmful English competition, got him into trouble again. He published two cartoons depicting a hanged traitor labeled "Jacky Finance," easily identified as the Irish Parliamentarian John Foster. The House of Commons ordered Carey's arrest for sedition, and a wide swathe of the public rallied behind him as the House inconclu sively debated his fate. With his case still unresolved in the fall of 1784, Carey fled on the ship America to Philadelphia. Shortly after he landed in Philadelphia, Carey launched the Pennsylvania Evening Herald, with the help of a loan from Lafayette. Far from being a thorn in the establishment's side, his paper took a strong pro-Franklin and later pro-Federalist position. In Philadelphia his already rooted principles of religious toleration, wide participation in a public political discourse, and an economy bolstered by protectionism met with a largely favorable recep tion. Even as a newcomer to Philadelphia, Carey inserted himself into the political controversies of the 1780s and beseeched his readers to set aside political factionalism and reject political and economic policies that harmed the crucial goal of national unity. The Herald, however, was not much of a financial success, so Carey began to set his sights on something bigger. In October 1786 he joined with five other partners to publish the monthly Columbian Magazine. But within two months he had quarreled with his partners and had set up a rival magazine on his own called the American Museum. All previous American magazines had been directed to a local or regional audience, but both these magazines sought a national audience for substantial essays and reports that would promote readers' reflections on politics, culture, and the economy. As Carey disengaged from newspaper publishing, he devoted more and more of his considerable energy to developing that wider audience for the Museum, appealing to fellow printers in every state for help with gathering subscrip tions and distributing the monthly issues. In Carey's hands, the American Museum become a repository of Federalist commentaries about the Constitution, the First Bank of the United States, commercial tariffs, and structuring the post-Revolutionary economy. As the essays in this special issue attest, Carey was a principled supporter of many economic policies associated with Federalists, including his long-standing

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:27:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 398 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

advocacy of protective tariffs and his later support for the national Bank alongside state banks. Carey's able editorship brought him to the attention of Federalist political and literary figures throughout the country. But by the end of the first Washington administration, Carey's enthusiasm for the French Revolution and his growing discomfort with Hamilton's pro-British economic policies were eroding his Federalist support. At the same time, widespread Federalist hatred of Irish immigrants was pulling Carey toward towering opposition figures such as Madison and Jefferson, whose pro French associations grew stronger during the 1790s. Meanwhile, despite the magazine's high reputation, it barely provided him with a decent living. In these early post-Revolutionary years, transpor tation, communication, and financial networks were unreliable, and in many cases it proved impossible to get the magazines out to the far-flung sub scribers on time and to get their payments back to him. In 1792 he closed the magazine down, but over its unusually long run Carey had cultivated enduring relationships with leading figures well beyond Philadelphia, and he had begun to learn about building distribution networks and cultivating public opinion—both of which were invaluable to him during the coming decade.

Even before he gave up periodical publishing, Carey began to develop a secondary business as a publisher of Catholic books, beginning with a few small, cheap devotional books, and then with typical bravado moving on quickly to publish the first American edition of the Catholic Douay Bible in 1790. It was a small edition that he sold in advance by subscription, but it proved a modest success, and it fostered an ambition to expand his profile in the bookselling business. With recommendations from his friends among the merchant and political elites, he was able to import large shipments of books on long credit from booksellers in London, Edinburgh, and Glas gow—and from his old friends in Dublin. This sudden plunge into book importing proved to be a means to a very different end. Carey had not forgotten his passionate defense of native man ufactures in Ireland, and by importing so many books he knew very well that he was sending precious specie abroad, fueling the North American demand for foreign luxuries, and taking work from American printers, bookbinders, and papermakers. What he really wanted to be was a publisher of American books, or at least of American editions of British books, and on a very large sale. But he lacked the capital. It was an accepted fact in the book trade at the time that the only sound capital basis for publishing was a stock of books. Carey's only real asset was the credit he had with foreign

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:27:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Maison and Green • Special Issue Introduction | 399 booksellers, so he used it to acquire that necessary stock of books. Then, in 1794 and 1795, he embarked on two large editions of expensive, heavily illustrated books that cost him a colossal sum—probably over $40,000— which he financed by paying printers, bookbinders, and papermakers with promissory notes, using his (as yet unsold) book stock as collateral. Thus, the capital he used to get his start as an American publisher was supplied by the publishers of London. Over the two years it took him to finish these books, Carey sold off his printing office and began to buy the labor of other printers, just as he bought paper or bookbinding from others. He was one of the first Ameri cans to make this transition from printer to publisher and from artisan to manufacturer, the transition that came to define the nascent American pub lishing trade. It seems like a brilliant strategic move, and so it is all the more astonishing that Carey had at that point given no thought to the marketing or distribution of these expensive books. He seems to have believed they would sell themselves. As the notes to local artisans began to fall due, he turned in desperation to the itinerant Anglican clergyman and traveling book salesman Mason Locke Weems. Parson Weems sold huge numbers of books for Carey in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, thereby prevent ing the house of cards from collapsing. Unfortunately, the expenses of Weems's travels and the cost of his various middlemen ate up all the profit. Carey still had not paid off his debts to foreign booksellers, and to get out from under them to save his business, he simply stopped making payments. This act burned his bridges to England, but it was less risky than it might have been because by this time he had broken definitively with the Federalists over the diplomatic agreement with England that became Jay's Treaty. His personal repudiation of British loans was masked by a principled refusal to do business with them. Once the Alien and Sedition Acts—aimed especially at Irish immigrants and publish ers—made Federalist intentions even clearer in 1798, Carey in effect shut down his publishing business. With Jefferson's election, though, it came back to life. In a burst of opti mism he published a large-format edition of the King James Bible in 1801, which he sold nationwide by means of a network of postmasters newly appointed by Jefferson. In 1802 his credit troubles melted away when he accepted a seat on the board of the Bank of Pennsylvania as a reward for his support of Jefferson. (He soon resumed payment on his British debt.) This was the first time that he had ready access to bank capital. He used it to finance the purchase of enough type to keep the text of his Bible con stantly standing ready to print, and to buy the type for a small-format Bible

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:27:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 400 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

already composed. Thus, his Bibles gained a reputation for textual accuracy, and because he did not need to keep resetting the type for each impression, he could undersell his competitors. This gave him a virtual monopoly on Bible production in the United States, which made him a wealthy man at last. Over the next twenty years, Carey published about a thousand other books: science and medical treatises, novels, theater criticism, guides for the mechanical arts, compilations of humorous anecdotes, travel accounts, and advice manuals on comportment. Also in 1801 he convened the first of a series of booksellers' trade fairs, which facilitated exchanges among publish ers all over the country. From then on, to gain entry to the publishing trade, printers had to abide by the rules and customs established at the fairs, under Carey's guidance. Thus, he became the largest publisher in America and the undisputed leader of the industry. He retired in 1822, leaving the busi ness to his son Henry Charles Carey, who in time became not only a greater publisher than his father, but a greater economist as well. As articles in this special issue emphasize, Carey's identity as an Irish American and a Catholic, and his contributions to economics and politics are inseparable from the trans-Atlantic print culture of the early national era. He wrote on the political economy of the American union and federal ism, the nature of national authority over citizens of the republic, religious toleration and Catholic identity in the new nation, mounting racial and ethnic tensions, continuing public health crises and poverty, and much more during a heady era of competitive book and newspaper publishing. In addi tion, Carey's own identity as an Irish Catholic and nationalist political econ omist infused all his efforts to enrich the public discourse for his American readers.

Carey brought to Philadelphia the elements of a political economy that were evident during his teen years in Ireland as a dissenting publisher. Although the political and social issues of early America were dramatically different from those facing Ireland, Carey steadfastly advocated deeper gov ernment involvement in transforming the small producer republic into an entrepreneurial nation of interdependent regions. And despite his closeness to Jeffersonians in Philadelphia and the national Congress, Carey distanced himself from their faith in state and local banks and held firmly to his earlier advocacy of a national bank. During the debates over rechartering the Bank of the United States, he demonstrated his aloofness from party loyalty to defend the institution that Jeffersonians wished to destroy. While his and

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:27:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Maison and Green ' Special Issue Introduction | 401 others' arguments failed to secure a recharter of the Bank in 1811, the fis cal and social dislocations of the ensuing War of 1812 seemed to validate Carey's position. The need for strong protective tariffs and the regulatory functions of central institutions such as the Bank were, for Carey, the fundamental start ing point for improving American commercial and consumer independence from England—and Carey was finally beginning to win over state and national policy makers. In one of Carey's most widely read works, The Olive Branch; or, Faults on Both Sides (1814), he exposed both political party per suasions as entirely too partial, shrill, and factional to sustain the federal union and the essential economic policies that would achieve national great ness. By 1816, as the nation teetered on the brink of economic trauma once again, he had won over key figures to his view, and Congress created the Second Bank of the United States. The Olive Branch went through ten editions in the first five years of its publication. The Panic of 1819 ushered in an unprecedented level of hardship throughout the country. Hundreds of small manufacturers became insol vent, thousands of small entrepreneurs and shopkeepers failed, and tens of thousands of Americans became unemployed for years. Carey faced such "hard times," as contemporaries called the panic, by continuing to publish appeals for policies long associated with his name—for example, he elabo rated rather than innovated on his calls for a high protective tariff and gov ernment support for small manufacturing during the depression of the 1820s. But surrounded by dire circumstances and, from his point of view, the persistent foolishness of economic policy makers, Carey also undertook an extended period of study to refute the "mistaken views of Adam Smith" and other prevailing economic doctrines. The result of these observations was not significant changes to Carey's own proposed policy remedies but rather a sharpened critique of classical economic theories and greater sense of urgency to eliminate English inter ference in the American economy. For example, Carey railed against English auction agents who flooded American cities with imports, and, viewing the domestic markets that lay in ruins during the depression, he became a strong advocate of government investment in roads and canals finking the hinterlands to coastal cities. As articles in this special issue underscore, the Panic of 1819 inspired Carey to redouble his efforts to create reform societies. These societies, he hoped, would unite the interests of manufacturers and commercial farmers, compile "scientific" information about the character and extent of the depression, and provide public charity

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:27:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 402 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

to the unemployed and chronically poor who were, he argued, not idle but rather victims of international commercial disarray and unenlightened gov ernment leaders. By 1824 Henry Clay's famous speech on the necessity of an "American System" of high tariffs, extensive infrastructure, and a national bank embodied what Carey had long advocated for the North American political economy.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:27:09 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Mathew Carey, Ireland, and the "Empire for Liberty" in America Author(s): MAURICE J. BRIC Source: Early American Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3, Special Issue: Ireland, America, and Mathew Carey (Fall 2013), pp. 403-430 Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23547678 Accessed: 30-08-2018 10:30 UTC

REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23547678?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Early American Studies

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mathew Carey, Ireland, and the "Empire for Liberty" in America

MAURICE J. BRIC University College Dublin

abstract This article sets the American career of Mathew Carey against his political and publishing involvements in Ireland. Arriving as Carey did in America at the age of twenty-four, these involvements were short-lived, but their influence was long lasting. His largely overlooked pamphlet, The Urgent Necessity, published in Ireland in 1781, clearly revealed his despair that "oligarchy" could promote reform and that, para doxically, it could nurture only resentments and prejudices. For him, the breaking of oligarchy was the only way in which a harmonious and self confident polity could be cultivated. The attempts of the Irish administra tion to muzzle his newspapers also encouraged a commitment to cham pion the freedom of the press in America not only as a just cause but as a way of venting differing opinions and, thus, create a more inclusive polity. Carey was ever the champion of accommodation in his adopted city of Philadelphia, and this article suggests an explanation by reference to his Irish experiences and how they predisposed him to support Jeffersonian Republicanism.

Not for the first time, Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1826 of an American "empire for liberty" that would be animated by the integrity of its citizens rather than by the hierarchical polities and territorial ambitions of the Old World.1 The extent to which Americans could eschew any lingering attach ments to that abandoned world was a test of their civic virtue and a measure

For their comments on an earlier draft of this paper, I am grateful to James Kelly, Charles Ivar McGrath, and Eamon O'Flaherty. I am also grateful to James N. Green, Cathy Matson, Peter S. Onuf, Andrew Shankman, and the other members of the Worlds of Mathew Carey conference. 1. Although the term was first used in 1780 to refer to the physical expansion of America, it also suggested a particular type of polity. See Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville, 2000), 2, 7, and pas sim, and Onuf, '"Empire for Liberty': Center and Peripheries in Postcolonial America," in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires:

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 404 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

of their worth as the decisive drivers of republican government. This was a particular challenge for immigrants not least because, as John Adams put it in 1780, once arrived, they should promote "our language, our laws, our customs, and humours of our people."2 To do otherwise would recognize a level of cultural dependence on the Old World that was incompatible with republican virtue.3 It would also indulge the persistence of foreign metro poles, something that was anathema to "Jefferson's empire." Such views posed particular challenges for Irish immigrants and for those who spoke for them, especially within America's growing Catholic population, not least because by definition such immigrants brought their own particular métropoles with them. The first of these was informed by universal Catholi cism, and the second was a result of focusing the social and political griev ances of contemporary Ireland on London after the Act of Union was passed in 1800. In America an Irish diaspora gave these métropoles contin uing life and energy, especially as increasing numbers of Irish emigrants streamed into the country after 1783.4 In trying to incorporate universal Catholicism and the "corruption" of the British Empire in Ireland into their rhetoric and actions as Americans, however, many of these immigrants were perceived to put private loyalties before the objective interests of the United States. For his part, the influential Irish-born writer Mathew Carey was also influenced by what he had experienced in Ireland before he sailed for Philadelphia in 1784. Well before he arrived in America on November 1, 1784, Carey had become a powerful opponent of oligarchy and the political systems that

Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500-1800 (New York, 2002), 301-18. See also John M. Murrin, "The Jeffersonian Triumph and American Exceptionalism," Journal of the Early Republic (hereinafter JER) 20 (Spring 2000): 2-3. 2. John Adams to the President of Congress, June 29,1780, in The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 10 vols. (Boston, 1850-51), 7:209; emphasis added. 3. For the concept of virtue in early national America, see Richard Vetterli and Gary Bryner, eds., In Search of the Republic: Public Virtue and the Roots of American Government, rev. ed. (Lanham, Md., 1996); and Richard K. Matthews, ed., Virtue, Corruption and Self-Interest: Political Values in the Eighteenth Century (Bethlehem, Pa., 1994). For a wider discussion, see Daniel T. Rogers, "Republicanism: The Career of a Concept," Journal of American History (hereinafter JAH) 79 (June 1992): 11-38. 4. For Irish immigration to late eighteenth-century Philadelphia, see Maurice J. Brie, Ireland, Philadelphia and the Re-invention of America, 1760-1800 (Dublin, 2009), 94-139.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Bric • Mathew Carey, Ireland, and the "Empire for Liberty" in America \ 405 supported and promoted it. It was particularly "wretched" in Ireland, not least because it was defined by religion, what he later called a "Protestant Ascendancy."s As a Catholic Irishman, Carey could not justify such a pol ity—in natural justice, humanity, or historical explanation—especially because the tyranny of the Penal Laws was keeping it in place. Neither could he see it encouraging the type of social rapport that was for him a prerequisite for stability and progress. Instead, oligarchy had not only divided the nation into mutually antagonistic interests but also inflicted "the most deplorable wretchedness and misery" on the country at large.6 From this Carey also made a generic point that transcended religion and national ity: that oligarchy in any form was not a template for stability and justice, much less for progress and prosperity.7 Although he retained these views throughout his life, they were first expressed in a controversial pamphlet

5. Mathew Carey, Sketch of the Irish Penal Code, Entitled "Laws to Prevent the Growth of Popery": But Really Intended, and with Successful Effect, to Degrade, Debase, and Enslave the Roman Catholics of Ireland, and to Divest Them of Their Estates (Philadelphia, 1823), 3-4. For the use and significance of the term Protestant Ascen dancy, see the debate among W. J. McCormack, James Kelly, and Jacqueline Hill in W. J. McCormick, "Eighteenth-Century Ascendancy: Yeats and the Historians," Eighteenth-Century Ireland (hereinafter ECI) 4 (1989): 159-81 (which also includes a bibliography on the exchange as it stood at that time); James Kelly, "Eighteenth Century Ascendancy: A Commentary," ECI 5 (1990): 173-87; and Jacqueline Hill, "The Meaning and Significance of 'Protestant Ascendancy,' 1787-1840," in Joint Meeting of the Royal Irish Academy and the British Academy, Ireland after the Union (Oxford, 1989), 1-22, in which she regards the term as "a slogan to defend the retention of privilege in Protestant hands [and as such] ... a selfish, negative and reactionary concept" (2). For the most influential use of the term, by Bishop Richard Woodward of Cloyne (1781-94) in 1787 in the context of defending the "Protestant interest" from the challenges of the Rightboys, as well as recent historio graphical reflections on the use of the term Protestant Ascendancy, see James Kelly, "Defending the Established Order: Richard Woodward," in James Kelly, John McCafferty, and Charles Ivar McGrath, eds., People, Politics and Power (Dublin, 2009), 143-74. For the context in which the term appeared, see James Kelly, "Inter denominational Relations and Religious Toleration in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The 'Paper War' of 1786-88," ECI 3 (1988); and Maurice J. Brie, "Priests, Parsons and Politics: The Rightboy Protest in County Cork, 1785-1788," Past and Present 100 (August 1983), 100-123. 6. Carey, Sketch of the Irish Penal Code, 4-5. 7. For the associated point that it was the administration rather than the Irish Parliament that pushed the repeal of the Penal Laws, see Eamon O'Flaherty, "Ecclesiastical Politics and the Dismantling of the Penal Laws in Ireland, 1774-82," Irish Historical Studies (hereinafter IHS) 26 (1988): 33-50.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 406 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

that was printed in Dublin in 1781, The Urgent Necessity of an Immediate Repeal of the Whole Penal Code Candidly Considered.,8 In making his case, Carey argued that though the Reformation was a worthy stand against "outrageous" papal intrusions into civil matters, the irony was that the "galling yoke" of Rome had been replaced by something similar at home. Moreover, as Catholicism came to be associated with dis loyalty to the new polity, the estates of its lay leaders were "marked out" for attainder. Carey suggested that this was understandable where and when such leaders had rebelled against the established state, but the procedures of the various "inquisitions" that sat during times of comparative peace were, in the words of David Hume, "contrary to the clearest principles of law and natural equity." As a result, Catholic leaders did not see the law as a disinterested instrument that would protect their civil and religious rights. Carey wondered how, in these circumstances, Ireland's Catholic leaders could be expected to respect a regime that did not even acknowledge them and argued that eventually they became "exasperated" and were "provoked" into rebellion. As such, rebellion was as much a moral as it was a practical imperative: "Irish Catholics . . . found themselves entirely deprived of any other alternative, than absolute destmction, or manly resistance. They justly chose the latter: as its most pernicious consequences could not exceed what they had already suffered, and had ever reason to apprehend, in future, under the sanction of law."9

8. Although acknowledged as the reason for Carey's temporary exile in Paris (1781-83), the Urgent Necessity ofan Immediate Repeal of the Whole Penal Code Can didly Considered (Dublin, 1781) is usually discussed by reference to the publisher's advertisement of sale, which was circulated in November 1781 (see below). Follow ing the pamphlet's suppression, it was presumed that though it had been printed, it was never published, distributed, or sold. There is an incomplete and somewhat unpolished version of the Urgent Necessity in Carey's book collection, which is housed in the Library Company of Philadelphia. I am grateful to Dr. Jim Green for bringing this to my attention and for facilitating access to it. The Urgent Necessity is also analyzed in Michael Steven Carter, "Mathew Carey and the Public Emer gence of Catholicism in the Early Republic" (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 2006). 9. Carey, Urgent Necessity, 22,14, 57, 56; Hume is quoted on 29. For the "mark ing" of Irish estates, see Thomas Leland, The History of Ireland, 3 vols. (London, 1773), 3:166, as quoted in Carey, Urgent Necessity, 57. Carey's discussion of the inquisitions, especially as managed by Chichester and Strafford, was drawn from Henry Brooke, Tyral of the Roman Catholics (Dublin, 1762). For the inquisitions themselves, see Nicholas P. Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580-1650 (New York, 2001).

Carey knew that many would not accept his argument. But he also sug gested why. "Prejudice" had been nurtured over the years; in religious terms, Catholicism was seen as "ridiculous and contemptible," and in political terms, it had placed itself against Parliament and therefore against the will of the people. There were no ends to which such prejudice would not go to unravel the reformed state and destroy the new establishment, political as well as religious. According to Carey, rumors of "plots, conspiracies, massa cres, ôcc. &c." had been assiduously circulated to strengthen these biases, keep "the people in a continual alarm," and allege that Catholics could never be loyal citizens, all with the intention of reinforcing the oligarchic charac ter of the Protestant polity. Carey saw it as his duty to question the basis of these prejudices, especially as they had been colored by the most notorious "Catholic plot" of all: the violent and bloody rising of 1641.10 Though Carey's substantial "vindication" of the Catholics of 1641 did not appear until 1819, the Urgent Necessity argued in a preliminary way that Ireland's Catholics had been "unjustifiably calumniated" by incomplete and partisan histories such as Sir John Temple's The Irish Rebellion (London, 1646).11 Carey did not see himself as a Catholic apologist per se, however,

10. Carey, Urgent Necessity, 27, 14,17, 48. See also the preface to the first edition of Mathew Carey, Vindiciae Hibernicae; or, Ireland Vindicated: An Attempt to Expose a Few of the Multifarious Errors and Falsehoods Respecting Ireland. . . (Philadelphia, 1819), where Carey also claimed that the "falsehood and imposture" of the histories of the 1641 rebellion had led to "the most vulgar and rancorous prejudices," which in turn had led to "the odious code" of the Penal Laws and were "made subservient to the sinister purposes of a party or faction ... [by] wicked and profligate men"; see xi, 21. All subsequent citations from the Vindiciae are taken from the first edition. 11. Carey, Urgent Necessity, 58. See also Carey, Vindiciae Hibernicae. For the enduring influence of Temple's work on English attitudes to Ireland, especially "at times of crisis," and how it provided much "raw material from which Protestant memories were shaped and reshaped over the generations," see Raymond Gillespie, "Temple's Fate: Reading The Irish Rebellion in Late Seventeenth-Century Ireland," in Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer, eds., British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, U.K., 2005), 316, 333. For the views of David Hume and Thomas Leland on the rebellion, see David Berman, "David Hume on the 1641 Rebellion in Ireland," Studies 65 (1976): 101-12; and Joseph Liechty, "Testing the Depth of Catholic/Protestant Conflict: The Case of Thomas Leland's 'History of Ireland,' 1773," Archivium Hibernicum (hereinafter Arch. Hib.) 42 (1987): 13-28. For a wider analysis, see Jacqueline Hill, "Popery and Protestantism, Civil and Reli gious Liberty: The Disputed Lessons of Irish History, 1690-1812," Past and Present 118 (1988): 96-129; and Nicholas P. Canny, "The Politics of Irish History and Memory: At Home and Away" (unpublished lecture, University of Notre Dame, 2010). I am grateful to Professor Canny for making his lecture available to me. For the ways in which these histories were memorialized (and in some cases rebutted),

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 408 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

and he "studiously decline[d] every thing which might, in the most distant degree, involve a religious contest." Carey's stated purpose had a wider focus: to censure a historical record that in his view had contaminated the body politic, limited its ability to evolve organically and in harmony, and helped generate a rationale for the Penal Laws as a "device" to consolidate the Cromwellian and Williamite settlements of seventeenth-century Ire land.12 It also obscured what for him was an even more important point: that the 1641 rebellion had been raised in the name of traditional rights and liberties just as surely as the Glorious Revolution had been. In making this case, Carey stressed that Catholics could identify with the ancient English constitution just as readily as anybody else, and he refused to acknowledge that it should be appropriated by any one type of citizen over another: "I glory in the war of 1641: and hope the day will soon arrive, when all Irishmen will look up, with equal veneration, to its victims, as the English to a Hamden, or a Sidney. They will then be esteemed, as irish heroes, martyrs to their country's freedom, against the tyranny of Britain; and not as papistical rebels, deserving the vengeance of the law."13 Carey's differentiation between the "papistical" and the "Catholic" was something to which he would return later in his life.14 For the moment he observed that the majority of the population in Ireland were estranged from government and the government from them. Catholics were "disaffected" and, in Carey's opinion, they were made to feel so. If this was to be arrested, Carey suggested that Ireland needed a more inclusive polity that would promote harmony, mutual respect, and toleration, as well as a specific

see T. C. Barnard, "The Uses of 23 October 1641 and Irish Protestant Celebra tions," English Historical Review 56 (October 1991): 889-920; and John Patrick Deluiy, "Ex Conflictu et Collisione: The Failure of Irish Historiography, 1745 to 1790," ECI15 (2000): 9-37. 12. For a discussion of a somewhat similar purpose to that in the Urgent Neces sity, see Martin J. Burke, "The Politics and Poetics of Nationalist Historiography: Mathew Carey and Vindiciae Hibernicae," in Joep Leerssen, A. H. van der Weel, and Bart Westerweel, eds., Forging in the Smithy: National Identity and Representation in Anglo-Irish Literary History (Atlanta, 1995), 183-94. 13. Carey, Urgent Necessity, 10, 64, 56. 14. For a discussion of similar distinctions in Ireland and how they were used to block Catholic emancipation after 1800, see Jacqueline R. Hill, "National Festivals, the State and 'Protestant Ascendancy' in Ireland, 1790-1829," IHS 24 (May 1984): 38, 42, and passim; Hill, "Popery and Protestantism, Civil and Religious Liberty," 104-7.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Bric • Mathew Carey, Ireland\ and the "Empire for Liberty" in America | 409 encouragement to Irish Catholics to "feel an interest in the state, by a par ticipation in its advantages. ... Then, having an equal interest in the consti tution, shall they take the usual share in its support."15 Such a polity would move beyond the narrow culture of seeing people as members of one or another church. The Penal Laws, however, were preventing what Carey later termed "an enlarged and liberal spirit of national feeling" whereby Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter could be "amalgamated into one solid mass of friends to their common country."16 Thus, though the Urgent Neces sity was often seen as a tirade against the Protestant Ascendancy and an aggressive plea for Catholicism, in many ways it was neither. Instead, it confronted an entrenched oligarchy that in Carey's opinion was preventing all Irishmen—whatever their background—from promoting the common good. Carey's question in 1781 was whether such a regime was appropriate for the late eighteenth century. His answer was that it was not. Such views would bring Carey to challenge Ireland's Catholic as well as Church of Ireland leaders and, in particular, to question the Catholic Committee's careful campaign to repeal the Penal Laws by diplomatic and pragmatic engagement with the government.17 As part of that campaign, Catholic leaders had already "displayed a magnanimity of national charac ter" by supporting Dublin Castle during the Anglo-American War.18 Shortly after France had declared its support for the American Revolution, Bishop Troy of Ossory called on Catholics to be loyal, whereas in Athy, County Kildare, Catholics were exhorted "in the most strenuous manner to

15. Carey, Urgent Necessity, 69, 73. An influential contemporary had already made a similar argument to "Confer benefits; expect affection; and receive gratitude. . . . Make people happy, and you will make them loyal"; see Thomas Campbell, Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland (Dublin, 1778), 300. For Leland's argument that it was impossible for Catholics to remain loyal during the 1641 rebellion, see Liechty, "Testing the Depth of Catholic/Protestant Conflict," 21, and passim. 16. Carey, Sketch of the Irish Penal Code, 7. 17. The Catholic Committee had been founded in 1759 to coordinate a cam paign to repeal the Penal Laws. See Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690-1830 (Dublin, 1992), 73-75. 18. Carey, Urgent Necessity, 62. For Carey's record that this support was of both monetary and strategic value, especially after France allied itself with the American colonists in March 1778, see ibid., 77. The most comprehensive treatment of Irish reactions to the American Revolution is in Vincent Morley, Irish Opinion and the American Revolution, 1760-1783 (Cambridge, U.K., 2002).

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 410 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

observe that faithful and loyal line of conduct, which will render you pleas ant to government and worthy of its benign attention towards you." As the Athy address makes clear, however, such statements had less to do with the Revolution itself than with the need to reassure the government that as a possible French invasion threatened to unseat the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, the country's Catholic leaders could be trusted, in the words of Kilkenny's Catholics, to "conduct ourselves in such a manner, as will fully evince our loyalty to his majesty, and satisfy our fellow Protestant sub jects."19 Such statements also vindicated the spirit of the Test Oath of 1774. This oath repudiated the Stuarts in favor of a "promise to maintain, support, and defend . . . the succession of the crown in his majesty's family," accepted that George III was not a heretic, and affirmed that Catholics could "keep faith" with him.20 Although for Catholic leaders it represented an important departure—in the first case because it disregarded the fact that promises that had been made to them both before and after the Treaty of Limerick had been broken, and in the second because it abandoned traditional loyal ties to the Stuarts—Carey suggested that the initiative was not being recip rocated by a government that "too well relish[es] the Sweets of your [Catholic] Slavery, to be willing to loose the horrid Fetters"; as a result, " very few opulent catholics" had taken it.21 For him this was all the more unfortunate because by enabling Catholics to associate with Hanoverian government, the Test Oath could generate a new type of polity without

19. These quotations have been drawn from Maurice J. Brie, "Ireland, America and the Reassessment of a Special Relationship, 1760-1783," ECI11 (1996): 101. For the boost that the first phase of repeal in 1778 gave to pro-administration feel ing among Irish Catholics, see O'Flaherty, "Ecclesiastical Politics," 38. 20. As quoted in Vincent Morley, "Catholic Disaffection and the Oath of Alle giance of 1774," in Kelly, McCafferty, and McGrath, People, Politics and Power, 123-24. See also Patrick Fagan, Divided Loyalties: The Question of the Oath for Irish Catholics in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1997). 21. "Advertisement to the Roman Catholics of Ireland," attached to the Urgent Necessity. For Carey's comments on how few Catholics took the oath (or how many were reluctant to do so), see ibid., 89; and Morley, "Catholic Disaffection and the Oath of Allegiance of 1774." Morley also makes the point that those who took the oath did so on the basis that loyalty was always due to the established government (133-36). For this point see also Arthur O'Leaiy, Loyalty Asserted] or, The New Test Oath Vindicated . . . (Cork, 1776). For Carey's characterization of a "violation of faith" in the past, see his Urgent Necessity, 38-42. Carey also argued that if Catholic leaders had not "foolishly relied on their enemies' word" at the time, "government would, at this day, probably wear a different aspect"; Carey, Urgent Necessity, 41.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Bric • Mathew Carey, Ireland, and the "Empire for Liberty" in America | 411 endangering the essential apparatus of the established state or compromis ing private religious belief. Indeed, far from accepting that such initiatives could strengthen the government, members of the administration often regarded them as covert attempts to subvert it.22 As a result, they continued to look to history to justify the nature of their polity. For many the survival of the Protestant Ascendancy demanded no less. For Carey it was clear that as a mode of governance, oligarchy could not be defended any longer. This was in marked contrast to the "liberal conduct" of contemporary Europe, which, despite being "absolutist" and Catholic for the most part, was abol ishing many conventions that had been introduced on the basis of religion. This was "much superior" to what was happening in Ireland, with the result that he feared that the historically admired English constitution would be tarnished and, with it, the ways in which Britain's renewed and wider cul ture of empire might be seen.23 Carey regarded those who did not agree with him as self-interested, self righteous, or both. He thought his critics were also in effect fomenting a rebellion among a majority of the people who had "[nojthing to lose, and every thing to gain, by commotion" against "virtual" slavery. The unfolding American Revolution was showing the way forward. As colonial America had by then "nearly emancipated herself from Slavery," Carey called on his fellow Catholics to bring their own "slavery" to an end. In doing so, they would also break the connection with England and thus deprive oligarchy in Ireland of its efforts to "take into their own Hands the executive Part of our Government; and with a dictatorial Power, prescribe Laws to their Fellow-Subjects." For Carey the invidiousness of the one had been possible only by the persistent invidiousness of the other. As he drew parallels with both the 1630s and the 1770s, however, not only Dublin Castle but also

22. For another context for similar worries, see Maurice J. Brie, "The Tithe System in Eighteenth-Century Ireland," Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 136 (1986): 271-88, where Bishop Woodward's comment (although not made until 1787) expressed fears that the contemporary popular protest against tithes had not only the "subversion" of the Church of Ireland in view but that of the state itself: "the [Established] Church ... is so essentially incorporated with the State, that the Subversion of the one must necessarily overthrow the other." See Richard Wood ward, The Present State of the Church of Ireland (Dublin, 1787), 6. That the contro versy surrounding the Test Oath influenced his defence of Catholics in America is clear from Carey's Calumnies ofVerus; or, Catholics Vindicated, from Certain Old Slan ders Lately Revived (Philadelphia, 1792), as discussed in M. S. Carter, "Mathew Carey and the Public Emergence of Catholicism," 211-30. 23. Carey, Urgent Necessity, 87-88, 63.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 412 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

the Catholic Committee took fright, especially after he poked the elephant in the room: "the very least that can be done ... is to restore them [Catho lics] to the state in which their ancestors were placed by the Limerick articles. . . . The present generation of protestants are . . . indispensably bound to restore those rights; and thus expatiate the injustice of their ances tors."24 Having also "excited" his Catholic readers in the very title of his pam phlet, "to a just Sense of their civil and religious rights," Carey implied that if the Penal Laws were not repealed, revolution would follow and Ireland's Catholics would undo the Protestant establishment at the earliest opportu nity.25 Nothing could have been more unwelcome to the Catholic Commit tee. Whatever its differences with the administration, it was convinced that they were best solved by rational argument and diplomacy with Dublin Castle rather than by violence or "French intrigue."26 Far from being "pusil lanimous," as Carey described it, the committee believed that it was also important to preserve its "natural leadership" from the would-be leaders of popular protest and radical movements. No less than Dublin Castle, it appreciated the potential of these alternative "moral economies" for its own social and political leadership as well as for that of its church.27 As a result, and perhaps not without surprise, after the Urgent Necessity was advertised in both the Dublin Evening Post and Faulkner's Dublin Journal on November 10, 1781, and promotional handbills "of a still more alarming nature" were

24. Ibid., 70, 79; "Advertisement to the Roman Catholics of Ireland," 90-91. 25. "Advertisement to the Roman Catholics of Ireland." 26. For the assumption that Irish Catholics were still being influenced by France, see Gerard O'Brien, "Francophobia in Later Eighteenth-Century Irish History," in Hugh Gough and David Dickson, eds., Ireland and the French Revolution (Dublin, 1990), 40-51. For an example of these continuing suspicions and how they were part of contemporary politics, see the Hibernian Journal (Dublin), May 10, 1784, where it was reported that an emergency meeting of "the Select Committee of the Roman Catholics" in Dublin dismissed as "idle" an allegation that Ireland's Catho lics had "invite[d] the natural enemies of the kingdom to invade the land," and that the story was little more than "a paltry trick ... to form idle distinctions . . . [and] to review the old English cant of Protestant interest—and Catholic interest—to divide and destroy." 27. "Advertisement to the Roman Catholics of Ireland"; Thomas Bardett, "An End to Moral Economy? The Irish Militia Disturbances of 1793," Past and Present 99 (May 1983), 41-64; James Kelly, "The Genesis of the 'Protestant Ascendancy': The Rightboy Disturbances of the 1780s and Their Impact upon Protestant Opin ion," in Gerard O'Brien, ed., Parliament, Politics and People: Essays in Eighteenth Century Irish History (Dublin, 1989), 93-127.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Bric • Mathew Carey, Ireland, and the "Empire for Liberty" in America \ 413 circulated in Dublin "and affixed to the doors of some chapels," nearly sixty Catholic leaders—including Lords Kenmare and Fingal—denounced it as "disloyal and seditious," resolved to discover and prosecute "the libellous and inflammatory author," and eventually had the proposed pamphlet sup pressed.28 In the event, Carey evaded possible prosecution by fleeing to France, where he remained in temporary exile until 1783. As he did so, he realized that oligarchy could operate outside as well as inside the establish ment and that it was not confined to any one church. Carey's dismay did not diminish after he returned to Dublin. On October 13, 1783, he launched the Volunteers Journal; or, Irish Herald "lor the great purposes of perpetuating . . . Public Spirit ... to point out what further may be necessary to be done for effecting ... the Renovation of our Consti tution . . . [and] to [promote] the closest bonds of harmony and concord in every denomination of Irishmen." While the Journal left few doubts about Carey's continuing radicalism, it also maintained that the campaign for par liamentary reform should incorporate the arguments of the Catholic Com mittee to extend the franchise to Catholics. Carey reasoned that the one made no sense without the other. The Journal rejected as "absurd the argu ment, that communicating liberty to our Roman Catholic brethren would be the means of subverting the Protestant government of this country." This was not just a matter of superseding religion as a badge of Irish citizen ship. As one of Carey's correspondents put it, it underlined that when Ire land put its "intestine divisions" behind it, "the giant of discord fled before us, and from a nation of slaves we became a dignified people." Division suggested dependency. The opposite—harmony—suggested independence and virtue. To argue otherwise was to continue the slavery of Ireland.29

28. The advertisements stated that the pamphlet would be published on the following day. For the circulation of handbills, see DEP, November 15, 1781; and Eamon O'Flaherty, "The Catholic Question in Ireland, 1774-1793" (M.A. diss., University College Dublin, 1981), 54. I am grateful to Dr. O'Flaherty for allowing me to consult his copy of his dissertation. The resolution of the fifty-seven Catholic leaders is in DEP, November 15, 1781. See also R. D. Edwards, ed., "The Minute Book of the Catholic Committee, 1773-92," Arch. Hib. 9 (1934): 61-63. 29. Volunteers Journal (hereinafter VJ) (Dublin), June 25, 1784; "The True-Born Irishman No. XII," VJ, December 1, 1783; "To the Volunteers of Ireland," VJ, November 5, 1783. For the tensions between these two relevant levels of reform, see James Kelly, "The Parliamentaiy Reform Movement of the 1780s and the Catholic Question," Arch. Hib. 63 (1988): 95-117. For this phase of Carey's career and his commentary on the politics of contemporary Ireland, see Edward C. Carter II, "Mathew Carey in Ireland, 1760-1784," Catholic Historical Review (hereinafter CHR) 51 (Januaiy 1966): 515-26.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 414 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

Such attitudes also questioned the integrity of Parliament itself, which in the opinion of one of the Journal s correspondents in April 1784 had been "reduced . . . from being the admiration of the world, to be the contempt of even their own countrymen." This contrasted with its situation in 1780 and 1782, when Parliament had successfully made the case for free trade and legislative independence, respectively. Many reformers believed that Dublin Castle was trying to back away from these concessions, however, especially with respect to how they were affecting commercial relationships among Ireland, Britain, and the extended empire of which they were all part. For Ireland, Luke Gardiner, M.P., proposed that within this wider economic area, Irish manufactures were best nurtured and encouraged by imposing protective duties on British imports. As the effective manager of the administration's business in the House of Commons, as well as the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, John Foster, M.P., opposed these proposals. As James Kelly has observed, his "preference was for the de-regulation of Anglo-Irish trade rather than protectionism, because [he] . . . believed that this was the way to foster a community of interests and commercial prosperity." The issue faced its first major hurdle in the House of Commons on April 2, 1784, during which a mob invaded the gallery and "harangu[ed] the members" on the need to protect Irish goods from British competition. After the measure was defeated, a "consid erable number of. . . distressed manufacturers" greeted those 123 members of Parliament who had defeated the motion with "hisses, groans, Sec."30 On April 5 the Journal suggested that the public was so incensed with Foster that he was "hanged" outside the Houses of Parliament. The Jour nal s lampoon included a mock speech from the dock in which Foster sup posedly acknowledged his "fraud and corruption . . . that virtue was all a cheat and that none but fools and madmen practised it." There was also a small engraving that showed Foster hanging from a noose under the inscrip tion "Thus Perish all Traitors to their Country." When Foster referred to this in the House of Commons, initially on April 5, he proposed that the Journal had "calculated to sow sedition among his Majesty's subjects, to

30. "To the Right Honourable J-hn F-st-r," VJ, April 9, 1784; James Kelly, Prelude to Union: Anglo-Irish Politics in the 1780s (Cork, 1992), 81; VJ, April 7, 1784. For the debate itself, see The Parliamentary Register; or, History of the Proceed ings and Debates of the House of Commons of Ireland 3 (Dublin, 1784), 122-43. For the subsequent debate on "commercial propositions" that would regulate Anglo Irish trade to their mutual advantage, see Kelly, Prelude to Union, 131-87; and A. P. W. Malcomson,/o7m Foster: The Politics of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy (Oxford, 1978), 49-60 and passim.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Bric • Mathew Carey, Ireland, and the "Empire for Liberty" in America | 415 alienate their minds from his Majesty's government... in opposition to the laws of the land." On the following day, as the man deemed to be "solely responsible" for the offending articles, Carey was ordered to be taken into custody and taken before the bar of the House.31 Undaunted by the sum mons, the Journal published two further engravings on April 7, one depict ing Foster's tarring and feathering, the other showing his body stretched out next to a coffin, over which was the following "motto": "Behold the fate of the unnatural parricide, the villainous traitor, who having this morning justly suffered the punishment due to his manifold offences against the almost ruined constitution of his much injured country and her sorely dis tressed artists, was this evening cut down, and now lies under the gibbet without a single hand to lift the hated corpse into its last dreary mansion!"32 Foster felt these libels had gone too far. Carey, however, thought both the parliamentary debate and his ridicule of Foster were part of two important campaigns. The first of these aimed to reignite the nonimportation move ment, which had been so effective in obtaining free trade and which could be used once again to strengthen Irish manufactures. The second under lined the importance of a "free press."33 Foster's indictment of Carey was an essential riposte to both as well as a plan to silence one of their leading champions. It had also been influenced if not driven by the determination of Dublin Castle to destroy the Journall34 As a result, for radicals such as Carey the controversy was not only about the right to criticize a member of the administration, even in graphic terms. It was also about protecting something that had been "a pillar of strength in the worst of times, against the worst men, and on the most critical occasions and was adorned with public spirit, intrepidity and national honour . . . the prop of patriotism,

31. Foster is quoted in DEP, April 6, 1784 and Careys arrest is in Brian Inglis, The Freedom of the Press in Ireland\ 1784-1841 (London, 1954), 25 and passim. For Carey s account of his detention, including the alleged trespass on both his own personal rights and the wider freedom of the press, see "An Appeal to the Public," Vf April 23, 1784. 32. Even after Parliament deemed Carey guilty of libeling Foster, the VJ on May 26, 1784, published a lengthy "Epitaph" of "Jack Financier [John the Chancellor], Who, With inflexible constancy . . . Persisted in his country's ruin." Foster was made chancellor of the exchequer on April 22, 1784, having chaired the Committee on Ways and Means since 1777. 33. For the former, see, for example, the appeal to buy only Irish woolens, and therefore to promote "public spirit" in Ireland: "To the Friends of Protecting Duties," VJ, April 16, 1784. 34. E. Carter, "Mathew Carey in Ireland," 522.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 416 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

and the bulwark of virtue . . . the richest gem in the cap of liberty."35 It was about the right of the citizen to be informed and independent and, as a result, to be a man of integrity and virtue. As Foster presented what was called the "Bill for Securing the Liberty of the Press" (known informally as the Libel Bill) on April 8, 1784, it was clear that he understood the freedom of the press in a different way. He told the House of Commons that in his opinion "the manifest design of that bill was to preserve the liberty of the press by curbing its licentiousness, which of late had grown to such a degree of enormity as to become a national reproach."36 For his opponents, it was "a bill of resentment, not of redress" as well as "a most desperate and violent aim to effect the subversion of the Constitution."37 With its passage and the earlier rejection of protec tion duties, however, the journal concluded that "the patriotic spirit of the nation" had been unable to "withstand the insidious efforts of designing and interested men." The whole business had revealed a Parliament that was becoming increasingly compromised as well as unable and unwilling to break from its "grievous fetters" and represent "the genuine sentiments of the nation." It was also allowing aristocracy to reassert its influence over it to such an extent that the Journal wondered if the cures of 1780 and 1782 might turn out to be worse than the disease. As a result, whatever about the specifics of debates such as that on protection duties, the parliamentary supporters of the administration had regrouped and not only compromised the independence of the House of Commons but also "divid[ed] the nation" in pursuit of their own narrow purposes.38 In the meantime, Carey was arrested and detained, and he appeared before the Commons on April 19 to answer the charge that being the sup posed publisher of the Volunteers Journal, he had printed a "malicious, scan dalous and seditious libel, tending to excite rebellion among the people, and to create a division of this country from Great Britain."39 Foster left mem bers in no doubt about his opinion: Carey "deserved the greatest punish ment that could be inflicted on him," and he should be committed to

35. VJ, April 9,1784. 36. Quoted from the debates of the House of Commons in Freeman's Journal (Dublin), April 10, 1784. For the text of the bill, dated April 8, 1784, see VJ, April 12, 1784. 37. Quoted in Malcomson, John Foster, 49. 38. VJ, May 21, April 5, June 14, and April 12, 1784. 39. VJ, April 21, 1784. On April 16, in a letter "To the People of Ireland," the VJ offered a "simple narration" of the events surrounding Carey's indictment. See also VJ, April 14, 19, 1784. During all these proceedings, Carey denied that he was the owner of the Journal and, as such, was not responsible for the alleged libel.

Newgate to await trial. Although Carey denied the charges—as well as the authority of the Commons to summon him in the first place—for all his protests that his rights were being trampled on by a corrupt place, he soon realized that his altruism was not going to be recognized. He decided to take his indignation with him to America, although not before the Volun teers Journal published another engraving showing the beheading of Straf ford with a notice: "thus may every Tyrant fall, who, despising a much wronged nation's voice, would, to gratify the inordinate lust for power of a detested faction, trample on a people's rights."40 Although debts as well as an uneasy relationship with his father may have also influenced him to leave Ireland for Philadelphia, he had concluded that insofar as the impending court case was concerned, a good retreat was better than a bad stand.41 Although the Urgent Necessity was written when Carey was only about twenty years old, both it and the Volunteers Journal reveal the main themes that would concern his long and varied career in America: opposition to oligarchy, promoting a fair and responsible system of representation, pro tectionism, freedom of the press, and a celebration of the individual. In America the political complexion of the new republic—and in particular the adoption of the First Amendment in 1791—was appealing and congenial.42 A trans-Atlantic journey did not change Carey's views that the ideal polity was where its citizens could work together to secure the interests of the

40. VJ, April 21, July 12, 1784. Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, was Charles I's representative in Ireland between 1632 and 1641. Although initially he worked closely with Irish Catholic leaders, Wentworth soon broke his commitments to them and proposed to seize and plant the largely Catholic province of Connaught with his own supporters. For Ireland's Catholics he was—in the words of a recent biographer—a man of "breathtaking duplicity." Having fallen foul of Charles I, he was beheaded in May 1641. See Terry Clavin, "Thomas Wentworth," in James McGuire and James Quinn, eds., Dictionary of Irish Biography, 9 vols. (Cambridge, U.K., 2009); quotation is from 9:842. 41. Careys troubled relationship with his father as well as his debts are suggested by various statements that were made in early 1785 by James Dowling, who bought the Volunteers Journal from Carey in June 1784; see VJ, January 21 and 24, 1785. 42. Patrick W. Carey, "American Catholics and the First Amendment, 1776 1840," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (hereinafter PMHB) 113 (July 1989): 323-46. For Carey's career in America, see Edward Carter II, "The Political Activities of Mathew Carey, Nationalist, 1760-1814" (Ph.D. diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1962); Earl L. Bradsher, Mathew Carey, Author and Publisher: A Study in American Literary Development (New York, 1912); Kenneth W. Rowe, Mathew Carey: A Study in American Economic Development (Baltimore, 1933); and Lawrence A. Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry (Baltimore, 2003).

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 418 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

wider community and thereby promote their own virtue as well as the hap piness of the whole. The irony was that such a republican promise could be challenged from the vantage of an unlikely source: the increasing number of Irish immigrants who were streaming into Philadelphia after 1783. At issue was the ease with which such immigrants could be absorbed into the new republic. In 1782 Jefferson had suggested that immigrants "will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It will be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. . . . They will infuse into it [legislation] their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass."43 In 1793 a writer to the General Advertiser (Philadelphia) brought many of these reservations together when he wrote, "It would be a difficult matter to convince an unprejudiced mind, that foreigners merit the same degree of public confidence, which is due to the natives of our country ... for if the interest of the country clash with the interest of the country which his private views have called him to, the presumption is that his original preju dices will determine his conduct."44 Given that Carey had arrived with a reputation for controversy, some Philadelphians felt that they should apply Jefferson's caveats to him, and he was soon called to account in the columns of Eleazer Oswald's Independent Gazetteer. Though the Carey-Oswald exchanges between December 1785 and January 1786 were prompted in part by Carey's decision to establish the Pennsylvania Evening Herald on January 25, 1785, they allowed the two editors to discuss the nature and direction of contemporary Pennsylvania. For Oswald and the Gazetteer, the state's governing Constitutionalists had discarded the experienced and the "well-born" of a previous generation for their own "mob government" and "offensive Upstart[s]." These arrivistes included the more visible "outsiders" of the new republic—the "foreign born"—and in particular, the so-called Irish colonels who were at the core of George Bryan's leadership. For his part, Carey saw no reason why the "new men" of American politics should not include immigrants, whom he believed could, in the words of The Federalist, be "melted into a new race of men" and as a result contribute with honor to the evolution, progress, and stability of "the most perfect society now existing in the world." In Ireland

43. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, in The Writings of Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb, 20 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1903-4), 2:120-21. 44. "Pennsylvaniensis," General Advertiser, April 2, 1793.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Bric • Mathew Carey, Ireland, and the "Empire for Liberty" in America | 419 he had often argued that recognizing Catholics as full members of the polity would enhance rather than endanger the polity. With these memories, Carey regarded the Constitutionalists as representing the epitome of an inclusive, integrated, and thriving polity. He found that they were intent less on replacing one interest by another than on uniting those who had long been "outsiders" with those who had long been "in."45 Oswald and Carey aired their differences when they discussed the Society of the Lately Adopted Sons of Pennsylvania, a Constitutionalist network most of whose members had been born outside the country. Oswald was particularly critical of the society as a platform for "foreign distinctions" and Tammany-like control over the votes and political behavior of its members. Carey believed nothing could be further from the truth, as the Sons' pream ble of association made clear: "jealousies, engendered by national distinc tions ... invariably... strained the principle of common attachment, which is the firmest support of every country."46 As he repeated his views, Carey attracted an unfortunate criticism that was both personal and general in nature. Oswald ridiculed Carey's career in Ireland, his disability (he had been lame since a child), and the circumstances in which he had fled Ireland in 1784. Carey gave as good as he got. He was, however, less concerned with the debate on the Sons per se than with the wider influence of Oswald's invective and, in particular, with the suggestion that immigrants were a potential threat to social and political stability. He also rejected the view that by taking part in public fife in America, Irish immigrants had—as "A Foreigner" would have it—"reviled the country that feeds . . . [them] instead of treating it with respect." "National reflections," he argued, were "in every case, as illiberal as they are unjust."47 In Ireland Carey had insisted

45. Brie, Ireland, Philadelphia and the Re-invention of America, 62 and passim; Joseph S. Foster, In Pursuit of Liberty: George Bryan and the Revolution of Pennsylva nia (University Park, Pa., 1994), 145. For the supposed influence of the Irish on the Dublin-born Bryan and the evolution of the Constitutionalist interest in Pennsylva nia, see Foster, In Pursuit of Liberty, and Ronald M. Baumann, "The Democratic Republicans of Philadelphia: The Origins, 1776-1797" (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1970), from which the reference to Bryan's "Irish colonels" is taken (2°). 46. Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia) (hereinafter IG), January 26, 1786; Adopted Sons of Pennsylvania: Principles, Articles and Regulations . . . (Philadelphia, 1786). The society is discussed in greater length in my Ireland, Philadelphia and the Re-invention of America, 69-77. 47. Pennsylvania Evening Herald (Philadelphia) (hereinafter PEH), January 25, 1785. "A Foreigner" is quoted in Pennsylvania Packet (hereinafter PP), December 2, 1785.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 420 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

that a united people was essential for progress and prosperity. Now, in Phil adelphia, he was not going to alter his opinions. On January 18, 1786, two days after Carey's 294-line poem, The Plagi Scurriliad, was published, Carey faced Oswald in a duel, thus bringing this particular dispute to an end.48 Its underlying cause continued to simmer, however, not least because of the ways in which the new republic was being threatened by the implications of war in Europe. As Irish immigrants became a supposed fifth column for French interests in the United States, the concerns of the 1780s about an "enemy within" were revived during the 1790s. Once again Carey became a visible target for venting renewed doubts about the loyalty of Irish immigrants and whether they could be trusted to behave in the best interests of the United States. On this occasion his prin cipal bête noire was William Cobbett, editor of Porcupine's Gazette,49 The focus of the Carey-Cobbett exchanges was the American Society of United Irishmen, founded in Belfast in October 1791. In seeking "a free form of government, and uncontrolled opinion on all subjects," this society challenged the country's political leaders to foster a culture of government that would be more accessible to men of all classes and backgrounds. Its mission was not confined to Ireland, however, and members were asked to pursue "the attainment of liberty and equality to mankind, in what ever nation [they] may reside." This was no rhetorical flourish: after the United Irishmen was proscribed in May 1794, some of the society's more radical leaders emigrated to Philadelphia, where, partly because of its all-embracing policies, partly because of its international links, and partly because of its support for Jefferson and those who stood for him in elections, it became an important addition to the landscape of Philadelphia politics. It was one thing to see a society grow out of a reform movement in Ireland

48. Carey, The Plagi-Scurriliad: A Hudibrastic Poem. Dedicated to Colonel Eleazer Oswald (Philadelphia, 1786), was described by Aneas Lamont as "the most bitter thing that has appeared in America"; see Lamont to Carey, January 22,1786, Lea & Febiger Collection, Incoming Correspondence (1785-96), vol. 10, Historical Soci ety of Pennsylvania (hereinafter HSP). 49. For the support by John Ward Fenno, editor of the Federalist-leaning Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia) (hereinafter GUS), of Cobbett's argu ments, see Brie, Ireland, Irishmen and the Re-invention of America, chap. 5. It should also be noted that Carey was somewhat uncomfortable engaging in these public controversies, if only because it highlighted the kind of factionalism that he opposed. In September 1796 he wrote to Cobbett that he "regret[ted] exceedingly the introduction of my name into your life"; see Carey to Cobbett, September 6, 1796, Lea & Febiger Collection, 1st series, Letterbook 3 (1792-97), HSP.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Bric • Mathew Carey, Ireland, and the "Empire for Liberty" in America | 421 and to challenge the status quo there. It was another to see it trying to apply its version of reform to the United States. Therefore, Federalist chagrin was to be expected, especially after the society's American section was publicly noticed in Philadelphia in August 1797.50 Many Americans also held a wider belief that as a result of their supposed political activities, Philadelphia's Irish immigrants were inherently disrup tive and, therefore, beyond attaining a "character which . . . [they] were never intended for." That the United Irishmen were seen as blindly Fran cophile, espousing a version of republicanism that in some ways sat uneasily with the growing "cult" of America, as well as having caused a violent and bloody rebellion in contemporary Ireland, reinforced the argument that these Irishmen were a threat to the political and social order of the United States. Cobbett put it in blunt terms: "I appeal to any man of common sense, whether this infernal combination can possibly have any other object in view than an insurrection against the Government of America." His belief that "though some traitors have been found amongst them, the natives were not so much to be relied on, in the prosecution of any design, evidently hostile to the interests and honour of their country," emphasized the point. The society and its adherents were "without principles, without country, and without character."51 They were also without patriotism, in that they had put their own "gratification" before the "tranquillity" of gov ernment. As they did so, "American interests [had been] neglected—and the American character degraded."52 Such views offended Carey as both an Irishman and a political reformer. Differing opinions, however, should not be taken as a prima facie expression

50. [William Cobbett], Detection of a Conspiracy Formed by the United Irishmen, with the Evident Intention of Aiding the Tyrants of France in Subverting the Govern ment of the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1799), 6. See also Maurice J. Brie, "The United Irishmen, International Republicanism and the Definition of the Pol ity in the United States of America, 1791-1800," Proceedings of the Royal Irish Acad emy 104 (2004): 81-106. 51. DEP, March 7,1799; [Cobbett], Detection of a Conspiracy, 19,1, 2; emphasis in original. See also James Morton Smith, Freedom's Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties (Ithaca, N.Y., 1956); and David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997). 52. Philadelphia Gazette, January 25, 1798, and Brie, Ireland, Philadelphia and the Re-invention of America, 253-54. These comments were made in the context of a controversy surrounding the two state senate elections in Philadelphia (October 1797-February 1798), for which see Brie, Ireland, Philadelphia and the Re-invention of America, 250-60.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 422 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

of disloyalty. In Ireland, in making the case for admitting Catholics to the franchise, Carey's own Volunteers Journal had already argued that within the enlarged polity that would follow, Catholics would have responsibilities as well as rights.53 In America it was no different for the foreign-born who were naturalized citizens of the polity there. As a result, at least as Carey saw it, to paint Irish immigrants with the brush of disloyalty, violence, agi tated political behavior, and possible revolution revealed an elitism that was no less entrenched than what he had seen in Ireland. In his opinion it was also disingenuous of his critics to raise the "Jacobin phrenzy" as a cloak for their real concerns: the broadening of the polity and its implications for the nature and leadership of the polity as it had existed until then.54 Carey was certain that Irish immigrants were not hiding inside a latter-day Trojan horse preparing to undo the United States. They wanted to strengthen the country, not ruin it.55 Carey understood that these debates posed particular challenges for Irish immigrants and their networks in Philadelphia, especially if they were Catholic. In view of his aversion to clubs and societies, references to his own assumed links with the American Society of United Irishmen were at least ironic. Though Carey accepted the "sociability" of club culture and its place in urban life, he also believed that however the society was explained, it also had obligations to help the less fortunate and thus to promote their independence, the sine qua non of the virtuous citizen. It is little wonder that some seven years after arriving in Philadelphia, he helped establish the Hibernian Society for the Relief of Emigrants from Ireland, of which he became foundation secretary (1790-91, 1796-1800). Carey's private papers reflect his active engagement with the Hibernians, from helping Irish immi grants find lodgings and employment to assisting those who had fallen on hard times. As a result, "emigrants have been not only rendered more happy in their situations, but more useful members in society . . . and consequently the temptations to wander from the paths of rectitude diminished."56

53. See for example, VJ, June, 16, 1784. 54. Marshall Smelser, "Jacobin Phrenzy: Federalism and the Menace of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," Review of Politics 13 (1951): 457-82. 55. For Carey's eloquent confrontation of party political conflict during the War of 1812, see Edward C. Carter II, "Mathew Carey and 'The Olive Branch,' 1814— 1818," PMHB 89 (October 1965): 399-415. By 1819 The Olive Branch (Philadel phia, 1814) was in its tenth edition and had sold over 10,000 copies (409). 56. PP, March 3, 1790. For a detailed history, see John H. Campbell, The Friendly Sons of St. Patrick and the Hibernian Society of Philadelphia, 1771-1892 (Philadelphia, 1892). For the wider importance of such societies, see Albrecht Koschnik, "Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together": Associations, Partisanship, and

For all his humanitarianism, however, Carey was careful not to present the society as one that would be defined by the circumstances and issues of contemporary Ireland, even on St. Patrick's Day. In Ireland he had been appalled by how "anniversary-preachers" had sometimes allowed their rhet oric to get the better of common sense, the result being that festive occa sions had often constituted a "most formidable [threat] to the interests of harmony" by repeating a "long catalogue of causes of discord" to an unsus pecting audience.S7 Perhaps under his influence, Carey's Hibernians offered toasts that were relatively low-key and cautious in how (if at all) they recog nized the issues of the day in Ireland and America. In any event, Carey saw them as a complement to what some historians have marked as an emerging cult of America that in many ways completed the inclusive patriotism of his early years.58 To present them otherwise was to encourage the kind of divi sion that, in his view, warped virtue and demoralized the polity. Carey also believed that the toasts and orations that immigrants made on such occasions should be supplemented by fostering an informed, honor able, and virtuous citizenry.59 For these reasons he had championed the liberty of the press in Ireland. Shortly after he arrived in America, Carey also "pour[ed] out incessant execrations" against the attempts being made in Massachusetts at the time to curb the press there and warned that

Culture in Philadelphia, 1775-1840 (Charlottesville, 2007); and Brie, Ireland, Phila delphia and the Re-invention of America, 151-62. See also Lance Banning, "Religious Benevolence as Social Control: A Critique of an Interpretation," JAH 60 (June 1973): 23-41, for a critique of the use of benevolence as a means of "social control" and establishing such organizations as "the moral arbiters of American society." The quotation is from p. 23. 57. Carey, Urgent Necessity, 21. For this point, see also Carey, Vindiciae Hibernic iae, 22; Jacqueline Hill, "National Festivals, the State and 'Protestant Ascendancy' in Ireland," 38, 42, and passim; and Hill, "Popery and Protestantism, Civil and Religious Liberty," 104-7. 58. For example, see Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes; and Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early Ameri can Republic (Philadelphia, 1999). 59. See Richard D. Brown, The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996); and Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). For Carey's career as a publisher, see James N. Green, Mathew Carey, Publisher and Patriot (Philadelphia, 1995); and William Clarkin, Mathew Carey: A Bibliography of His Publications (New York, 1984). For Carey's own belief in the importance of reading, as evidenced by his membership in library societies in Dublin, see E. Carter, "Political Activities of Mathew Carey," 71.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 424 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

"should any wretch pollute the air with such a proposal" in Pennsylvania, the "plagues of Pharaoh" would await him.60 Carey's belief in an informed citizenry led him to establish influential periodicals such as the Columbian Magazine (1786) and the American Museum (1787), the second of which was described by George Washington on June 25, 1788, as "easy vehicles of knowledge more happily calculated than any other to preserve the liberty, stimulate the industry, and meliorate the morals of an enlightened and free people."61 Similarly, as he publicized the Douai Bible in 1790, Carey stressed to his fellow Catholics that without "the books of their religion . . . they must be in a great measure ignorant not only of their religious princi ples, but even of their moral duties."62 Such concerns also led him to ensure that those of his fellow countrymen who chose to emigrate from Ireland would be fully informed before they left as well as fully aware of their responsibilities to the wider community once they arrived in America. Carey's writings on emigration underlined these points and why they were important. In his much later Reflections on the Subject of Emigration from Europe (1826), he argued that though America might be perceived as an asylum, this did not mean that emigration was suitable for everyone.63 In making this case, he was trying to ensure that for those who left, emigra tion would not be a burden on their adopted country or on themselves. If

60. Carey, Urgent Necessity, 14; PEU, August 3, 1785. 61. Washington to Carey, June 25, 1788 as quoted in The Papers of George Wash ington: Confederation Series, ed. W. W. Abbot et al., 6 vols. (Charlottesville, Va., 1983-95), 6:355. 62. Carey, "To the Roman Catholics of America," August 15, 1789, quoted in Michael S. Carter, '"Under the Benign Sun of Toleration': Mathew Carey, the Douai Bible, and Catholic Print Culture, 1789-1791,"/ER 27 (Fall 2007): 455-56. For these reasons, Carey also believed that if his publishing ventures failed, it would be "hurtful to the community at large" (467). In urging "the Protestants of the United States" to buy his Bible, Carey stressed that in doing so, they would demon strate "that they are superior to that wretched—that contemptible prejudice, which confines its benevolence within the narrow pale of one religious denomination, as is the case with bigots of every persuasion"; Carey, "To the Protestants of the United States," quoted in M. Carter, '"Under the Benign Sun of Toleration,"' 459-60. 63. Mathew Carey, Reflections on the Subject of Emigration from Europe, with a View to Settlement in the United States (Philadelphia, 1826), x, iii, 20-27. Carey indicated that this pamphlet was "chiefly intended" for inhabitants of England and Ireland (xi). For his advocacy that "a suitable agent" be sent to Ireland "with an authenticated statement of the situation of this country," see his "Emigration from Ireland, and Immigration into the United States" (1828) in Mathew Carey, Miscel laneous Essays, 2 vols. (1830; repr., New York, [1966]), 1:321.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Bric • Mathevu Carey, Ireland, and the "Empire for Liberty" in America | 425

this happened, it would compromise public virtue, and, if they were "artifi cers," encourage a culture of dependency that, as Jefferson had noted in his Notes on Virginia, "begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition." Thus, what America offered was not a mere list of opportunities or, indeed, an open "asylum for the oppressed of all nations." It was advantageous only when immigrants could become independent and were prepared to work hard to do so. In this regard, Carey's views were little different from those of Benja min Franklin, whom he quoted with admiration: "Dr. Franklin truly stated that 'this was a country of labor.' And it has undergone no alteration since the days of that illustrious philosopher.... let me repeat in the most forceful language . . . that no man ought, on any account whatever, to cross the Atlantic to settle in the United States, unless he be seriously disposed to industry and economy."64 Those who were either unable or unwilling to work should stay where they were, if only because such people could not promote the type of indus try that defined virtue and led to freedom. In 1787 Franklin had observed that "only a virtuous people are capable of freedom." If virtue was impossi ble without independence and independence without industry, then indis criminate emigration to America was not sound, even in a nation that could "so advantageously receive" labor from Europe.65 Such indiscriminate emi gration would create a culture of distress and, as a result, compromise the ability of the polity to integrate its diverse parts into a harmonious unit. For not dissimilar reasons, Carey continued his benevolent activities into the nineteenth century.66

64. Carey, Reflections, x, iii, ix, x, iv. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, is quoted in Edmund S. Morgan, "Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox," JAH 59 (June 1972): 9. As Morgan noted, however, Jefferson also suggested that artificers had the capacity to be industrious and thus to be independent and free. If they were denied that opportunity, they were "the instruments by which the liberties of a country are generally overturned" (9). As a result, the wider responsibilities of more settled citizens were clear. 65. Carey, Reflections, x, iii, ix, x, iv. Franklin is quoted in Drew R. McCoy, "Benjamin Franklin's Vision of a Republican Political Economy for America," Wil liam and Mary Quarterly 70 (October 1978): 606. For the importance of "well rewarded" labor in advancing "the best state of society," see Carey's "Emigration from Ireland, and Immigration into the United States," 321. See also Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980). 66. For Carey's involvement in the Society for Establishing Sunday Schools (1791), infant schools (1827), and public charities in general, see M. Carter, "Under the Benign Sun ofToleration," 465. Carey's Essays on the Public Charities ofPhiladel

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 426 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

Carey's Reflections was published at a time when the campaign to repeal the Penal Laws was entering its final phase. Unlike the original Catholic Committee, however, Daniel O'Connell's Catholic Association of the 1820s appealed for American support as it made its final drive toward Cath olic emancipation. In 1828, when the Philadelphia chapter of the Friends of Ireland was established, Carey was the obvious choice as its president. This, however, acknowledged Carey's status as a person who was interested in Catholic emancipation as an issue of human rights rather than as a man who wanted to reconnect with the politics of Ireland, even if it was where Carey had been born. Indeed, when the Friends of Ireland met in Philadel phia to celebrate O'Connell's success, their resolutions saluted Irish Catho lics on their "success in the establishment of their rights as British subjects." But they also recognized those Protestants who had backed the passage of the relevant legislation and applauded them for their "liberality and philan thropy."67 Two years later, as the Friends of Ireland reorganized, again under Carey's presidency, they stressed the need for the "combined efforts" of Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter to achieve the repeal of the union: "be united in feeling, in sentiment, and sympathy, and you will infallibly regain the legislative liberties of your country."68 In some ways the Friends of Ireland's resolutions suggest that Carey had not traveled very far from the Urgent Necessity. As Catholics pushed for the right to sit in Parliament, they implied that they were no less virtuous in doing so nor the polity more so for the concession of Catholic emancipa tion. In any event, just as in 1818 Daniel O'Connell had made a distinction between being Catholic and being Popish, so did Carey differentiate between Catholicism as an institution and Catholicism as a religion. None theless, despite these distinctions and however they were regarded, the Catholic Church still had "a benign effect" in America and, as Carey saw

phia (1828) also spells out his views on the moral benefit of promoting benevolence among the poor. For similar reflections, see "benevolence" in his School of Wisdom (Philadelphia, 1803), an anthology that he "intended principally for youth" to encourage "a respect and reverence for the forms of government under which we live" (5, hi). 67. United States Catholic Miscellany (hereinafter USCM), May 30, 1829. See also Thomas F. Moriarty, "The Irish American Response to Catholic Emancipa tion," CHR 66 (July 1980): 353-73. 68. Irish Shield (Philadelphia), April 15, 1831. For Carey's characteristic interest in contemporary Greece and his central role in establishing a committee of assis tance, see his "To the Citizens of Philadelphia" (March 1,1827) in Carey, Miscella neous Essays, 1:300-306.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Bric • Mathevj Carey, Ireland, and the "Empire for Liberty" in America | 427 it, the ability to sustain "more truly religious persons" than anywhere in contemporary Europe.69 What had made this possible was the focus on the congregation over the hierarchy, and the hierarchy over Rome. But then, as Carey wrote in 1821, "a different order ... prevails in this country." Writing about Irish priests, he added that all "too frequently the relations between the pastor and his flock partake of the nature of extravagantly high toned authority on the one side and servile submission on the other. . . . this [American] people will never submit to the regime in civil or ecclesiastical affairs that prevails in Europe.... The extreme freedom of our civil institu tions has produced a corresponding independent spirit respecting church affairs . . . which it would be a manifest impropriety to despise or attempt to control by harsh or violent measures. ... an overweening idea of the extent of episcopal authority is not suited to this meridian."70 These comments were offered in the context of the bitter dispute between the Derry-born Bishop Henry Conwell (served 1819-26) and the lay trustees at St. Mary's Church and underlined Carey's support of what Dale Light has described as the congregation's "rhetoric of dissent and forms of expression based on the principles of popular sovereignty." When in 1826 Conwell agreed to allow the trustees a veto over his appointments, Rome refused to support him and installed the Dublin-born Francis Ken rick as coadjutor (served 1840-42). Kenrick not only faced down the trust ees but, in Edith Jeffrey's words, introduced "a degree of central control previously unknown" in the diocese.71 Moreover, seeing no reason why Catholicism had "to adapt to its American context," his episcopacy high lighted what were to be enduring tensions within American Catholicism between "traditional" and more "modern" modes of authority.72 Careys

69. Carey, Reflections, 17. 70. Mathew Carey, Address to the Rt Rev Bishop Conwell and the Members of St. Mary's Congregation (February 14, 1821), quoted in Jay P. Dolan, "The Search for an American Catholicism," CHR 82, no. 2 (April 1996): 175. 71. Dale B.Light, Rome and the New Republic: Conflict and Commuait in Phila delphia Catholicism between the Revolution and the Civil War (South Bend, Ind., 1996), 103; Edith Jeffrey, "Reform, Renewal, and Vindication: Irish Immigrants and the Catholic Total Abstinence Movement in Antebellum Philadelphia," PMHB 92 0uly 1988): 415. For "lay trusteeism," see the perceptive article by Patrick W. Carey, "Republicanism within American Catholicism, 1785—1860," JEH 3 (Winter 1983): 413-37. 72. Richard A. Warren, "Displaced 'Pan-Americans' and the Transformation of the Catholic Church in Philadelphia, 1789-1850," PMHB 128 (October 2004): 357; Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Notre Dame, Ind., 1992).

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 428 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

attitudes were clear from the start.73 He not only championed the majority of the congregation at St. Mary's but also criticized those Catholic priests who did not embrace the more flexible polity within which all citizens, whether Catholic or not, existed in America.74 When his and similar com ments attracted the hostile attentions of the Society of Irish Orange Men, he appealed to his critics to "preach harmony, kind feelings, and good will to all men" and to "his fellow citizens at large, of every denomination and description ... to inculcate the divine doctrine of mutual forgiveness and forgetfulness of the crimes of ages of barbarous ignorance, insatiate rapacity, blind bigotry, infuriated fanaticism, and bloodthirsty cruelty."75 In doing so, Carey underlined that for all the prejudices that had existed with respect to Catholicism, the origins of which he had put so carefully in both the Urgent Necessity and Vindiciae Hiberniae, American Catholics stressed their loyalty to the American republic over anything or anybody else. To the extent that they functioned as a body corporate, they were a "National American Church with liberties consonant to the spirit of gov ernment under which they live."76 In this Carey echoed the thoughts of his friend Bishop John England of Charleston (served 1820-42) that Catholi cism was not incompatible with American republicanism. On May 14, 1841, in his "Address on American Citizenship," England was to argue that a republic "becomes the vision of an idle dream, if the people become corrupt. ... it cannot subsist where there is no virtue. . . . the permanence and prosperity of our institutions can be secured only be each individual's exercising his political rights according to his conscience, and not from

73. For "a respectable and numerous meeting" of the congregation at St. Mary's church in April 1827, which agreed on resolutions critical of Bishop Conwell for forwarding to Rome, see USCM, May 19, 1827. The meeting was chaired by Carey. 74. Light, Rome and the New Republic, 105-6, 108-9, and passim. 75. Quoted ibid., 217. For the publications and other ways in which those who were "fanning the embers of religious bigotry and intolerance," see ibid., 217-19, 385-86. 76. Dr. Matthew Driscoll to Bishop Maréchal of Baltimore, December 15, 1817, quoted in P. Carey, "Republicanism within American Catholicism," 417. For the economic corollary, see the resolutions of the Friends of American Industry (Philadelphia, September 25, 1831) to promote the "National Interest" by encour aging "American Industry," in Hazard's Register of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), October 1, 1831. Carey acted as vice president of this meeting. For an earlier "Trib ute of Gratitude to Mathew Carey, Esquire, in approbation of his Writings on Political Economy. Presented by Some of the Friends of National Industry" in April 1821, see Niles' Weekly Register (Baltimore), July 28, 1828.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Bric • Matheiu Carey, Ireland, and the "Empire for Liberty" in America [ 429 interested private views."77 That same year, in a eulogy that he delivered after the death of President Harrison, England also cited the need for toler ation as the true test of republicanism, observing that departing from it "may cause political principles to be blended with religious distinction, and then we have at once a union of church and state, the antagonist of civil liberty," a point that he had also made to Congress on January 8, 1826.78 It could have been Carey speaking in 1781. Throughout his life, Carey saw himself as a radical in the sense that he wanted to broaden the established polity. Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, he believed that it was only through such reform that the essential structures of society and politics could reassure their integrity as the managers of the body politic. This was an obvious challenge for leaders in situ, not least because it also confronted their sense of themselves as an elite. When Carey suggested that rebellion would follow if they did not respond, however, he found himself being criticized from all sides, Catholic as well as Protestant. This left him with an abiding opposition to oligarchy, the preservation of which had in his opinion been responsible for so much personal harassment in Ireland. Nonetheless, though Carey never abandoned these views, neither did he stop believing that a wider polity was essential for social harmony and productivity. In doing so, he also stressed that Catholics who would be emancipated into such a polity had clear responsibilities, and both they and the Establishment should also put the prejudices of the past behind them as well as debate their present in a more objective public sphere. As such,

77. Quoted in Keams, "Bishop John England," 53, 54. For similar views of Janu ary 8, 1826, when England became the first Irishman who had not been elected to that body to address Congress, see "Address before Congress" in Sebastian G. Messmer, ed., Works of the Right Reverend John England, First Bishop of Charleston, 7 vols. (Cleveland, 1908), 7:35. 78. For this point, see P. Carey, "Republicanism within American Catholicism" and An Immigrant Bishop: John England's Adaption of Irish Catholicism to American Republicanism (Yonkers, N.Y., 1982); and Daniel F. Kearns, "Bishop John England and the Possibilities of Catholic Republicanism," South Carolina Historical Maga zine 102 (January 2001): 47-67. For the ways in which the realities of American politics influenced England in this regard, see R. Frank Saunders and George A. Rogers, "Bishop John England of Charleston: Catholic Spokesman and Southern Intellectual, 1820-1842," JER 13 (Autumn 1993): 301-22. For Carey's argument that religious liberty should not be confined and thus be extended to Jews, see P. Carey, "American Catholics and the First Amendment," 330. For the evolution of a "lay Catholic republicanism" in contemporary France, see Suzanne Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France (Ith aca, N.Y., 1990).

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 430 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

the successes of the campaign to repeal the Penal Laws were not about marking mere achievement. They were about marking loyalty and the con cern of Ireland's Catholics to reinforce the state by accommodating them selves into it, not dismantling and then reconstituting it. For Carey the point was especially important for the place of the Catholic Church, not so much because it was the obvious "outsider" in his Ireland but because its reconciliation with those who had been the "insiders" for several generations challenged all sides to rise above their respective histor ies toward the common platform of Irishmen. Almost as soon as he landed in Philadelphia, he made similar arguments about moving toward a more inclusive "American character." In asking people to move beyond their respective pasts, however, he was also asking them to promote a polity that should include people of different backgrounds, some of whom were less familiar with republican virtue than others. Similar challenges faced those who had fashioned the "Protestant Ascendancy" in Ireland as well as those who hoped to undo it. Carey had seen how these debates had turned in Ireland, and he remained impressed by them. Little wonder that when he died in 1839, he was remembered as an "esteemed philanthropist" who had celebrated the essentials of Jefferson's "empire for liberty."79 As Edward Carter II con cluded, Carey "was never a doctrinaire party man": "Always the nationalist, he refused to sanction any group, section, or theory that threatened the nation's unity. . . . [He] disapproved of voting the Hibernians as a unit. . . [and] he desired that minority group to become American in all ways."80 To this extent, he represented a type of Ireland in America that was not an unquestioning and unquestioned appendage of Ireland, no more than his American Catholicism was an unquestioning and unquestioned appendage of Rome. He represented the culture of eighteenth-century radicalism and its commitment to a new type of empire for which, in an age of reinvented empires in the Old World, Jefferson had given it new meanings.

79. Ni/es' National Register, September 21, 1839. The reference to "the empire for liberty" was not included in this newspaper report. 80. E. Carter, "Political Activities of Mathew Carey," 268, 264, 271.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:30:27 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

"A Reciprocity of Advantages": Carey, Hamilton, and the American Protective Doctrine Author(s): STEPHEN MEARDON Source: Early American Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3, Special Issue: Ireland, America, and Mathew Carey (Fall 2013), pp. 431-454 Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23547679 Accessed: 30-08-2018 10:31 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Early American Studies

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms "A Reciprocity of Advantages" Carey, Hamilton, and the American Protective Doctrine

STEPHEN MEARDON

Bowdoin College

ABSTRACT The roots of Mathew Carey's protectionist ideas, and their connection with those of the most famous early proponent of protection for domestic manufactures, Alexander Hamilton, are subjects of dispute. Carey himself disclaimed much knowledge of political economy before 1819, and, until recently, the historiography on Carey echoed him. After 1819 Carey claimed the mande of Hamilton's protectionism, a claim that scholars have come recently to deny. The denial is due to doubts not about Carey's trade doctrine but about Hamilton's. This essay argues for the continuity of Carey's protectionism over the course of his career as a pub lisher and polemicist, dating from his early efforts in Ireland up to 1784 and continuing afterward in the United States, and for the commonality of his doctrine with Hamilton's. The argument turns on Hamilton's notion, in his Report on Manufactures, of "a reciprocity of advantages."

Mathew Carey was, by the time of his death in 1839, among a handful of the United States' most prolific and influential protectionist thinkers. On that point historians of early American political economy agree.1 But when and how he earned this distinction, and the connection (or disconnect) of his ideas with those of the most famous early proponent of protection for domestic manufactures, Alexander Hamilton, are subjects of dispute. Carey

I thank John Pollack of the University of Pennsylvania's Rare Book and Manu script Library for helpful research advice, and Maurice Brie, Martin Burke, Samuel Hollander, Albrecht Koschnik, Cathy Matson, Ariel Ron, and Simon Vezina for valuable comments. Any mistakes are mine. 1. See Edward Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Cen tury, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903), 1:246-49; and Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606-1865, 5 vols. (New York: Vik ing, 1946-59), 2:576-77.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 432 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

himself wrote that before 1819 he "knew very little, scarcely any thing of political economy."2 Echoing him, his biographer Kenneth W. Rowe says that 1819 "marked Carey's entrance into politico-economic discussion"; his earlier writings were undertaken "without any study of economic theory."3 Edward C. Carter II agrees that Carey's most productive phase as a political economist began in 1819, but he argues that he first "entered the field" during the Bank recharter fight of 1810—ll.4 Carey and his chroniclers tend to draw a line separating his early and ostensibly less sophisticated politico economic writings with his later and more evolved ones. But where in time to draw the line, and why did Carey undertake a study of political economy? Discerning the connection of Carey's views to Hamilton's begins simi larly with Carey's own account. In the 1820s and later, he saw in Hamilton the apotheosis of protectionism. Hamilton, he averred, was "the real father of the American system," and his Report on Manufactures was "among the proudest monuments of the human intellect."5 To those who remembered Carey's view of Hamilton three decades earlier, such reverence might have seemed odd. In the debate over the Jay Treaty, he had declared Hamilton's advocacy of it "poison."6 But somehow in the interim he changed his mind, found the treaty to have conferred "solid advantages" to the United States, and even alleged that its detractors had been led astray by "prejudices" or "perturbed imaginations."7 Even more, Carey led—unsuccessfully, as it happened—a subscription campaign to commemorate Hamilton with a gold medal cast in his likeness.8 Carey's shift respecting Hamilton undoubtedly presents a puzzle. Recent scholarship finds a purported dichotomy between Hamilton's equivocal "encouragements" of manufactures and Carey's pronounced protectionism. According to this argument, Carey's opinion of Hamilton during the Jay

2. Mathew Carey, Autobiographical Sketches, in a Series of Letters, Addressed to a Friend (1829; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1970), 48. 3. Kenneth W. Rowe, Mathew Carey: A Study in American Economic Develop ment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1933), 29. 4. Edward C. Carter II, "The Birth of a Political Economist: Mathew Carey and the Recharter Fight of 1810-1811," Pennsylvania History 33, no. 3 (1966): 275. 5. Carey, Autobiographical Sketches, ix-x. 6. Mathew Carey, Address to the House of Representatives of the United States, on Lord Grenvi/le's Treaty (Philadelphia: Printed by Samuel Harrison Smith for Mathew Carey, 1796), 43. 7. Mathew Carey, The Olive Branch; or, Faults on Both Sides, Federal and Demo cratic, 7th ed. (Philadelphia, 1815), 57. 8. Carey, Autobiographical Sketches, ix-x.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mear don • "A Reciprocity of Advantages" | 433

Treaty debate was better founded than his later one, which must have been either a misunderstanding or a strategic misrepresentation. Thus, Drew R. McCoy considers it "curious that historians have generally portrayed Ham ilton as the father of the American protective tariff," given his preference in the Report on Manufactures for bounties rather than tariffs.9 John R. Nelson Jr. amplifies the point, insisting that "Hamilton found protective tariffs and commercial discrimination repugnant to his fiscal program" despite the "anachronistic visions" of generations of historians who thought other wise.10 Lawrence A. Peskin argues similarly that "Hamilton's fiscal system was fundamentally opposed to protective tariffs," and Andrew Shankman holds that the similarities between Hamilton's ideas and Henry Clay's American System (which was no less Carey's American System) "were only superficial."11 The argument is corroborated by Douglas A. Irwin, on the one hand, and Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, on the other, who say that Hamilton cannot be considered much of a protectionist after all, in light of his "moderate tariff policies" and ends that "went well beyond sim ple protection."12

9. Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jejfersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 150-51. 10. John R. Nelson Jr., Liberty and Property: Political Economy and Policymaking in the New Nation, 1789-1812 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 54, 48. Although Nelson does not in this context cite Stanwood's outstanding turn of-the-twentieth-century American Tariff Controversies, it must be ranked near the top of those works advancing the vision Nelson disputes. Stanwood criticized what was then the decidedly minority view, articulated by the likes of the economist Henry Carter Adams, that Hamilton's Report did not represent "a genuine protec tionist sentiment existing at the time and finding expression in the legislation by Congress" (1:98). To Stanwood such a view could be maintained only by practically denying the plausibility of a concept called "protectionism" that may be usefully studied over time. Otherwise, he wrote, it must be accepted that "the 'Report on Manufactures' and the legislation which was based upon it were dictated by the same spirit that has animated protectionists for more than a hundred years since the Report was written" (1:104). This essay may be read as a renewal of Stanwood's argument, using different evidence but to the same effect, after the passage of another century has seen what was then the minority view become the majority one. 11. Lawrence A. Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 115; Andrew Shankman, '"A New Thing on Earth': Alexander Hamilton, Pro Manufacturing Republicans, and the Democratization of American Political Econ omy,^"Journal of the Early Republic 23, no. 3 (2003): 344. 12. Douglas A. Irwin, "The Aftermath of Hamilton's 'Report on Manufac tures,' "Journal of Economic History 64, no. 3 (2004): 820; Stanley Elkins and Eric

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 434 I Early American Studies ' Fall 2013

This essay argues differently on both counts. First, Carey's protectionism was well established even before he emigrated to the United States from Ireland in 1784, and it was remarkably well informed by the 1790s. Although his studies of political economy added grist to his protectionist mill after 1819, they did not change the substance of the arguments. Sec ond, Carey's doctrinal affinity with Hamilton was hardly superficial. Carey perceived correctly the theoretical gist of Hamilton's argument in the Report on Manufactures and spun it out faithfully and consistently in his own writ ings. It is Carey's disagreement with Hamilton during the Jay Treaty debate, and the discrepancy between their opinions about the precise rates of ad valorem tariffs that should be levied, that is superficial. This is not to dis pute the observation that Hamilton had purposes besides or beyond pro tection (in Nelson's words, "the achievement of economic and political stability"; in Shankman's, to "establish internal order and provide external strength") that qualified his advocacy of protection in circumstances of ¿«stability and ¿/border.13 It is to suggest that the observation should be understood differently from what has been done in the recent historiogra phy. The Jay Treaty dispute between Carey and Hamilton and the differ ences between the tariff rates they advocated were circumstantial. They should not be allowed to elide the pair's fundamental agreement on trade doctrine.

IRELAND

Far from being innocent of political economy early in his career, Carey was so guilty of it during 1781 to 1784, as a newspaper editor and publisher in Dublin, Ireland, that he had to flee his country. His periodical, the Volun teers Journal; or, Irish Herald, pressed vigorously, up to alleged sedition, the cause of Ireland's commercial emancipation from Great Britain. That cause had come to be associated with the greater one of political emancipation.14

McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 261. 13. Nelson, Liberty and Property, xiv; Shankman, "'A New Thing on Earth,'" 325.

14. Carey's early history, including his trade policy agitation in Ireland, has been studied in Edward C. Carter II, "Mathew Carey in Ireland," Catholic Historical Review 51, no. 4 (1966): 503-27; and more recently in Eoin Magennis, "Mathew Carey, 'Free Trade' and 'Protected Trade' in Ireland, 1776-1785" (paper prepared for the conference Ireland, America, and the Worlds of Mathew Carey, Trinity College, Dublin, November 2011). These more detailed treatments of the early Carey generally support the conclusion to be advanced here, to wit, that Carey was

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mear don • "A Reciprocity of Advantages" | 435

The Volunteers of Carey's newspaper title had evolved quickly from a mili tia, which sprang up during the American war to defend against an expected French invasion, into a popular reform movement with a menacing mien toward Dublin Castle. The Parliament of Ireland could not enact legisla tion independently of the British Parliament. The grievousness of the sit uation was manifested in the commercial legislation that Great Britain had long imposed, and that Ireland was powerless to resist, prohibiting the exportation from Ireland of certain manufactures, including woolens. In 1779 the Dublin artillery corps of Volunteers showed on parade a cannon labeled "Free trade, or else."15 At the same time, resolutions were adopted throughout the county to refrain from importing British goods in retalia tion. The menaces worked: before the year ended, the Irish Parliament sub mitted to the British a resolution deeming it expedient to repeal the export prohibitions.16 For some Volunteers, British consent to an "expedient" free trade would not suffice. It neither compensated for the long-standing and artificial advantage given to British manufactures nor affirmed the principle of legis lative independence. Irish industry had been hobbled, ran this line of thought, and could not stand on its own again without the positive help of government. Besides, if Great Britain consented to free trade, then free trade must not be worth much to Ireland. This last notion took on greater salience after 1782, when the Irish Parliament declared its independence, the British Parliament ostensibly concurred, and events quickly showed the change to be illusory. The Lord Lieutenant set about enjoining the still pliant Irish legislators to concede "the superintending power and supremacy of Great Britain in all matters of state and general commerce."17 Only the enactment of protective legislation for Irish manufactures, which could also be expected to work against British manufactures, would have the desired economic effect and make the essential political point.

a convinced protectionist from his time in Dublin. Carter, however, sees Carey's protectionism during this time as being served in "rather crude form," or, as he prefers to put it, as an expression of "intense nationalism" ("Carey in Ireland," 526). Magennis's treatment is similarly useful, although like other recent historiography it disagrees with this essay's related conclusion about the close doctrinal connection between Carey and Hamilton ("Carey, 'Free Trade,' and 'Protected Trade,'" 21-22). 15. Philip Harwood, History of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 (London: John K. Chapman, 1848), 30. 16. Ibid., 27-28, 30. 17. Ibid., 40.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 436 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

Resolutions supporting such legislation were presented to the Irish Par liament on April 2, 1784, by Luke Gardiner, County Dublin's member in House of Commons.18 Gardiner, later the Viscount Mountjoy, denied any invidious intentions toward Great Britain. The legislation he envisioned was "not . . . calculated to divide, but to unite the two countries," he said: "she adopted protecting duties, because she thought it her interest—let us act the same part—what's good for one, must be good for the other."19 Mathew Carey supported Gardiner's effort, but in a tone less friendly and more urgent. Before April, as Carey awaited the resolutions' presentation and debate, he harangued the parliamentarians in the Volunteers Journal for their lack of haste. On February 9 he alleged that Parliament fiddled while manufactur ers starved, "to the great joy of all true Englishmen." Parliament, he offered, met "merely to support the interests of England," to the effect that "Ireland may fall, but she never will rise, with England."20 If the Irish Parliament was to serve Irish interests, Carey insisted, it needed to fix its attention on the "calamity" of "want of employment." How was the calamity to be ameliorated, he asked, "but [by] encouraging the consumption of our own manufactures?" And how was such encouragement to be effected, he con tinued, "but by protecting duties?"21 On March 1 he urged again "the grand measure of protecting duties, the only one adequate to counteract the pernicious effects of our blasting connexion with England."22 And on March 10, considering a correspondent's data showing English woolens to be 60 percent cheaper than comparable Irish products, he called on the opponents of protection to answer "whether it is possible for the poor of this county to command subsistence, while its markets are pre-occupied by Englishmen, who possess such immense advantages over us."23 Carey printed the economic argument for protection most expansively in his issue of March 31, under the title "Thoughts on the State of the Infant Manufactures of This Country" and the pen name "Hibernicus." He saw fit

18. House of Commons of the Parliament of Ireland, The Parliamentary Regis ter; or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons of Ireland (Dublin), vol. 3 (March 10-May 14, 1784), 130. For biographical details about Gardiner, see Thomas W. H. Fitzgerald, Ireland and Her People: A Library of Irish Biography, 5 vols. (Chicago: Fitzgerald, 1909-11), 3:329. 19. Parliament of Ireland, Parliamentary Register, 3:122. 20. "Postscript," Volunteers Journal; or, Irish Herald, February 9, 1784, 3. 21. Ibid. 22. "Protecting Duties," Volunteers Journal, March 1, 1784, 2. 23. "Protecting Duties," Volunteers Journal, March 10, 1784, 3.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mea.rd.on ' "A Reciprocity of Advantages" | 437

to reprint it two days later as Gardiner spoke in Parliament. Whether Carey was its author is unknown. But given his duplication of the argument, its consistency with his earlier remarks, and, what is more, his prefatory endorsement of it,24 what is known is that he supported the article's argu ment unreservedly. "A free trade may have been granted to this kingdom," began Hibernicus, "but if, at the same time, we are refused the benefit of our own market; I say, we can have no benefit from a free trade."25 Free trade, in his view, meant "a liberty to export to foreign markets the redun dancy or surplus of goods that may remain after supplying our own mar kets." But if another country (namely, England) had such "superior advantages" as to be able "to undersell us in our own markets," then there could be no surplus, and thus no gains from trade for Ireland. Hibernicus considered in detail England's advantages and Ireland's impediments. English manufactures had come to be supported by large amounts of capital, machinery, and superior skill. They would therefore always undersell Irish manufactures both within Ireland and abroad. Nor under the circumstances was the flow of capital from England to Ireland, upon the prospect of the eventual transfer of machinery and skill, a plausible scenario:

We are in extreme poverty in every part of this kingdom, except in the North, and having no capitals, we can give no credit; not being able to give credit, we cannot export to foreign markets, as we cannot wait for the return of the produce of our goods in our present circumstances, therefore, we can have no markets but our own. I lay it down as an incontrovertible maxim, self-evident in theory, and proved by experience in all countries, that you must travel to foreign markets through your own. It is the only road to them. The contrary doctrine involves absurdities too apparent to need dwelling on. A man might as well attempt building the last story of his house first.26

Once the metaphorical house was built, and industry established, it would rest on a foundation as sound as England's. The proposal was to use

24. "We implore such of our senators as are not dead to every feeling of honor, love of their country, or shame, by every thing near and dear to human nature, to peruse it with the most solemn attention" (preface to "Hibernicus," "Thoughts on the State of the Infant Manufactures of This Country," Volunteers Journal, April 2, 1784, 1). 25. "Hibernicus," "Thoughts on the State of the Infant Manufactures of This Country," Volunteers Journal, March 31, 1784, 1. 26. Ibid.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 438 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

protective duties not to encourage expensive manufactures indefinitely, but merely to "get rid of difficulties we have to struggle with in the first state of our infant manufactures." Granted, the "first effect" of the duties would be to raise the price of manufactures. "So much the better," averred Hiberni cus, "for by this means, and no other, it is that the manufacture will be extended." Soon enough, with "the benefit of home markets," manufactur ers would be assured they could sell to their "next door neighbour" any goods they might produce. With that assurance, they would enter the mar ket in greater numbers. Indeed, manufacturers from Lancashire, Yorkshire, and other English counties would relocate to Ireland and bring their machinery, too. The price of Irish manufactures would fall, and they would be produced up to the "redundancy" required for a viable export trade. Then, and no sooner, "we will begin to feel the happy effects of a free trade."27 The article's argument combined succinctly several sophisticated argu ments for protection, as well as a rejoinder to an equally sophisticated counterargument. To summarize: (1) "infant" manufactures have initially high costs of production, and they cannot be profitable without government support; (2) if they were supported, so that the scale of manufacturing firms, the manufacturing sector, or both were allowed to increase, then their costs would fall; (3) the support should be of such a form that directs manufac tures initially to a diversified "home market" comprising manufacturers and their "neighbours," that is, farmers, merchants, and other manufacturers; (4) the enlargement of the home market would entice the migration of foreign manufacturers, together with their machinery and technology, thus enlarging the market even more; (5) the falling costs and growing quantities of manufactures would eventually satisfy fully the home market and produce a surplus of manufactures for export; (6) free trade is not undesirable per se, but it is inappropriate in the face of foreign policies of the present or past that disrupt trade and impede progress toward (5). A counterargument to the foregoing proposes that if there is a reason able prospect for a domestic manufacturing sector, then it should be profit able for domestic or foreign lenders to put up the money to finance it—the long-term rewards compensating for the short-term losses. Hibernicus anticipated the counterargument. The inset quotation above contains his rejoinder: "having no capitals, we can give no credit." He asserted, in a basic

27. Ibid.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Meardon • "A Reciprocity of Advantages" | 439 form, what later economists have called an imperfection of capital markets. Foreign investment, Hibernicus believed, was unfeasible under prevailing circumstances;28 domestic investment was unfeasible because there was insufficient domestic saving to finance it. In brief, Ireland was too poor for free trade to alleviate its poverty. Or, put more pointedly, "being down, we may easily be kept down." Positive government action was required. As to the particular form of government action, Hibernicus entertained the possibility of either "giving aids out of the national funds" to infant manufacturers or levying additional duties on the imports with which they competed. He preferred duties, as the alternative was politically precarious, wasteful of public revenue, and "liable to many frauds and impositions." In the event, neither the arguments proffered in the Volunteers Journal nor those echoing them in Parliament garnered enough votes to pass Gardiner's resolutions. The member of the Irish Parliament for Dunleer and chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, John Foster, moved successfully for the resolutions to be taken up by his committee.29 There they could be safely disposed of without a vote in the House.30 That was on Friday, April 2. On the following Monday, Carey published the response that forced his emigration to the United States. The front page of the Volunteers Journal on that day featured an engraving of an imagined hanging. "Thus Perish all Traitors to their country," read the caption. Immediately below was a dedication "to a certain virtuous majority," followed by the purported news report. On the previous Satur day, the report went, "an innumerable body of starving manufacturers . . . from a numerous band of notorious malefactors dragged the arch traytor, Jacky Finance." Jacky was said to have had some last sorrowful words for the crowd. "I was taught to think, like my betters, that nothing was con nected with happiness, but what led to self-interest," he confessed (in an

28. It was not only the advocates of protection who were skeptical of the pros pects for foreign investment in the late eighteenth century. The major premise of Adam Smith's free-trade syllogism was that "every individual endeavours to employ his capital as near home as he can." See Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 5th ed. (1789; repr., New York: Modern Library, 1937), 421. 29. On the controversy between Carey and Foster and the latter's standing in the Irish Parliament, see especially Maurice Brie, "Mathew Carey, Ireland, and the 'Empire for Liberty' in America" (paper presented at the conference Ireland, America, and the Worlds of Mathew Carey, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Philadelphia, October 2011), 12-18,15n32 (also published in this volume). 30. Parliament of Ireland, Parliamentary Register, 3:130-32.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 440 I Early American Studies ' Fall 2013

IONDAY, APRIL 5, 178+

office of maf fTlitis Pe^ifk. ordinance. End of thi nform the Traitors? rf Ireland, "to COUN'TKY". LON but three This day < the intelli members to r« when eight car Vf evening viz. Mr. Sawb md domt flic, Newnham, M o of Wed Mr. Brooke V. VERY AD muel .Smith, jv Pitt, when the of this plan. , of nteffrs. Pitt, ham. But a p . who will, yfRAlTOR-, CALENDAR. bridge, Atkint bblin paper./ . »»««««■• of which the r ■ of ooftaar Dedicated to a certain

unmistakable reference to Bernard Mandeville); "that virtue was all a cheat, and that none but fools and madmen practised it." The doctrine of selfish ness made him obedient to power rather than virtue. Obedience won him "a department at court" and his nickname, "John the favourite." Thus, he concluded, he lost all human feeling and so undertook "the opposition that I gave to the business of protecting duties, for which I so deservedly suffer this ignominious death." Just in case Foster failed to recognize him self hanging from the gallows, Carey imagined a publication that would not resort to nicknames. Titled "The whole art and mystery of tarring and feathering a traitor," the fictitious manual would be "dedicated to the Rt. Hon. john foster, By Fifty Thousand starving manufac turers." Thus ended Carey's career in Ireland. He was arrested for sedition and sent to prison until the close of the parliamentary term a month later. Although he was liberated subsequently by the lord mayor, he anticipated

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Meardon • "A Reciprocity of Advantages" | 441 the government's future and successful prosecution of him. So he left the country.31 Accounts of Carey's career refer often to his early publishing and prose lytizing in Ireland, but they do not enter into the details of the arguments that he offered for protecting duties. Fair attention to them reveals that Carey's entrance into politico-economic discussion happened well before 1819, and even before 1810-11. Indeed, the weaker statement that until those years he wrote "without any study of economic theory" can be enter tained only (and with some hesitation) by hewing to strict definitions of "study" and "theory." In light of his protectionist writings of 1784, his pub lication and endorsement of the arguments of Hibernicus, and (what is less important but notable) his derogatory reference to the Mandevillian doc trine, it is fitter to say that Mathew Carey was already an informed and astute advocate of protection in his twenty-fourth year.

CAREY, COXE, AND HAMILTON With good luck and the help of the Marquis de Lafayette, whom he met during an earlier and briefer exile in France, Carey reestablished himself in Philadelphia in his previous vocation.32 After two less successful publishing ventures, Carey's Pennsylvania Evening Herald and the Columbian Maga zine, in 1785 and 1786, in the next year he established the American Museum, a periodical that was to be national in circulation and eclectic in scope.33 According to its subtitle, it contained "ancient and modern fugitive pieces. .. prose and poetical"; the prose pieces dealt often with commercial subjects. During the American Museums run, from 1787 to 1792, the com mercial subjects at the forefront of American national debate were closely connected with free trade and protection. The American victory in the Rev olutionary War was followed immediately, in the words of Drew McCoy,

31. Carey, "Extract from the Volunteers'Journal, 1784," in Miscellaneous Essays by M. Carey (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1830), 453-55; Earl L. Bradsher, Mathew Carey: Editor, Author and Publisher: A Study in American Literary Develop ment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912), 2—3. 32. James N. Green, Mathew Carey: Publisher and Patriot (Philadelphia: Library Company of Philadelphia, 1985), 5. 33. Carey's Pennsylvania Evening Herald and American Monitor (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, ed., 1785-86); Columbian Magazine; or, Monthly Miscellany (Phila delphia: Mathew Carey et al., eds., 1786); American Museum; or, Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces &c. Prose and Poetical (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, ed., 1787-89); succeeded by American Museum; or, Universal Magazine (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, ed., 1790-92).

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 442 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

by the "stunning defeat of the Revolutionaries' commercial aspirations."34 Those aspirations were manifested in the plan of liberal trade treaties adopted by the Continental Congress in 1776 and inscribed, for the most part, in the nation's first commercial treaty in 1778.35 The United States and the king of France agreed to establish between them "the most perfect equality and reciprocity." To both parties, reciprocity implied mutual grants of most-favored-nation treatment in goods trade and navigation, comple mented by "the liberty of admitting at [their] pleasure other nations to a participation of the same advantages."36 The United States had aimed to invest even more meaning in the word. In navigation the original plan had been mutual grants not only of most favored-nation treatment but also of national treatment.37 The inability to extract from France a reciprocal promise of national treatment in navigation was a setback. The "stunning defeat," however, was not that, but rather the inability through the 1780s and into the 1790s to overturn the prohibitions by foreign empires of American ships and some exports in the West Indian colonies.38 Great Britain was the main culprit, but France and Spain were also troublesome. Their curtailment of the United States' major export mar kets for flour, lumber, livestock, and shipping frustrated the nation's ability to finance soundly its "insatiable" desire for imported British and European manufactures.39 So the desire was financed unsoundly, through a credit boom that produced a disquieting bust by mid-decade, just when Carey landed in America.40 The commercial depression that followed fostered a national reexamination of the liberal premises that had been so widely held in regard to international trade and the meaning of reciprocity. The history of that reexamination has been written searchingly by Drew R. McCoy and others. Here the goal is to document the arguments that

34. McCoy, Elusive Republic, 93. 35. Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, ed. Worthington C. Ford et al., 34 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904-37), 5:768-79; William M. Malloy, ed., Treaties, Conventions, International Acts, Protocols and Agreements between the United States of America and Other Powers, 1776-1909 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1910), 1:468-79. 36. Journals of the Continental Congress, 5:422. 37. Ibid., 768-69; Vernon G. Setser, The Commercial Reciprocity Policy of the United States, 1774-1829 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1937), 69. 38. Setser, Commercial Reciprocity Policy, 52-57. 39. Ibid., 52-53. 40. McCoy, Elusive Republic, 90-100.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mear don • 'A Reciprocity of Advantages" | 443

Mathew Carey contributed to the moment, and to examine their relation ship to those from other moments in his career and from other contributors, most importantly Alexander Hamilton. Carey weighed in on the depression and trade policy just four months after his arrival.41 In February 1785, in the Pennsylvania Evening Herald, Carey deplored the public's "predilection for foreign frippery and gewgas" that caused a shortage of specie at home, and he celebrated some states' consideration of "every object that can check the progress of importations, and tend to the promotion of domestic manu factures."42 Foremost among those states was New York, whose legislature was considering a "truly salutary bill" that would enable the associated mechanics of the state, as a corporate entity, to raise and lend money, to give medals and premiums for the invention of ingenious products, and generally to lower their prices relative to importations. A few months later, in June, Carey celebrated a different but also "very salutary act" passed by the same legislature, in this instance placing a bounty on hemp, the pay ments to be financed by levying additional duties on foreign hemp, cordage, yarn, rope, shoes, boots, and linseed oil to encourage the domestic produc tion of all those goods.43 And in October, as the depression worsened, he offered the pamphlet-length Observations on the Badness of the Times, which hinted at his protectionist mindset.44 Carey must have had Ireland's misery in mind as he asked, "with all the coolness and gravity of a stoic," whether conditions in his newly adoptive land were so bad after all.45 He granted that there was less money around than at the conclusion of the war, but he claimed that happiness did not require so much of it. What Pennsylvania required, and what it had, was a healthy climate and a state of peace. Besides, its people could obtain any things "(if any such there be)" that had to be imported from foreign nations. With all that, if they were not happy, then they could blame their own "folly, imprudence, and party squabbles."46 The parenthetical remark, no less than Carey's writings in the Pennsyl vania Evening Herald, echoed the brazen émigré's past battles and signaled the coming ones. Though foreign trade was not an unqualified evil, there was

41. Carey's grandson Henry Carey Baird gives November 1,1784, as the date of Carey's disembarkation in Philadelphia. See Baird, "Memoir of Mathew Carey," Journal of the American-Irish Historical Society 5 (1905): 127. 42. Editorial, Pennsylvania Evening Herald, February 22, 1785, 3. 43. Editorial, Pennsylvania Evening Herald, June 25, 1785, 2. 44. Carey, Observations on the Badness of the Times, in Miscellaneous Trifles in Prose, by Mathew Carey (Philadelphia: Lang and Ustick, 1796), 173-76. 45. Ibid., 167. 46. Ibid., 176.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 444 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

too much of it under prevailing circumstances. The way for a country, or for that matter a state, to pick itself up was to rely on domestic production. Carey published stronger salvos for his protectionist views in the United States in several articles in the American Museum in 1791 and 1792. Most notable were two sets of anonymous, serialized articles, titled "Examination of Lord Sheffield's Observations on the Commerce of the United States" and "Reflexions on the State of the Union"; their true author was Tench Coxe, a fellow Philadelphian, erstwhile representative in the Continental Congress, and (beginning in 1790) assistant to Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton.47 Dozens of letters between Carey and Coxe bear evidence of their close collaboration on the composition, publication, and dissemination of the articles.48

Notwithstanding the title of Coxe's first set of articles, their impetus was not really the Observations of Lord Sheffield.49 In that work's first edition, published in 1783, the Irish peer had counseled Great Britain to abstain from any "mischievous precipitation" in making postwar commercial con cessions to the United States.50 No concessions were required to maintain British dominance of the American trade; throwing the West Indies open to American ships was unnecessary as well as unwise.51 By 1791 Sheffield merely personified the seemingly unmovable British restraints on American commerce—although by Carey's lights he must have been especially choice for that role. In a different set of observations published in 1785, Sheffield

47. For the details cited here regarding Coxe's career up to his association with Carey, see Harold Hutcheson, Tench Coxe: A Study in American Economic Develop ment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1938), 16, 21. A recent treatment of Coxe's political economy may be found in Martin Ohman, "Perfecting Independence: Tench Coxe and the Political Economy of Western Development," Journal of the Early Republic 31, no. 3 (2011): 397-433. 48. The letters from Coxe to Carey may be found in folder 15, box 5, Mathew Carey Section, Lea & Febiger Records (collection 227B), Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. A letter from Carey to Coxe indicating the former's willingness "to undertake the printing, the reflexions on the state of the union, at my own risque" (February 19, 1792) may be found in Carey Letterbooks, vol. 3, Lea & Febiger Records. 49. John Holroyd, Earl of Sheffield, Observations on the Commerce of the American States with Europe and the West Indies; Including the Several Articles of Import and Export; and On the Tendency of a Bill Now Depending in Parliament (London: J. Debrett, 1783); Sheffield, Observations on the Commerce of the American States by John Lord Sheffield, with an Appendix, 6th ed., enlarged (London: J. Debrett, 1784). 50. Sheffield, Observations (1783), 5. 51. Ibid., 3.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Meardon • "A Reciprocity of Advantages" | 445 had disparaged the "unsteady and extravagant" attempts by the Irish to pro mote manufactures with protective duties.52 He was exactly the sort of figure that Carey fancied seeing hang from the gallows. American frustrations with the restraints came to a peak early in the year. President Washington reported to Congress on February 14, 1791, that the negotiations of his envoy, Gouverneur Morris, with Great Britain had been fruitless. A House committee responded with a bill for retaliation. While nominally nondiscriminatory, the additional duties that the bill proposed on distilled spirits from ports where American ships were prohibited, and the ban on imports not carried in American ships or those of the country from which the goods originated, were plainly aimed at British West Indian mm and re-exports in British ships.53 Partisans rallied to support retaliation or suppress it. Coxe's "Examination of Lord Sheffield's Observations" put him decidedly among the retaliators. To Coxe, Great Britain's supposition that it should and would continue to dominate American commerce was mere hubris. Though the pattern of trade at the time made Americans dependent on British purchases of their raw materials, Britons should be humbled and Americans pleased to know that "it would be most profitable to the united states, to manufacture the raw material, and to expend the provisions on her own manufactures." Looking ahead, commercial intercourse with Great Britain was "not partic ularly to be courted by the united states."54 Coxe elaborated the point in subsequent installments. During British mle, "the effects of the commercial monopoly were prodigious" in stifling American manufactures, as were the effects of prohibitions on labor-saving machinery. The scant progress of Ireland afforded "a striking example of what might have happened to this country" if British political and economic shackles had not been thrown off.55 "Should impediments be thrown in the way of our fisheries, shipping, and foreign commerce," he concluded, "policy, interest, and feeling will prompt us to pursue with ardour the object of manufactures."56 How to pursue that object was another question. Generally, when Americans were "injured in the loss of a vent" for some good, they could

52. Sheffield, Observations on the Manufactures, Trade, and Present State of Ireland (London: J. Debrett, 1785), 3. 53. Setser, Commercial Reciprocity Policy, 110. 54. Tench Coxe, "Examination of Lord Sheffield's Observations," American Museum, May 1791, 237. 55. Coxe, "Examination," American Museum, June 1791, 294-95. 56. Coxe, "Examination," American Museum, July 1791, 10.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 446 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

"create a market for it by checking the introduction of some connected foreign commodity, and making a succedaneum for it at home." Moderate protective tariffs levied on goods of any kind could be combined with boun ties for manufactures that would be paid for by the tariff revenue. The government would have discretion as to which branch of manufactures would enjoy the bounty. "If it be selected with judgment," Coxe deter mined, and "if labour saving machines be used—if the articles [that is, raw materials] it works on, be made free of duty—if the growth of them can be encouraged at home—if a progressive duty be imposed, there can be little doubt of success."57 In the "Reflexions" that Carey published serially the next year, Coxe developed the foregoing ideas as they related to the integrity of the union. "An opinion has prevailed," he observed, "that the southern states will be sacrificed to the eastern, and in some degree to the middle states, by the plan of manufactures." He found the opinion erroneous: the home market for all goods, agricultural as well as manufactured, would be enlarged more than enough to compensate for the loss of foreign markets. In his words, "the southern states and western country will have considerable advantages in the support which the home market of the manufacturers will give."58 The resemblance of Coxe's arguments, as promoted by Carey in 1791 and 1792, to those that Carey promoted or articulated himself in 1784 is unmistakable. It might well be expected that Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufactures, submitted to the House on December 5, 1791, would share the resemblance. Coxe was Hamilton's assistant during the prepara tion and completion of the report.59 He even wrote the first draft of it.60 He was chosen for the work because Hamilton sought "gladiators of the quill" for his economic program; Coxe's previous and forceful writings to the same ends, including notably a pamphlet of 1787, An Enquiry into the Principles on Which a Commercial System for the United States of America Should Be Founded, were well known in Hamilton's circle.61 And Coxe was an early

57. Ibid., 15,10. 58. Coxe, "Reflexions on the State of the Union "American Museum, April 1792, 130. 59. Hutcheson, Tench Coxe, 28, 99. 60. Jacob E. Cooke, "Tench Coxe, Alexander Hamilton, and the Encourage ment of American Manufactures," William and Mary Quarterly 32, no. 3 (July 1975): 371. 61. Hutcheson, Tench Coxe, 14-21. The term "gladiators of the quill," in refer ence to Hamilton's needs and Coxe's qualifications, was Pennsylvania Senator Wil liam Maclay's; Hutcheson, Tench Coxe, 21.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mear don • "A Reciprocity of Advantages" | 447 and leading supporter of plans for the public chartering of manufacturing establishments on a large scale. The plans envisioned assistance for manu facturing not only from state legislatures but also from the United States Congress, which would "increase the duties upon such articles as shall be seriously & systematically undertaken, and otherwise ... foster and encour age the institution."62 They came to fruition in New Jersey's incorporation of the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (SEUM) two weeks before the submission of Hamilton's report. The timing was no coincidence. The report was calculated to promote the SEUM and the SEUM to exem plify the report's recommendations.63 Hamilton's report did echo some of the notes struck by Carey and Coxe. First, it emphasized that new manufacturing enterprises faced "intrinsic dif ficulties" that were hard to surmount if left to themselves. Foreign manufac tures may have acquired seemingly solid advantages; individuals guided by habit, imitation of others, and fear of failure may be slow to perceive that the advantages are really tenuous. To correct such public perceptions "may therefore require the incitement and patronage of government"—all the more, given "the bounties, premiums, and other artificial encouragements with which foreign nations second the exertions of their own citizens."64 Second, the report held that the first experiments with a new branch of domestic manufactures were attended by high costs of production. But in time, through the combination of learning, avoiding foreign transportation costs, and the entry of domestic competitors, production "invariably be comes cheaper."65 Third, the report foresaw productivity gains not only in the establish ments that the government might encourage directly. The diffusion of man ufactures had "the effect of rendering the total mass of useful and productive labor, in a community, greater than it would otherwise be." It did so partly by giving a greater scope for the introduction of machinery to facilitate the division of labor, partly by providing better insurance against the "injurious interruptions" of foreign markets, and partly by affording more varied

62. Coxe to Thomas Jefferson, enclosure of April 15, 1791, quoted by Joseph Stancliffe Davis, "The 'S.U.M.': The First New Jersey Business Corporation," in Essays in the Earlier History of American Corporations, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917), 1:353. 63. Davis, "The 'S.U.M.,'" 366. 64. Alexander Hamilton, Report on Manufactures (1791; repr., Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1913), 18-19. 65. Ibid., 31.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 448 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

opportunities for people with varying talents than would be seen in exclu sively agricultural or commercial societies. Those who devoted their ener gies to agriculture and commerce were the most fit for those vocations, so their productivity as well as that of the aggregate would rise: "the commu nity is benefited by the services of its respective members in the manner which each can serve it with most effect."66 Fourth, the productivity gains would be greater still when one accounted for the enlargement of the domestic market by the immigration of foreign manufacturers, enticed by relief from the "restraints which they endure in the Old World." And, fifth, they would be still greater when one accounted for the particular impetus that a diversified domestic market gave to the commercial sector, wherein merchants and shippers find more opportunities for foreign exportation "in proportion to the variety ... of commodities which they find at home."67 This in turn suggested, sixth, that foreign trade was not undesirable per se. Indeed, "if the system of perfect liberty . . . were the prevailing system of nations," it might usefully be undertaken much further, so that "each country would have the full benefit of its peculiar advantages to compensate for its deficiencies or disadvantages." But that was not the system that pre vailed. Instead, the United States "experience numerous and very injurious impediments to the emission and vent of their own commodities." So a different policy was required. Insofar as other nations gave artificial encour agement to their own manufacturers, even to the extent of monopolizing the domestic market, the United States needed to respond proportionately, thereby "to secure to their own citizens a reciprocity of advantages."68 The similarities of Hamilton's report to the arguments that Carey advanced (as written by himself, Hibernicus, and Coxe) are manifest. It bears mentioning, too, that Carey reprinted Hamilton's report in its entirety in successive issues of the American Museum between January and March 1792.69 At the same time, some differences should be acknowledged. The

66. Ibid., 9,12,15,14. 67. Ibid., 13, 32. 68. Ibid., 17, 37. 69. Jacob E. Cooke, too, observes many of the similarities between Hamilton's report and Coxe's (if not Carey's) ideas: see Cooke, "Tench Coxe." But he does so in less detail and without recognition of two crucial similarities. One is Hamilton's presentation of the "home market" argument—or, as Cooke puts it, "the benefits of a partnership between the farm and the factory" (379)—which is enumerated as the third point here. Neither the partnership nor its supposed benefits are presented less clearly in Hamilton's words than in Coxe's. The other is the endorsement that both

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Meardon • 'A Reciprocity of Advantages" | 449 capital-market-imperfection argument that Hibernicus articulated and Carey published in 1784 was absent from Hamilton's report. At least, that form of it was absent. To Hamilton there was no shortage of capital but, rather, a deluge. He saw in consequence "a certain fermentation of mind, a certain activity of speculation and enterprise, which if properly directed may be made subservient to useful purposes, but which if left entirely to itself may be attended with pernicious effects."70 There was an imperfection in the American capital market, in other words, but it was different from the one that Hibernicus observed in Ireland with Carey's strong support. Hamilton thought that investors' habits and their propensity to imitate others tended to cause not lack of investment but misinvestment. Neverthe less, the conclusion that government encouragement of manufactures was needed followed in both cases. The preferred means of government encouragement differed, too. At least, Hamilton's preference differed from Carey's before the latter's emigra tion. Whereas Hibernicus was skeptical of bounties and wished to rely entirely on protective tariffs, and Carey evidently agreed when he was in Ireland, Hamilton (like Coxe) embraced bounties and wished to use them in combination with tariffs, the former paid for by the latter: "The true way to conciliate these two interests [of giving advantages to manufactures in the home market and promoting their exportation] is to lay a duty on foreign manufactures of the material, the growth of which is desired to be encour aged, and to apply the produce of that duty, by way of bounty, either upon the production of the material itself or upon its manufacture at home, or upon both."71 Yet this difference signifies little. We have already observed that with a change in circumstances—less than a year's time and an ocean crossing— Carey endorsed the same combination of bounties and tariffs six years before Hamilton's report. But suppose he had not. Surely neither Carey's affinity with Hamilton's ideas, nor Hamilton's with protective tariffs, would be disputed because of a disagreement about whether tariffs should be the exclusive means or just the partial means of achieving the common end of encouraging manufactures, which end was justified by strikingly similar reasons. So why, in either case, would anybody dispute it?

Hamilton and Coxe gave to reciprocity, construed as tit-for-tat commercial restraints. 70. Hamilton, Report on Manufactures, 36. 71. Ibid., 39.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 450 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

A RECIPROCITY OF WHAT?

The reasons have to do not with the principles enunciated by writers but rather with the awkward fact that just three years after Hamilton submitted his report, Carey (and likewise Coxe) opposed him vehemently on the urgent trade policy questions then at hand. Looming in their political dis agreements was the question of how to respond to the escalation of British prédations on American commerce in 1793, at the onset of war between Great Britain and France. British Orders in Council in June of that year held that all cargoes of grain destined for France, even in neutral ships from neutral ports, should be diverted to England. New orders in November required that all ships, even neutrals, carrying the products of French colo nies be detained. France responded in kind, but less resolutely. By the fol lowing spring, 600 ships were under detention at British ports (mainly in the West Indies), 150 of them condemned.72 Support gathered in Congress for tough application of the principle of reciprocity, implying in this instance counterrestrictions against Great Britain.73 Hamilton disagreed with aggressive efforts to obtain reciprocity. The interdictions of American commerce, he believed, were tactics of a war that the United States was powerless to stop. Besides, retaliation would beget further retaliation, which would interrupt the flow of British capital needed for America's economic expansion and the tariff revenue needed for its good credit.74 To these beliefs, Paul A. Varg writes, Hamilton added "the note of supplication that so characterized Hamilton's every intrusion into foreign affairs when these involved Great Britain."75 Such was the thinking that drove Carey and Coxe away from Hamilton and into the camp of his Republican opponents, whose vision of foreign policy and domestic econ omy was starkly different.76

72. Anna C. Clauder, American Commerce as Affected by the Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, 1793-1812 (1932; repr., Clifton, N.J.: Augustus M. Kel ley, 1972), 30-34. 73. Paul A. Varg, Foreign Policies of the Founding Fathers (East Lansing: Michi gan State University Press, 1963), 98; Doron Ben-Atar, The Origins of Jeffersonian Commercial Policy and Diplomacy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), 136. 74. Numerous sources explain Hamilton's thinking on this question. The brief summary given here draws on Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 34-35; Varg, Foreign Policies, 100; and Setser, Commercial Reciprocity Policy, 102. 75. Varg, Foreign Policies, 97. 76. Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution, 190-91.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Meardon ' "A Reciprocity of Advantages" | 451

The Republican vision is encapsulated in Thomas Jefferson's "Report of the Secretary of State on the Privileges and Restrictions on the Commerce of the United States in Foreign Countries," which had been requested by Congress early in 1791, but withheld by Jefferson until December 1793, when outrage at British actions made its conclusions irresistible.77 Like Hamilton, Jefferson conjured an image of a world where commerce would be "relieved from all its shackles," where every country would be "employed in producing that which nature has best fitted it to produce, and each be free to exchange with others mutual surpluses for mutual wants," and where, in consequence, human happiness would be advanced, "the numbers of mankind would be increased, and their condition bettered." Also like Hamil ton, but even more, he demonstrated how starkly the real world contrasted with that image. But unlike Hamilton, having finished the demonstration, he did not cast aside the "system of free commerce" and substitute another end that was equally (or more) congenial. Jefferson's question was: seeing the myriad restrictions on American commerce and navigation, how could they best "be removed, modified, or counteracted"?78 If the system of free commerce did not prevail, how could it be made to prevail? Jefferson's answer, which is paradoxical to some of the best of his histori cal interpreters,79 and downright confounding to others,80 was to meet bur dens with burdens, prohibitions with prohibitions. Reciprocity was his maxim. In particular, "when a nation imposes high duties on our produc tions, or prohibits them altogether, it may be proper for us to do the same by theirs"; when a nation refuses national treatment to American merchants or factors of production, to do the same to theirs; when a nation refuses to admit third-country goods in American vessels, or to recognize the Ameri can nationality of vessels not built in America, or to let American vessels

77. Ben-Atar, Origins, 134. 78. Jefferson, "Privileges and Restrictions," in American State Papers, Foreign Relations (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1789-1828), 1:303. 79. Ben-Atar, Origins, 135. 80. Nelson, Liberty and Property, 54, 69. Nelson admits that Jefferson's end was free markets for American goods abroad, but he insists on a "crucial" distinction: '"free trade' was not the same as 'free markets'" (69). He explains that free markets, in Jefferson's view, could be achieved only by restraining trade. The explanation is right but the distinction drawn from it, far from being crucial, is misleading. Nelson would have Jefferson appear not to have advocated a policy designated "free trade." But the policy so designated, both then and now, is precisely what he advocated, albeit as an end, not a means. The crucial distinction is not between "free trade" and "free markets." It is between ends and means, between goals and strategies.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 452 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

ply their trade in offshore dominions, to do the same to theirs. For "free commerce and navigation are not to be given in exchange for restrictions and vexations, nor are they likely to produce a relaxation of them"ix In proposing reciprocal restrictions, Jefferson did not lose sight of his end: a relaxation of them. Whether this combination of means and end is paradoxical, and whether it is good, it is hardly unusual. In historical per spective, it should not be the least bit confounding. It characterizes the majority of American free-trade opinion not only during the 1790s but also during the 1830s, the 1910s, the present day, and most days in between.82 Jefferson's views may be usefully compared with Carey's. Both men saw the Jay Treaty with Great Britain of 1794, fostered by Hamilton to defuse the gathering threat of American retaliation, as degrading. Worse, it pre vented the better outcome that could be had if the United States met British

"perfidy and injustice" with tough retaliation.83 Thus wrote Carey in a pam phlet of his own authorship in 1796.84 But though these views made Carey a circumstantial ally of Jefferson and his partisans, they did not make him a convert: Carey's protectionist convictions would have made such an out come difficult.

Attention to the different usages of reciprocity by Hamilton, Jefferson, and Carey helps explain Carey's political posture during the later 1790s and highlights the difficulty. Hamilton used his peculiar term, "a reciprocity of advantages," in his Report on Manufactures to suggest "prohibitions of rival articles or duties equivalent to prohibitions" when other countries did the same, so long as the measures were consistent with "a due [domestic] com petition and an adequate supply on reasonable terms."85 He did not suggest that the measures were a means of inducing foreign countries to relinquish their restraints. They were, rather, "an efficacious means of encouraging

81. Jefferson, "Privileges and Restrictions," in American State Papers, Foreign Relations 1:303-4. Emphasis added. 82. On the 1830s see Stephen Meardon, "Negotiating Free Trade in Fact and Theory: The Diplomacy and Doctrine of Condy Raguet," European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 21, no. 3 (2014, forthcoming); on the 1910s see Ste phen Meardon, "On the Evolution of U.S. Trade Agreements: Evidence from Taus sig's Tariff Commission," Journal of Economic Issues 45, no. 2 (2011): 475-84. 83. Carey, Lord Grenvilles Treaty, 37; Ben-Atar, Origins, 139. 84. Carey's authorship is not stated in the pamphlet. It is evidenced by a letter from Carey to Samuel Harrison Smith dated January 20,1796, and cited by William Clarkin, Mather.u Carey: A Bibliography of His Publications, 1785-1824 (New York: Garland, 1984), 41. 85. Hamilton, Report on Manufactures, 37.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mear don • "A Reciprocity of Advantages" | 453 national manufactures," an end attended by the several advantages he set out elsewhere in the report. The perfect aptness of the term for Hamilton's purpose should be appreciated. The marked difference of Jefferson's usage of reciprocity should also be appreciated. The instruments of reciprocity were identical. In Jefferson's report of December 1793, they comprised primarily the imposition of high duties on, or prohibiting altogether, the productions of countries that did the same to the United States. But one searches in vain for any "advantage" that Jefferson believed to be gained from such measures. To the contrary, "we must expect some inconvenience in practice from the establishment of discriminating duties." The reason for their establishment was that "we are left to choose between two evils": inconveniences now or greater inconve niences later. Wrote Jefferson, "When once it shall be perceived that we are either in the system or in the habit of giving equal advantages to those who extinguish our commerce and navigation by duties and prohibitions, as to those who treat both with liberality and justice, liberality and justice will be converted by all, into duties and prohibitions."86 To Jefferson, "advantages" were obtained by one side when the other eschewed restraints. Jefferson's purpose is the mutual enjoyment of such advantages, the elimination of restraints. Given that the instruments of reci procity entertained are duties and prohibitions, no notion could be so remote to him as "a reciprocity of advantages." If he had been a poor stylist, he might have answered Hamilton with "a reciprocity of deplorable but circumstantially necessary and temporary disadvantages." Carey, too, speaks of "advantages" in a telling way. His Jay Treaty jere miad, while favoring the Republican opposition, gives little indication in its forty-eight pages that he has Jefferson's end in view. That the treaty was disadvantageous he left no doubt—but where was one to seek advantages? He painted no idyllic picture in the manner of Jefferson of a free and thriv ing trade in which mutual surpluses would be exchanged for mutual wants to the betterment of all. He merely counted the myriad ways in which the treaty would "betray our country," bartering its "dear-bought independence . . . for sordid commercial advantages."87 It is possible to put too much weight on a word. But it may at least be admitted that Carey's description of the Jay Treaty's concessions to the United States as "sordid," not merely "insufficient," is consistent with his

86. Jefferson, "Privileges and Restrictions," 304. 87. Carey, Lord Grenville's Treaty, 16.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 454 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

views over the preceding dozen years. The nationalist and anti-British sen timent of his writing is equally consistent. The straightforward explanation of Carey's departure from Hamilton and alignment with Jefferson between the early and mid-1790s is not that Hamilton turned out to be insufficiently protectionist for Carey, nor that Jefferson turned against free trade, nor that Carey was uncertain in his commercial-policy predilections, nor that Carey was particularly interested in protection for small manufacturers whereas Hamilton was for big ones.88 It is that the alignment, in Carey's mind, had little to do with the protective doctrine that Hamilton delineated in his famous report or the free-trade vision that Jefferson sketched in his. Carey argued that negotiations with Great Britain were a poor way of advancing the common economic end that he and Hamilton embraced: protection for domestic manufactures. They also aroused his long-standing anti-British animus. He aligned himself with Jefferson in the mid-1790s because, under the circumstances, he thought his end was advanced more effectively and in a manner more compatible with the national honor by Jefferson's means than by Hamilton's, notwithstanding Jefferson's very dif ferent end. Mathew Carey's protectionism was well formulated at least as early as 1784, before he emigrated to America, and it was akin to Hamil ton's in the Report on Manufactures. But though Carey first aligned himself with Hamilton, he began to oppose Hamilton over the appropriate response to British commercial depredations and the most pressing international issues of the decade. Carey's opposition to Hamilton had to do with means, not ends, as did his siding with Jefferson. Carey's affinity with Hamilton's protectionism was long-standing, fundamental, and abiding. Decades later, when circum stances changed, no revelation or superficiality of thought was necessary for Carey to extol Hamilton as a champion of protective duties and cast him as an icon of the salient protective doctrine.

88. Shankman, "'A New Thing on Earth,'" 326. Cathy Matson, in her essay "Mathew Carey's Learning Experience: Commerce, Manufacturing, and the Panic of 1819," elsewhere in this issue, echoes the claim that Carey's favored manufactur ers differed in size and status from Hamilton's. But she goes well beyond that claim as an explanation of Carey's drift toward Jeffersonian positions on several policy questions, including the Jay Treaty. The gist of her explanation is largely consistent with the argument made here: that the drift by no means signaled Carey's retreat from the doctrine inscribed in Hamilton's Report, that it did signal his disagreement about the appropriate means for promoting the doctrine's ends, and that it was accompanied by his "gravest concerns" about the free-trade inclinations of not a few of his fellow travelers.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Mathew Carey's Learning Experience: Commerce, Manufacturing, and the Panic of 1819 Author(s): CATHY MATSON Source: Early American Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3, Special Issue: Ireland, America, and Mathew Carey (Fall 2013), pp. 455-485 Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23547680 Accessed: 30-08-2018 10:31 UTC

REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23547680?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Early American Studies

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mathew Careys Learning Experience Commerce, Manufacturing, and the Panic of 1819

CATHY MATSON

University of Delaware

ABSTRACT When Mathew Carey arrived in Philadelphia in 1784, he turned his formidable skills in publishing toward breaking North Ameri can dependence on English commerce and credit, forging alliances with leading political economists in the mid-Atlantic region. North American self-sufficiency was an attainable goal, he argued, one that would be founded on discriminatory tariffs designed to limit foreign imports, encouragements to manufacturers of desirable and necessary goods, and a liberal banking system that supported entrepreneurial ambitions. Carey's prodigious writings over the years reveal a remarkable consistency of eco nomic vision. But in Carey's view, the Panic of 1819 swept vulnerable North Americans into economic chaos that was directly traceable to the contentious political and economic interests in his own Philadelphia region and in the country that had failed to create a viable system of banks, tariffs, manufactures, and commercial auctions. The Panic of 1819 could, he argued, also be traced to the erroneous popular attachments to ill conceived theory about economic freedom that stemmed from Adam Smith and his followers in the new nation.

THE FRUSTRATIONS OF HAVING AN ECONOMIC VISION

When Mathew Carey arrived in Philadelphia in 1784, he was already con vinced that the only way North Americans could achieve the post Revolutionary economic prosperity that they anticipated was by breaking their continuing dependence on English commerce and credit. He must have been heartened to see regular appeals that year in the Pennsylvania

For advice and stimulating conversation, I would like to thank Jim Green and the participants in the Worlds of Mathew Carey conference.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 456 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

Gazette for "good policy" that would "multiply our currently modest pro ductions and stomp out the luxuries of foreign parts." Like so many Phila delphians who were getting busy with postwar recovery, "projecting new arteries of commerce and raising up new producing establishments," Carey believed that the post-Revolutionary decade was a most auspicious moment to establish national self-sufficiency. So he wasted little time cultivating friendships with the mid-Atlantic region's foremost nationalists who shared his perspective on America's future, most notably Tench Coxe. New friends also helped Carey initiate a succession of printing businesses, which became a vehicle for diligently spreading ideas about how to generate enterprise and cultivate republican citizens in the years to come. In his early printing efforts, the Pennsylvania Evening Herald (January 1785 to late 1786), the Columbian Magazine (October to December 1786), and the somewhat more successful literary and editorial magazine, the American Museum (January 1787 to December 1792), Carey established the core ideas of a political economy to which he adhered—with elaborations over time—for "the next thirty years."1

1. "An Act to Encourage and Protect Manufactures of This State," Pennsylvania Gazette, October 5, 1785; "At a Town Meeting," Pennsylvania Gazette, June 22, 1785; Mathew Carey, Essays on Political Economy; or, Most Certain Means of Promoting the Wealth, Power, Resources and Happiness of Nations (Philadelphia: H. C. Carey & I. Lea, 1822), preface, vii, ("thirty years"); Carey, Auto-Biographical Sketches. In a Series of Letters Addressed to a Friend (Philadelphia, 1829), v, where Carey claimed that his early writings coincided with the American System associ ated with Henry Clay and were his "life long pursuit." Essays on Political Economy was Carey's compilation of some previously written tracts, including his most important writings during the Panic of 1819; it was, however, "a dismal failure financially," according to Kenneth W. Rowe, Mathew Carey: A Study in American Economic Development (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1933), 85. The American Museum attracted positive recognition from Washington, Hamilton, and other nationalists; Tench Coxe was a regular contributor. For Carey's early efforts in print ing, see his Autobiography, 490, where he acknowledges a gift of "four one hundred dollar notes of the Bank of North America" from Lafayette to get him started; see also 491, 60-66, especially 65, where Carey writes of his "intense penury" during these early years. Carey first published his Autobiography in a series of thirteen installments as letters to the New-England Magazine, dated July 1833 through December 1834, which is the source used here. It is reprinted, along with other materials, as Mathew Cary, Autobiography (Brooklyn: Research Classics, 1942). See also James Green, "Mathew Carey: Publisher and Patriot" (Philadelphia: Library Company of Philadelphia, 1985), 5-7, 25-26; and Rowe, Mathew Carey, chap 1. For political economic thinking during the 1780s and 1790s, some of which was compatible with Carey's views, see Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jejfersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Maison • Mathew Carey's Learning Experience | 457

For Carey the bedrock of a viable political economy was protectionism, a wall of discriminatory tariffs designed to limit foreign imports and encour age production of desirable and necessary goods in North America. The prosperity that Americans yearned for in the new republic, argued Carey, would be impossible to achieve so long as they foolishly experimented with "unrestricted commerce" following the Revolution. In addition, he insisted that merchants had been lulled into believing that the old channels of com merce in Britain would continue to sustain them long into the future; such goals, he insisted, could only have "pernicious" results in an "expectant but as yet untested" republic. By the end of 1784, even as the "ink of American peace" dried, gluts of overpriced goods were being "disgorged on our shores" by British merchants, specie flew from American port cities to pay for a portion of these "unnecessary and luxurious" commodities, and unwary citizens were falling heavily into debt to foreign merchants. Americans lacked, Carey consistently argued, an adequate "protecting power." This latter would be composed of high discriminatory tariffs that would keep British commercial competition at bay; such tariffs were essential in a young country that was scrambling to establish international commercial credibil ity and trying to raise enough capital to make more of its own necessities. Once foreign goods flowed less copiously into the "infant country," Ameri cans would aspire energetically to meet their own growing domestic demand with new manufactures. In the meantime, manufacturers needed the "inter posing [of] the powerful aegis of governmental protection in favor of that important portion of the national industry devoted to convert the rude pro duce of the earth into such shapes and forms as are demanded by the neces sities, the comfort, or the luxury of mankind." As early as the mid 17805—and continuing through the 1820s—Carey believed high discrimi natory tariffs were the single most important means to break dependence on British commerce and create inviting conditions for manufacturing.2

1980), 139-65; Cathy D. Matson and Peter S. Onuf, A Union of Interests: Political and Economic Thought in Revolutionary America (Lawrence: University Press of Kan sas, 1990), chaps. 2-3; Matson, "American Political Economy in the Constitutional Decade," in R. C. Simmons and A. E. Dick Howard, eds., The U.S. Constitution: The First 200 Years (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1989), 16-35; Matson, "The Revolution, the Constitution, and the New Nation," in Stanley Engerman and Robert Gallman, eds., Cambridge Economic History of the United 'States, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1:363-401; and Matson, "Capitalizing Hope," in Paul Gilje, ed., Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early Republic (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 117-36. 2. Carey, Essays on Political Economy, i; Carey, Auto-Biographical Sketches, Letter III, 16-17; Letter IV, 21-26. Carey also believed there were too many importing

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 458 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

Many commercial leaders and rising entrepreneurs concurred. George Logan, Tench Coxe, and William Barton, for example, assured readers of the American Museum that a high wall of protectionism along America's coastline would provide the basis for the free flow of business within America. James Madison, from a more southern vantage, believed that the same combination of discrimination against foreign goods and close atten tion to petty manufacturing in America would secure a "natural harmony of interests" across all regions. Protectionism also figured prominently in early manufacturing societies in Philadelphia, Carey being a founding member of many of them. The short-lived Society for the Encouragement of Manu factures and Useful Arts in 1787-88 and the Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of Manufactures and the Useful Arts in the early 1790s were but the beginning of Carey's involvement in a long era of society build ing that blended the interests of commerce, manufacturing, and craft enter prise in Philadelphia.3 Although Carey's appeals for high discriminatory tariffs and more manu factures resembled planks in the Federalists' platform, the most influential

merchants and too few manufacturing entrepreneurs; see Auto-Biographical Sketches, introduction, xiv; Letter II, 10-11. For overviews of tariffs as policy and intellectual argument, see, e.g., Jacob E. Cooke, Tench Coxe and the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Philip R. Schmidt, Hezekiah Niles and American Economic Nationalism (New York: Arno Press, 1982); and Maurice G. Baxter, Henry Clay and the American System (Lexington: University Press of Ken tucky, 1995). 3. For example, Tench Coxe, "Statements ... in Reply to the Assertions and Predictions of Lord Sheffield" (1791), and "Sketches of the Subject of American Manufactures" (1787), in Coxe, A View of the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1794), 111-285, 34-56; William Barton, The True Interest of the United States, and Particularly of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1786) 11; Barton, "On the propriety of investing Congress with the power to regulate the trade of the United States," American Museum, January 1787, 13-17; Barton, "To the Printers of the Museum," American Museum, June 1790, 285-92; "A Farmer [George Logan]," "Five Letters addressed to the yeomanry of the United States," no. 5, American Museum, Septem ber 1792, 159-61; Coxe, "Address to the Friends of American Manufactures," American Museum, October 1788, 341-46; James Madison, "Fashion" (March 20, 1792), in The Papers of James Madison, Congressional Series, ed. Robert Rutland et al. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1962), 14:257-59. On manufactur ing societies, see, e.g., "An Act to Encourage and Protect the Manufactures ofThis State," Pennsylvania Gazette, October 5, 1785; Lawrence Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), esp. chap. 5; and Andrew Shankman, Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jejferson ian Pennsylvania (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 106-9.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Maison • Mathew Carey's Learning Experience | 459 of them being Hamilton's Report on Manufactures put before Congress in 1791, Carey more consistently advocated different policies, those that envi sioned a small producers' manufacturing republic. Carey also developed some doubts about the practices of the First Bank of the United States (although he supported the Bank in principle). He was convinced that lib eral lending from local and state banks to the country's ambitious entrepre neurs was an essential ingredient in a healthy political economy, and he insisted that such local lending needed the regulatory power of the national Bank to act as a watchdog over the smaller banks that might be tempted to put their money into circulation far beyond their available reserves of specie and risk collapse. But Carey was not pleased when the national Bank shirked this responsibility. First of all, he grew alarmed when he learned that the Bank lent large funds to merchants who invested not in domestic development projects and manufactures, but in trade with Britain and France. Second, even when Hamilton did promote bank investment in manufacturing, from Carey's point of view it was the wrong kind of manu factures; Hamilton's 1791 Report on Manufactures envisioned lending "pecu niary bounties" to wealthy commercial interests and "monied men" for pet projects (especially the scandalous speculative scheme called the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, in New Jersey), but it failed to provide a general plan of protectionism and liberal bank loans for the more numerous "enterprising class" of small investors. Third, Carey's displeasure crescen doed with the Panic of 1792, when a few Federalist speculators went on a spree of borrowing cash from numerous merchants, tradesmen, shopkeep ers, and widows. Once the speculators invested the funds in national (and other banks') stock, they then shorted that stock, with the consequence of ruining hundreds of Americans and bringing the new nation's fledgling financial institutions to the brink of disaster—a dramatic example, wrote Carey, of dangerously misguided economic energies in a fragile republic.4 There were other reasons Carey distanced himself from Federalist politi cal economy in the 1790s. Though he consistently advocated protectionism, the Federalists' Tariff of 1789 reflected a pastiche of "particular interests"

4. On the bank in 1791, see Matson, "American Political Economy"; compare to Kenneth W. Rowe, Mathew Carey, who wrote that Hamilton's (defeated) 1791 program for manufactures spurred Carey's thinking: "Carey definitely claimed Alex ander Hamilton as his spiritual father" (114); on the SEUM and the Panic of 1792, see Matson, "Public Vices, Private Benefit: William Duer and His Circle, 1776 1792," in William Pencak and Conrad Edick Wright, eds., New York and the Rise of American Capitalism (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1989), 72-123.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 460 I Early American Studies ' Fall 2013

that failed to consult the country's needs. "A more unjust or partial tariff could scarcely be devised," wrote Carey, for it taxed agricultural goods such as cotton and hemp, which were essential ingredients of early manufactures in America, and at the same time permitted many competing European manufactures to enter America virtually duty-free. Foreign imported tex tiles, for example, were assessed a 5 percent ad valorem duty in 1789, whereas raw cotton was charged a 12 percent duty. This "unbalanced approach" to taxing the nation's commerce would continue for years to come, and Carey relentlessly scorned policy makers' "unwisdom." Indeed, wrote Carey, most efforts, whether Federalist or Democratic-Republican, to raise tariffs on foreign manufactured goods from 1789 to 1810 were a "lamentable waste of time." From Carey's point of view, Federalists were forever bolstering merchants' commercial interests and compromising the "true interests" of manufacturing. But American manufacturers were also a source of frustration to Carey, for they failed to step forward and demand more government protection of their own interests. American consumers also bore the brunt of Carey's critical pen, for they were so blinded by their tastes for foreign textiles and household goods that they deliriously sang "cuckoo notes" for finished goods that carried "no importing duties at all" rather than form a chorus promoting domestic manufacturing.5 Other Federalist policies deepened Carey's concerns during the 1790s, especially when he began to articulate another component of his political economy: interregional harmony. Carey's early advocacy of an interregional harmony of interests—which would remain in the core of his political econ omy thenceforth, and which later became a cornerstone of Henry Clay's famous American System—provided a strong vision for widespread trans formation of the economy. It depended on collaborative development across regional geographies; peaceful prosperity under a protectionist umbrella favoring American commerce against competitive European merchants; flourishing agricultural exporting; and rising American producing potential in every region, including the West. Such a view had little room for postur ing by political factions. While "secessionist" Federalists stymied the steady

5. On the Tariff of 1789, see Carey, Auto-Biographical Sketches, 21-22, 25-26; and Carty, Autobiography, 481. On open importation, see Carey, Autobiography, 32; Carey goes on: free trade was "as much waste of capital and industry, as the most infuriated warfare could have done" before 1810. For Carey's anger about city man ufacturers' apathy, stt Auto-Biographical Sketches, 92-93. Also see McCoy, The Elu sive Republic, 139-65; Matson and Onuf, A Union of Interests, chaps. 2-3; Matson, "American Political Economy," 16-35.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Matson • Mathew Carey s Learning Experience \ 461 progress of expansion and improvement in the West, wrote Carey, too many Republicans had become naively enamored of free trade in a belligerent Atlantic world. The Federalists' Whiskey Tax took valuable personal income out of small entrepreneurs' and farmers' pockets, and the Jay Treaty was an undue continuation of British influence on Americans' shaping of the West. Hostility from warring empires and pernicious privateers on the high seas during the 1780s and 1790s, the Haitian Revolution, starting in 1791, and almost constant warfare between England and France after 1793 all interfered with the ability of Americans to advance their own develop ment objectives. Federalist "policy errors" did little to remedy these troubled international affairs. As Carey recognized, so long as Americans could ben efit from neutral shipping to England and France, they could count on a measure of commercial recovery. But in the seesawing unpredictability of the Napoleonic Wars, even clairvoyant commercial interests could not have succeeded; and as Carey saw it, American federal policies made matters worse by choosing to befriend England more often than France.6 Jeffersonians who claimed more state and local power by the end of the 1790s offered some comfort for Federalist "policy errors." Their animosity toward England heartened Carey. Around the time that Carey joined the board of directors of the newly chartered Bank of Pennsylvania in 1802 (a position that "afforded considerable facility for meeting my engagements" in the printing business through easy bank loans), he also welcomed moder ate northern Jeffersonians' support for liberal bank lending policies to crafts men and small manufacturers.7 But Carey was not entirely pleased with Jeffersonian ideological and policy directions. Free traders (many of them southern) and many merchants who rejected steeper tariffs (many of them

6. Carey, Autobiography, 505; Carey, Auto-Biographical Sketches, 27-28, 32. Given Carey's Irish background and abiding animosity toward England, his posi tions vis-à-vis federal policies during this era of warfare are predictable. Two addi tional points underscore Carey's difficulty finding a political place in America. (1) Many Republicans would have had little love for Carey, given his association with higher tariffs and the national Bank. (2) The "wicked" Shaysites demanded extreme issues of paper money for debtor relief, which Carey believed was a sure recipe for inflationary economic disaster. Although Carey opposed the Haitian Revolution, he did applaud the infusion of capital that refugees from it brought into North America; although he opposed the great speculators in land companies, he did sup port easy credit to middling Americans to move West. 7. On Carey's Bank of North America (BNA) position and credit he got there from a "small account" and some personal endorsements through the BNA, see Autobiography, 233 (for quote), preface, 95-96.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 462 I Early American Studies ' Fall 2013

mid-Atlantic) prompted his gravest concerns. Years later he reflected on the early 1800s, and he was "astounded" that so many Jeffersonians rejected the wisdom of protectionists' arguments, and that so many Federalists rejected the kind of tariffs that would have helped small entrepreneurs. Over and over, he wrote, the protectionists had "triumphantly refuted" all hesitations about moving headlong toward national self-sufficiency, but too many political leaders continued to believe "that we had not capital to spare [for investing in manufactures] . . . that our labour was too dear to allow us to compete with European or Asiatic industry . . . [that] it was our duty to direct our industry to the cultivation of the soil . . . that protecting or prohibitory duties would destroy commerce." In short, detractors offered, from Carey's point of view, too many unfounded excuses. There was, however, a redeeming Jeffersonian moment from 1807 to 1809, when Carey and his fellow protectionists cheered the commercial restrictions against foreign commerce, in the hope that many merchants would have to reckon with the heightened risks of commerce and turn to other investments. Higher insurance rates, privateering, piracy, and wildly fluctuating markets, thought Carey, would present mid-Atlantic traders with the option of either retiring from trade or investing in "infant manu factures." This would be a ripe moment for merchants with capital, "projec tors" with plans for new enterprises, and banks with liberal credit to combine in a concerted drive for manufacturing. The Philadelphia Manu facturing Society, founded in 1808 by such a combination of interests and funded by subscriptions from prominent nationalists such as Coxe, Carey, Samuel Wetherill, Charles Jared Ingersoll, George Mifflin Dallas, Israel Israel, and John Binns (publisher of the Democratic Press), advocated these hopeful perspectives and coordinated efforts to put political pressure on state and national policy makers. It was one of the first voluntary organiza tions outside the halls of legislatures to blend explicitly "the best ideas" about economic development with plans for winning legislation. That the Manufacturing Society never achieved much became one more source of frustration to Carey.8

8. For the long "triumphantly refuted" quote, see Carey, Essays on Political Econ omy, 1. For commercial restrictions in the mid-Atlantic, see Louis M. Sears, "Phila delphia and the Embargo: 1808," Annual Report of the AHA for the Year 1920 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1925); and J. David Lehman, "Explaining Hard Times: Political Economy and the Panic of 1819 in Philadelphia" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1992), 66-69. On the society, see John Thomas Scharf and Thomas Westcott, A History of Philadelphia, 1609 1884, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts, 1884), 2:531. Many of these individuals

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Maison • Mathew Carey's Learning Experience | 463

Given Carey's perception of a huge gap between the nation's economic needs and potential, on the one hand, and its insufficient political leader ship, on the other, the recharter debate about the Bank of the United States in 1810 loomed large. Despite his criticisms of how the national Bank had been used in practice, Carey remained a supporter of its regulatory and lending functions in principle. This was not an easy line to toe: critics of rechartering the Bank linked (not entirely correctly) the national institution to "moneyed speculators" and "unwary citizens." They also associated the national Bank with the liberal lending policies of state and local banks that had put a flood of paper notes into circulation, in turn prompting a "mania of speculation" in land and public improvements, which resulted in the inevitable decline in banknote values. A widespread public perception that all banks were connected in waves of "most unrepublican speculation" made it difficult for Carey to advance his argument that state and local banks were essential sources of liberal lending to entrepreneurs. Indeed, Carey became vulnerable to being aligned with the "moneyed interest" he so disliked. He had little choice but to put a positive spin on the national Bank's main "legitimate object"—to uphold the currencies and regulate the lending prac tices of state and local banks, so that banks everywhere could extend valu able loans wherever needy entrepreneurs demanded them. Yet despite sending a copy of his carefully reasoned pamphlet Desultory Reflections to every member of Congress at his own expense, his argument (and those of other pro-Bank interests) gained little traction, and the recharter vote failed.9 also supported Simon Snyder's successful bid for governor in 1809 (and opposed Lieb and Duane); Snyder was in office for nine years. This same cluster of city protectionists also tended to support entrepreneurs and employers against waged tradesmen, especially in labor disputes, a stoiy deserving its historian. 9. Carey, Desultory Reflections upon the Ruinous Consequences of a Non-Renewal of the Charter of the Bank of the Untied States (Philadelphia, 1810). Also see Carey, Autobiography, 53, 311, 312; Edward C. Carter II, "The Birth of a Political Econo mist: Mathew Carey and the Recharter Fight of 1810-1811," Pennsylvania History 33 (1966): 274-88; and Carey, Letters to Dr. Adam Seybert, Representative in Con gress for the City of Philadelphia, on the Subject of the Renewal of the Charter of the Bank of the United States (1810; repr., Memphis: General Books, 2009). Although sometimes allied with Carey, William Duane, publisher of the famous Philadelphia Aurora, opposed rechartering the Bank in 1810-11. Albert Gallatin, secretary of the Treasury during the recharter debates, agreed with Carey, see Kim T. Phillips, "Democrats of the Old School in the Era of Good Feelings," Pennsylvania Maga zine of History and Biography 95 (July 1971): 363-82. Carey hoped that Stephen Girard would aid his efforts to recharter the Bank; earlier, both men had supported lower taxes on ground rents and the initiation of taxes on stocks; see, e.g., Carey,

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 464 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

Carey had little time to lament the failed rechartering of a national bank; beginning in 1811 state governments began chartering scores of new banks that poured easy credit into an expectant economy. In light of the restrictive commercial policies still in effect, Carey once again held out hope that small investors might finally enter a salutary phase of mill and factory building, and he was joined by the voices of many others who, as the War of 1812 got under way, reiterated their expectations that wartime commercial restrictions would force merchants to invest in more domestic manufactures. But by 1814, when it became clear that the combination of commercial hardship and liberal bank lending were not spurring much manufacturing, Carey had grown disappointed once again. In his hugely popular 1814 pam phlet The Olive Branch, Carey once again rehearsed his critique of the American political economy and urged a number of remedies for the diffi culties and anxieties of the war years. Foremost, he called for an end to factional and sectional antagonism; Federalists, he charged, had made coop eration across political lines all but impossible, while Jeffersonians shirked their responsibility to think deeply about the development policies that required active government intervention. Second, Carey again addressed the "ruinous commercial course" merchants had pursued since the Revolution. Long-term warfare among European powers had lulled Americans into believing their prosperity depended on carrying American commodities in neutral ships to hungry fighting Europeans, but Carey insisted that export markets periodically collapsed because American merchants could not control their dependence on those foreign markets. The War of 1812 fur ther "deranged" commerce, proving definitively that dependence on foreign markets—especially British ones—for sales of agricultural exports was "foolish" in the extreme, especially because Americans were ill-prepared for blockades and privateering. The resulting wartime "desultoriness of our markets" pushed scores of merchants into insolvency, hundreds of regional inhabitants into homelessness when they could not pay rent, and thousands into structural unemployment. Instead of shaping banking and protective policies to redirect investment energies into the domestic economy, faction alized politicians and erroneous economic policies only reinforced interna tional commercial dependency. Under these conditions, untold numbers of Americans, said Carey, were leaving the settled states to look for more security in Cuba, Nova Scotia, and India, and the Mississippi Valley

Autobiography, 308-9. Carey's future collaborator in the American System, Henry Clay, opposed the recharter because it would interfere with the operations of state banks; he reversed this position in 1816.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Maison • Mathew Carey's Learning Experience | 465 remained closed to American expansion so long as the British were unde feated.10 In 1814 Carey also returned to the matter of banking. During the war Pennsylvania's legislature chartered a whopping forty-one new state banks, hoping to meet the frenzy of demand for more credit. At first Carey was guardedly supportive of these new institutions; despite Congress's failure to recharter the national Bank, he felt, the proliferation of small banks might be the most expedient solution for meeting wartime necessities. But a famil iar pattern emerged quickly: the newly chartered banks provided so many easy loans to hundreds of Pennsylvanians that within months the infant institutions came dangerously close to collapsing in insolvency. By early August 1814 Philadelphia banks were stretched thin by having wildly over extended their loans not only to land and stock speculators, but also to ambitious commercial farmers and "projectors" throughout the state, on the risky assumption that borrowers would eventually repay the loans. But a large proportion of the loans were renewed repeatedly and cosigned on little more than the word of equally indebted friends (a practice of guaranteeing notes among trusted associates and friends that Philadelphians had followed for decades). The weakness of making these "country loans" of sinking or uncertain value to people in the newly settled hinterlands affected lending in Philadelphia, too. In fall 1814 city bank directors took little time in announcing that they would refuse the notes of western banks except at a heavy discount. By September city bank directors also learned that the notes transferred to them from rickety southern banks were sinking in value because their specie reserves were dangerously low. Carey and his friends in Philadelphia predicted the potential for deep credit contractions.11

10. Mathew Carey, The Olive Branch; or, Faults on Both Sides, Federal and Demo cratic, first published November 8, 1814, by Carey, reprinted in second and third editions, 1815; and in ten editions by 1818. Also see Carey, Three Letters on the Present Calamitous State of Affairs, Addressed to J. M. Garnett, President of the Freder icsburg Agricultural Society (Philadelphia, 1820); and Green, "Mathew Carey," 27 29. Carey advocated other important policies in The Olive Branch, such as distributing western land more democratically, initiating a range of internal improvements, licensing brokers, and limiting interest rates on loans. 11. Carey, A Friend to Public Credit, To the President and Directors (1814); Carey, Auto-Biographical Sketches, 34; Robert Blackson, "Pennsylvania Banks and the Panic of 1819: A Reinterpretation," Journal of the Early Republic 9 (Fall 1989): 335-58. Within three years Findlay won the governorship, led the legislature in passing the enabling law over Governor Simon Snyder's veto, and expressed his support for the national Bank. Findlay s supporters included federal Congressman Samuel D. Ingham, Thomas Sergeant, Richard Bache (editor of the Franklin Gazette, which

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 466 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

In keeping with his abiding belief that small investors and entrepreneurs needed liberal credit on generous terms, even (perhaps especially) during wartime, Carey responded to the tightening credit crisis by issuing a circular letter that pleaded with the city's bank directors to stop redeeming unsound notes being delivered for payment, even at steep discounts, and to suspend specie payments. Instead, Carey urged, city banks should agree together to lend liberally to small traders and businessmen on the basis of new paper credit. Within a few days city bankers did just that, although probably on the basis of the impending credit crisis rather than of Carey's recommenda tion. But the strategy did not work well. Once free to extend loans on a lick and a promise, without a specie backing, Pennsylvania banks extended themselves even further. Distance between city and western banks com pounded the problems of communication and timely note exchanges, which forced wholesale merchants in the city to accept note payments in hugely inflated forms of paper from the interior—notes that were then refused when merchants presented them at Philadelphia banks. In war as in peace, Carey observed, the proliferation of state and local banks had the potential to help Americans turn toward essential manufacturing, but by drenching the region in easy credit these institutions had created more problems than solutions for his goal of unleashing entrepreneurial energies.12

HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF: AFTER THE WAR

At the end of the War of 1812, Philadelphians heaved a collective sigh of relief, expecting that peace would bring renewed commerce, rejuvenated internal connections, jobs, and lower food prices. Their expectations sounded eerily like the optimism of the early 1780s. "We closed the war with the highest éclat," Carey wrote in retrospect, having "every rational prospect of a continuance" of rising prosperity. Elsewhere he proclaimed that the war "emancipated us from our former slavish dependence on the looms and the anvils of Great Britain." Congressman Charles Jared Inger soll, a fellow supporter of manufactures and protective tariffs, concurred that peace brought a "vision of prosperity" for territorial expansion, new

was designed to replace John Binns's Democratic Press), George Mifflin Dallas, Tench Coxe, Nicholas Biddle, and Mathew Carey, see Phillips, "Democrats of the Old School," 375, 379. 12. Carey, A Friend to Public Credit; and "Circular Letter from the Committee Appointed at a Meeting of the Citizens of Philadelphia, Held October 2, 1819," published October 13,1819, in Carey, Essays on Political Economy, 229-37. See also Carey, "Letters to Bank Directors," in Essays on Banking (Philadelphia, 1816), 88-91; and Lehman, "Explaining Hard Times," 152-57.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Maison • Mathew Carey's Learning Experience | 467 urban enterprise, and new foreign markets. Tench Coxe felt certain in 1815 that manufactures "have passed the infantile stage. They are now adult," for enough capital and labor had been invested during the war that they could not collapse under any postwar conditions. And at first the visible evidence of foreign ships returning to the city and carts moving mountains of goods through the streets seemed to ratify writers' anticipated postwar prosperity. Merchants plunged into unprecedented amounts of importing, while farm ers inundated the city with goods. Bankers and brokers added to the frenzy of postwar optimism, offering loans galore for start-up ventures in shop keeping or real estate. Many Philadelphians expressed a contagious confi dence that postwar demand in Europe for American food and cotton would soar, and the initial climb of prices for exports seemed to validate this pre diction.13 In these first optimistic months of 1815, Carey returned to his argument for higher protective tariffs and expanding bank credit with renewed convic tion. To critics of his protectionist views, Carey was adamant in these first postwar months that Americans were becoming increasingly free of their "former debilitating dependence" on Britain—a goal he had advocated for years. Further, he directly tackled the fear among many of the city's most successful international traders that to develop manufactures, capital would be diverted away from their commerce. Carey assured traders that no such "zero sum" approach to using available capital was on the minds of postwar developers. The rise of manufactures was not dependent on the decline of commerce; instead, commerce, agriculture, and manufactures would rise together through "protection applied against foreign competitions," liberal bank loans, population growth and expansion, and internal improvements.

13. For quotes, see Carey, The Crisis: A Solemn Appeal to the President, the Senate, and the House of Representatives (Philadelphia, 1823), 14; Carey, The Olive Branch, 10th ed. (1818), 341; Carey, Autobiography, 322; Lehman, "Explaining Hard Times," 116, 117-18. For similar optimism, see Carey's reflection that the war brought "a revolution, immense, striking, glorious, and delightful," in The Olive Branch, 10th ed. (1818), 22; and see Carey, Auto-Biographical Sketches, 33-34; Carey, Essays on Banking, 18; and Carey, "Addresses of the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry," first published in a series of newspaper contributions beginning in March 1819, then appearing in reprints, and finally compiled in 1822 in Essays on Political Economy; see esp.13. William Crawford wrote to Albert Gallatin in 1816, "In many respects the nation was never more prosperous"; Crawford to Gallatin, October 9,1816, in The Writings of Albert Galla tin, ed. Henry Adams, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1879), 11. On opti mism see Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790-1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 310.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 468 I Early American Etudies • Fall 2013

To critics of his liberal banking views, Carey also had a confident reply. Borrowers and lenders had harbored an unhealthy attachment to gold and silver for generations, and it was time to "enter the new era." They did not need to worry about the periodic contraction of specie (a recurring problem since the colony had been founded), or grow anxious when banks stopped redeeming their notes in specie (as had happened in 1814), because a thriv ing entrepreneurial economy was better served by a flexible supply of bank notes anyway. Banknotes could be expanded to meet the needs of an enterprising people. Further, though specie's value was set by dangerously fickle world markets, banknotes did not have an inherent value of their own and could be set at levels that measured the true value of labor and goods "among our own enterprising people." In addition to becoming detached from dependence on British goods, Americans might also become detached from the credit and finance of markets outside their own borders. "We

might as well suppose that the nutriment and clothing necessary for a lad of five years of age would be adequate for a full grown man ... as to suppose that the enormous increase of business, during the last year, did not require a great alteration and extension of the banking system." When more cau tious writers warned about the depreciation that inevitably followed from increasing the banknote supply, Carey expressed confidence that the regional market would correct this. When the number of loans being issued during 1815 and 1816 grew enormous, he remained confident. "Liberality is nine times out of ten sound policy in banking."14 But the postwar optimism in Carey's thinking was premature, for the reality of persistent postwar economic troubles began to plague Philadel phians by 1816 and "blasted their hopes" for rapid recovery and new devel opment. Philadelphians in every neighborhood began to ride a roller coaster of wild price fluctuations during 1816 and 1817—wilder than at any other time between the Revolution and the Civil War. Prices for household necessities were especially volatile, and Pennsylvania real estate declined one-third in value, fueling a rise in bankruptcies and foreclosures. The prices of government stocks at first rebounded by a stunning 25 percent in just three days during February 1815, only to plummet later in the year. "Stock jobbers" in Philadelphia were reported to be "as hungry as wolves," and real estate speculators flew into "a mania" of buying right after the war; but soon the value of their purchases declined, and real estate was "near

14. Carey, Essays on Banking, 23, 19, 25.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Maison • Mathew Carey's Learning Experience \ 469 impossible" to sell. Numerous merchants also tumbled into insolvency by early 1816, just a year after the end of war and three years before the panic. As Carey put it, "The mercantile world is to a certain extent like the piles of bricks erected by playful children. The fall of one produces the fall of others—either immediately or remotely." Output in "infant industries," including new cotton manufactories, declined by some 60 percent from early 1815 to mid-1817. The newly formed Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of American Manufactures, much touted by Carey and his circle in 1815, announced a "state of great depression" by the end of 1817. That same year a few protectionists and tradesmen together formed the Pennsyl vania Society for the Promotion of Public Economy, intended to address deepening poverty and unemployment, but a lack of subscriptions and a failure to create a "system of economy warmly favoring the government's intervention" ended the society quickly. As the publisher Hezekiah Niles, ever the vigilant nationalist, warned about overextended credit, if only "half the evil that is anticipated by intelligent gentlemen be felt, we shall have 'such times' as the present generation has never seen."15 Economic woes, Carey argued, were due not to the "want of energy" in people, but rather to the "insipid policies" of legislators who would not raise tariffs high enough to protect new enterprises, or who consistently fixed tariffs on the wrong products. A new national tariff in 1816 was too low to keep out many competing foreign manufactures, especially the pernicious trade of British goods, he insisted. In their zeal to bolster international trade, the national Congress and state legislators persistently raised the "cry of 'mad dog' " against manufacturers. Congress had also been misguided, wrote Carey, when it placed high duties on Asian imports such as tea, for those goods were brought home in American ships. Indeed, Carey sus pected that, on balance, American merchants were throwing specie into the

15. Carey, Autobiography, 325-26; Carey, Auto-Biographical Sketches, 33-34, 45-46; for figures, see Anne Bezanson, Robert Gray, and Miriam Hussey, Wholesale Prices in Philadelphia 1784-1861, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936), 1:142, 185; for "playful children," see Carey, "Letters to Bank Direc tors," 67. For the societies, see The Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of American Manufactures, Circular (Philadelphia, 1817), 3; "Articles of Association of the PSPPE, adopted at Philadelphia, May 13,1817," in Report of the Library Committee of the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Public Economy (Philadelphia, 1817); Nile s ' Weekly Register, April 13, 1816; and Lehman, "Explaining Hard Times," 144, 145.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 470 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

"bottomless gulph of the East Indies" in exchange for unnecessary com modities entering Philadelphia.16 Congress's chartering of the Second Bank of the United States in 1816 should have buoyed Carey. Recharter of the national Bank had, after all, been one of his central concerns in 1811, and the Bank at the time had the support of such widely known figures as Clay, Stephen Girard, and James Monroe. In Philadelphia William Jones and Alexander J. Dallas were key advocates of the national Bank in 1815 and 1816. Jones, the first president of the Bank, in 1816, had been a victim of commercial insolvency in April 1815 and believed the Bank could dig many troubled merchants out of debt. The Philadelphia merchant Chandler Price, city broker Thomas McEuen, and tobacco merchant (and ally of Auroras editor, Duane) Thomas Leiper all served in the Bank's leadership during its first years. Girard served on the board as well, until he stormed out in anger in mid-1817. All these figures had supported a government-sponsored development program for years, and all of them expected to get large bank loans for personal invest ment.

The postwar Second Bank of the United States also had the explicit mis sion to curb excessive speculation by regulating state and private banks by regularly presenting the state banknotes it received back to the state banks and collecting specie. But postwar bank legislation also overlay lingering money and credit problems caused by local and state banks during the recent war, and soon enough the national Bank failed in its mission. By the end of the war the national money supply was dominated by banknotes issued by hundreds of independently operated state banks, a condition that the second Bank was intended to check. Carey continued to approve of the expansion of credit, and he even cheered the willingness of banks and pri vate lenders to fuel the popular demand for credit in the "golden age" that many North Americans expected to emerge at the end of the war. The paper-driven economy put Pennsylvanians "in a most liberal mood. Few men of fair character experienced refusals" of loans. It became increasingly apparent in the climate of economic uncertainty during 1816 and 1817, however, that the notes of local banks circulated at varying rates of discount in relation to specie, depending on the reputation of the issuing bank, as well as the distance between the place of issue and the site where a borrower wished to use the banknotes. It was a system

16. Carey, Auto-Biographical Sketches, 39-40; Carey, Autobiography, 325-26, 327; Lehman, "Explaining Hard Times," 358-66; and Poulson's American Daily Advertiser, December 12, 1818.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Maison • Mathew Carey's Learning Experience | 471 that not only caused headaches for travelers and entrepreneurs engaged in interregional trade, but also harmed the daily business of artisans, shop keepers, and laborers. Public ambivalence about paper credit deepened, and anxieties rose in the commercial community when, starting in late 1815, one after another bank again suspended specie payments, making it impos sible to convert banknotes into gold or silver coin. By late 1815 the Bank of North America in Philadelphia attempted to curtail credit in a bid to restore specie convertibility for its own operations. The result was a short but severe recession in the city that exacerbated the unequal exchange with the West. Then, in spring 1816, Philadelphia bankers reversed their efforts to tighten credit, initiating a new mania of extensive lending. This in turn led to a renewed suspension of specie payments, completing, once again, the cycle of institutional behavior that had the predictable adverse effects in all quarters of Philadelphia. Frustrated Philadelphians, many of whom Carey had ardently hoped would benefit from a responsible national bank to protect against the excesses of local banks, turned to interpersonal credit, barter, and stashing coins under floorboards.17 During these uncertain postwar years, Carey also turned his attention to another "pernicious evil" in Philadelphia: public auctions. Before the war some city writers had believed auctions were a flexible vehicle for merchants to dispose of stockpiled or spoiled goods quickly, and an important market place for city consumers to find cheap imports. And make no mistake: Philadelphians were enthusiastic auction shoppers for imported textiles, household goods, and food from distant places. But following the war Brit ish merchants eyed Philadelphia markets as a lucrative dumping ground for shipload after shipload of goods that had been sitting in London or Liver pool warehouses during the stagnant war years. Philadelphia's importing merchants in turn eyed auctioneers as stiff competition for sales and accused

17. Murray N. Rothbard, The Panic of 1819: Reactions and Policies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962); Lehman, "Explaining Hard Times," 125-126; Carey, Essays on Banking, 24, 49, 18-22. Carey often looked to Girard for support of liberal bank lending, but Girard's main biographer argues that Girard decried state bankers after the War of 1812, "who with their fictitious capital have acted imprudendy"; John Bach McMaster, The Life and Times of Stephen Girard, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1918), 2:356. By 1817 Girard also decried the sec ond national Bank, along with George Simpson (cashier of the first national Bank for its entire twenty years and the probable author of the "Brutus" essays in the Aurora that leaked information of the Bank's self-interested lending policies during 1816-17); see Girard's correspondence, January 1817-November 1818, Girard Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 472 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

auctioneers of manipulating customs entries and auction-house prices. Local retailers and small producers joined the auction opposition after the war, especially because auctioneers had become disreputable figures who "cared not a wit" for upholding customary prices and negotiating auction deals according to the ability of the buyer to pay for goods. Unwary or uninformed consumers, wrote critics, were duped by low prices into buying inferior goods that had not sold in England. Booksellers such as Carey were especially wary of competition from the auction vendors; he could agree with merchants that auctions were perfect sites for cheap foreign goods to undersell domestic ones—in his case, books. Critics also linked auctions to the increasing number of nonresident agents taking up residence in the city, men sent by foreign merchants who disregarded the protocols of placing international orders for goods through established correspondence with merchants, and instead bypassed city merchants to ease sales distribution of their foreign goods. Like the growing number of securities and banknote brokers in the city, auctioneers looked only at the bottom line.18 Here was an issue around which many Philadelphians could rally across class and occupational lines. In his writings about auctions, Carey had very little to say about consumers' place at auctions, but he was not alone, for few political economists factored consumers into their perspectives about the "three producing interests" of farmers, merchants, and manufacturers. Rather, Carey's primary focus was on importing relations, especially the British who dumped "foreign rubbish" on Americans and thereby mined fair trading among merchants and entrepreneurs. The remedy would be high taxes on auction houses. But another disappointing blow to Carey's efforts and anti-auction interests came in 1817, when Congress repealed the wartime tax of 3 percent on all auction sales. Through the following months, sheriffs sold distressed and forfeited properties on a daily basis at

18. For examples of complaints, see Paulson's American Daily Advertiser, 1815 17, and Nties' Weekly Register, 1817-18. For Carey's opposition to auctions, see his "Narrative of the Proceedings" (1813), and Auto-Biographical Sketches, 33-34. For auctions generally, see Ray Westerfield, "Early History of American Auctions: A Chapter in Commercial History," Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 23 (May 1920): 159-210; Joanna Cohen, '"The Right to Purchase Is as Free as the Right to Sell': Defining Consumers as Citizens in the Auction-House Conflicts of the Early Republic," Journal of the Early Republic 30 (Spring 2010): 25-65, esp. 36-41; and Malcolm Eiselen, The Rise of Pennsylvania Protectionism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1932), 83-88. North Americans' ambiva lence about auctions was colonial in origins, as were organized boycotts of auction eers' goods.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Maison • Mathew Carey's Learning Experience | 473 the auction houses in Philadelphia, and increasing numbers of British auc tion agents advertised cheap goods for sale at the same sites. His failed efforts to win legislation for higher auction taxes convinced Carey about one more "error" of political economy.19

THE PANIC

The difficulties Philadelphians endured from late 1815 through early 1818 became dire when foreign markets began to wobble in mid-1818. European harvests were bountiful again, which reduced foreign demand for mid Atlantic grain; by September prices of American grain were falling fast in Europe. Wheat exported from Philadelphia fell from about $2.50 a bushel in late 1818 to under $1.00 in July 1819 and continued to fall. In addition, British merchants were starting to trade with India for cotton, and British manufacturers dumped more unsolicited and cheaply made goods than ever on East Coast docks, demonstrating once again, said Carey, the debilitating dependence of Americans on foreign demand. Although in the long run British traders would return to America for high-quality cotton, in the short ran northern shippers and southern planters grew alarmed about a precipi tous fall in cotton export prices of some 50 percent in early 1819. Then, too, political unrest in South America interfered with American acquisition of specie from Mexico. By midyear, the panic was ripping through Philadel phia, soon to become a depression that lasted until 1823 in some mid Atlantic communities. "Merchants who have stood forty years, as well as thousands who have made a forty days' trade of it, are tumbling like rows of bricks." And still, wrote Carey and Niles, Americans clung to their "day dreams" of relying on foreign commerce to provide national prosperity, har boring a "fatal delusion."20

19. See, e.g., Carey, The Olive Branch . . . 1821, in Essays on Political Economy, 267; Cathy Matson and Peter Onuf, "Toward a Republican Empire: Interest and Ideology in Revolutionary America," American Quarterly 37 (Autumn 1985): 516 30. Not all merchants favored taxes on auction sales; as a matter of principle, many of them believed trade should be free of government restraints, and some confessed that in the future they, too, might want to buy bulk quantities of wine or textiles at auction to satisfy their regular customers' demands. 20. See Samuel Rezneck, "The Depression of 1819-1822: A Social History," American Historical Review 39 (October 1933): 28-47; Rothbard, The Panic of 1819; and Daniel S. Dupre, "The Panic of 1819 and the Political Economy of Sectional ism," in Cathy Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). For the panic generally see Bezanson et al., Wholesale Prices, 2:67, and Lehman, "Explaining Hard Times," 6-9, for prices of exports; Carey, Autobiography, 322, 323-24, on cotton and grain; and for quotes, Niles' Weekly Register, February 24,

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 474 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

By the winter months of 1819-20 the panic deepened into depression and Philadelphians were still waiting for remedies. State banks were doing nothing to ease the pressure of failures and collapsed credit; city brokers were charging exorbitant interest rates for short-term private loans, which had become a last resort of many city residents who struggled to save a store or pay rent. Debtors in desperate straits had two choices: either assign property up to the value of their debt to creditors, or agree to enter debtors' prison if creditors refused to settle. In 1819 there were 3,516 actions for debt filed in Philadelphia, over 150 percent more than in 1816, and more than 1,800 men and women were imprisoned for debts incurred in the city during 1819. The price of land, which had surged to $150 an acre in the buoyant first months of 1815, fell to about $35 an acre in 1819, and few were buying. For the homeless, private relief groups set up soup kitchens and designated sleeping areas. Hundreds of Philadelphia businesses failed, and thousands of Philadelphians became homeless or unemployed—or both; Carey estimated that some three million people, about a third of the country's population, suffered directly during 1819-20 in "a universal sus pension of industry and enterprize, a paralysis of all the active energies of our country." "Last year," Carey wrote in 1820, "we talked of the difficulties of paying for our lands; this year the question is, how to exist."21

1821, and Carey, The New Olive Branch (1820), in Essays on Political Economy, 319, 321. 21. Carey, Essays on Political Economy, preface; William Sullivan, The Industrial Worker in Pennsylvania, 1800-1840 (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1955), 51, on soup kitchens; Priscilla F. Clement, "The Philadelphia Welfare Crisis of the 1820s," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 105 (1981): 150-53, on foreclosures, health crises, and fuel shortages; Aurora, April 7, May 19, June 19, 1819, and Peter J. Coleman, Debtors and Creditors in America: Insolvency, Imprisonment for Debt, and Bankruptcy, 1607-1900 (Madi son: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1974), for insolvency and debts. For an excellent discussion of bankruptcies among printers and booksellers in this era, including Carey's difficulties, see Rosalind Remer, Printers and Men of Capital: Phil adelphia Book Publishers in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva nia Press, 1996), 115-24. For the final quotes, see Niles' Weekly Register, June 5, 1819, 253; and Carey, "Address to the Farmers of the United States" (February 11, 1821), in Essays on Political Economy, 409-63, quote at 419. In 1814 a new insol vency law permitted debtors to gain release from jail once they filed a petition for insolvency; the petition guaranteed that the debtor would remain available for set tlement of debts and would not conceal assets from creditors. In early 1819 another state law abolished imprisonment of women for debts incurred after February of that year; see "Report of the Committee appointed on the subject of the present distressed and embarrassed state of the Commonwealth," in Samuel Hazard, ed.,

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Maison • Mathew Carey s Learning Experience | 475

As the "calamitous conditions" of rising sheriff's sales and declarations of insolvency inundated the city during 1819, Carey took the measure of the region's economic dislocation and immersed himself in a study of reign ing political economic thought; he admitted that he "had never devoted three days to the study of political economy" before this. He spent several weeks studying, among others, the French physiocrats, Thomas Malthus, Jean Charles de Sismondi, and especially Adam Smith. In his series of "Addresses" written hurriedly over four months starting in March 1819, Carey insisted that too many merchants "were at once converted into disci ples of Adam Smith" whose advocacy of open trade encouraged overimpor tation, overspeculation, dumping cheap goods at American auction houses, and draining specie out of North America to pay for "worthless fabrics" and luxuries. Carey fumed against The Wealth of Nations, in which Smith asserted that if a foreign country could supply a nation with commodities more cheaply than native producers could make them, then the foreign country should have the freedom to sell. The advantage, Smith argued, would be that all the capital saved by buying cheaper imports could be invested at will. The error in this scenario, Carey charged, was that "the wealth of a country [its specie] may be swept away" in such competitive trading, only to enrich foreign nations that already had a manufacturing advantage. Adam Smith's teachings, insisted Carey, were "the main source whence the prevailing distress of the nation has flowed." Manufacturing nations that were already prosperous from manufacturing would increase their edge, while nations in need of encouragement to begin their "manu facturing ascent" would never catch up.22 Philadelphians were misguided, wrote Carey, by an ill-conceived theory about economic freedom, fickle banking policies, disregard for manufac tures, and destructive auction house behavior. Now they faced a panic that

Register of Pennsylvania 4 (1827): 136. For other personal insolvency and bankruptcy in publishing and bookselling during the postwar years, see Edward Cahill, "The Other Panic of 1819: Irving's Sketch Book, Literary Overproduction, and the Poli tics of the 'Purely Literary,'" Common-Place 9 (April 2009), www.common-place .org/vol-09/no-03/ cahill/. 22. See Carey, Essays on Political Economy, x, for "never devoted"; Carey, Autobi ography, 320-31; Carey, "Addresses of the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry"(1819), in Essays on Political Economy, x, 12; see also in the same volume Address No. 1, 10, 18-26, esp. 18; Address No. 2, 36-38; Address No. 5, 67; and The New Olive Branch, 252-382 at 362-64. Final quotes in this paragraph are from Carey, Three Letters, x-xi. On Carey's prolific writing and print ing in the 1820s, see James Green, "Mathew Carey," 29.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 476 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

forced their homes into foreclosure, their neighbors into unemployment and soup kitchens, and many debtors into prison. Philadelphians had cer tainly known hard times since the Revolution, and the difficult years 1815 to 1818 had provided plenty of evidence about the economic fragility of the city and its surrounding region. But the panic revealed that "there is now no diversity of sentiment on the subject [of prosperity or decline]"— everyone could agree about the "horrid realities" of "the idleness of thou sands of those who have no property but in the labour of their hands . . . which fully evinces a radical unsoundness in our policy. . . . No temporiz ing expedients will suffice" during this deep panic. While followers of Smith and other Scottish Enlightenment figures argued that economic dislocations such as the panic should be allowed to run their "natural course" until economic conditions were "rebalanced," Carey was adamant that the social and economic costs of waiting for the crisis to correct itself were simply too high to ignore. Distressed citizens looked to the govern ment for relief, and the government was itself facing a crisis of public indebtedness: "the resources of both [are] exhausted; both [are] marching to poverty ... in the same road, on the same principles; their expenses exceeding their receipts." Fans of Adams Smith, Carey insisted, were wrong about positing "never-failing activity and love of accumulation; they count not on the disposition [of most people] to indolence, the con tentment with little ... the love of pleasure; the passion for honour over coming that for wealth: all which may arrest the advance of public opulence in its free course." Trust in a "natural economy" and "free com merce" would not create new jobs, especially in the "deranged" conditions of 1819; the Smithian approach, which proposed that Pennsylvania work ers thrown out of one kind of work would soon enough find employment in some "collateral branch" of manufacturing, seemed to Carey "absurd, futile, and untenable." It took years of training to learn an employable skill, he pointed out; tradesmen were not simply interchangeable parts, and it was cruel to expect that a tradesman could make himself employable in another craft without extensive new training. Even then, speculated Carey, hard work and good reputation could not ensure financial security in such "evil times," and shortcomings of judgment and character could not explain the extent of the crisis. The regulating hand of local and state governments was the only means to prevent rising insolvencies and per manent deep inequalities.23

23. Carey, "Address to the Farmers of the United States," in Essays on Political Economy, 421; "Addresses of the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry, No. 1" (March 1819), in Essays on Political Economy, 15, 18; and

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Maison • Mathew Carey's Learning Experience | 477

By mid-1819 Carey had armed himself with a deeper understanding of "erroneous" political economic thinking, but he proposed no new policy or institutional remedies that were not already in his ideological arsenal. Indeed, Carey reiterated his core economic ideas with remarkable consis tency during the panic and ensuing depression. Americans, he implored, had to break their dependency on foreign commercial markets; government needed to energize small producers and entrepreneurs with proactive poli cies for a stronger national economy; banks ought to continue providing liberal credit; and everyone needed to adopt a "universal attachment" to an interregional "harmony of interests." What was new in Carey's writing, however, was a deeper sense of urgency and a more panoramic social per spective. The Panic of 1819 had pulled off "the veil that obscured the appalling vision of public distress." "Wars and famines in Europe," wrote Carey that year, "are [still] the keystone on which we erect the edifice of our good fortune," and Americans relied entirely too much on the fickle fortunes of international commerce. Further, state and national govern ments had ignored for too long their responsibility to promote enterprise because they believed in "the utter fallacy of some maxims supported by the authority of the name of Adam Smith."24 The message remained the same, but Carey's voice carried more urgency and his press produced a steady flow of pamphlets and addresses during 1819 and 1820. Carey also helped found the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry in mid-1819, and then he led a larger group of publicists and reformers called the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Domestic Industry in late 1819.25 Through the latter Carey spearheaded a

Auto-Biographical Sketches, 47, 54-67, 70. Carey added a note of scorn for President Monroe's apathy about the panic to his list of "public evils" in his New Olive Branch, in Essays on Political Economy, 309. 24. Carey, "Addresses of the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry, No. 2" (March 1819), in Essays on Political Economy, 37; and Auto Biographical Sketches, 48-49, 28. For "collateral branches," see Carey, Autobiography, 402. For more along these lines, see Carey, "Addresses of the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry, No. 7," in Essays on Political Economy, 81. Carey admired the writing of the political economists Condy Raguet, Samuel Jack son, and Daniel Raymond, who proposed solutions along similar lines; see Auto Biographical Sketches, 93-96. When Carey's Essays on Political Economy appeared in 1822, the collection prompted a number of angry southern replies; see, e.g., John Taylor's Tyranny Unmasked (Washington, D.C., 1822). New Orleans merchants trading to Philadelphia registered strong anti-tariff sentiments as well. 25. Carey, Essays on Political Economy, 141, 198-99, 230, 318, 416; Auto Biographical Sketches, 46-47; and Rezneck, "Depression of 1819-1822," 34. Carey sought financial support from the Philadelphia Society for publishing his

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 478 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

fact-finding committee to survey the panic's effects on industry and unem ployment, the only investigation of its kind conducted during the panic. Society members studied thirty industries in Philadelphia and found employment in them had declined from 9,672 in 1816 to 2,137 in 1819; the committee estimated that nearly 12,000 city residents were out of work. From more anecdotal information the committee learned that wages paid weekly to city laborers and tradesmen had declined some 80 percent, when work was to be found. Book printing had lost about a third of its jobs, falling from 241 to 170 people employed in the trade. With numbers like these, which were confirmed by the Pennsylvania Senate, Carey lamented that city soup kitchens could not ease the hunger of so many marginalized people.26 The hard facts of the society's survey became additional fuel for the fire Carey tried to light under policy makers in 1819-20. The national govern ment was doing too little to relieve the pain of thousands, and Monroe's national administration seemed oblivious to the disastrous retrenchment in banking and precipitous decline of commodities prices; too many even in Congress relied on the "fallacious wisdom of that mistaken philosopher Mr. Smith." As Carey's collaborator, Philadelphia Congressman John Serjeant pointed out that by refraining from using the national Bank as a solid regu latory agency and failing to raise protective tariffs to high enough levels,

"Addresses" in 1819, but that did not materialize. In the second organization, the Pennsylvania Society, there were important nationalist members such as Dr. Samuel Jackson; Peter S. DuPonceau; Alexander McClurg of Allegheny County, Richard Povall of Philadelphia; Charles Shoemaker from Berks County, and, at times, Wil liam Duane. Findlay was on the society's fringe, and Condy Raguet started support ing protectionism during the panic, probably in 1820. 26. "Report of the Committee appointed to collect information relative to the state of manufactures in 1814, 1816, and 1819," Aurora, September 8, 1819; see also Aurora, October 4, 1819; and Niks' Weekly Register, August 7, September 4, and October 23, 1819. For a fuller discussion of this committee, see Lehman, "Explaining Flard Times," 5-6, 282-85. Carey reprinted the report of October 2, 1819, as "American Manufactures," in Essays on Political Economy, 221-29; he incorporated the findings in his expanded New Olive Branch, in Essays on Political Economy. Carey also composed a circular letter summarizing the data collected by the committee and printed 4,000 copies to distribute as widely as possible through the country; see "Circular Letter from the Committee Appointed at a meeting of the citizens of Philadelphia, held October 2, 1819," in Carey, Essays on Political Economy, 229-30. Pennsylvania's Senate conducted its own investigation during the following months, and its members found that Carey's printed figures were accurate. In addition, Carey and his close associates used the Pennsylvania Society to initiate a national convention of manufacturers set for 1820.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Maison • Mathew Carey's Learning Experience | 479 elected national leaders had played into the speculative "mania" that gripped Americans. "Everything about us invites to speculation," wrote Serjeant. But for wide swathes of the public, the causes of the panic had no deep ideological roots and no international causes. They were at once simpler to explain and more sinister to behold: irresponsible state and national banks had set them on a "path of misery." The popular critique of banks intensified during 1818, when some $4.5 million in bonds for the Louisiana Purchase were coming due for redemp tion from the national Bank and U.S. Treasury; when foreign market prices for commodities began to plummet, British banks terminated specie pay ments to America and the national Bank was forced to call in loans from state banks and private borrowers to raise money for the Louisiana Purchase payments. The smaller banks in turn put pressure on myriad local borrowers for immediate payment, and as prices fell further, paper money lost value, quarrels over interpersonal indebtedness gave rise to a flood of legal actions, and state banks suspended specie payments once again. As public confi dence in small banks nosedived, depositors withdrew funds and banks closed their doors for business when there was no more specie to pay public demands. In early 1819—at about the same time as a British bank crash— the new national Bank president, Langdon Cheves, contracted his institu tion's loans even further and continued to build its specie reserves by draining the state banks. Popular demands for returning to specie payments became ever louder throughout the year.27

27. See Rezneck, "Depression of 1819-1822," 36-37, for first quotes, and 29 for the investigation. For the Cheves fiasco, see Carey, "Circular Letter from the Committee Appointed at a meeting of the Citizens of Philadelphia, Held October 2, 1819," in Essays on Political Economy, 229-37, at 231; Edwin Perkins, "Langdon Cheves and the Panic of 1819: A Reassessment," journal of Economic History 44 (June 1984): 455-61; and Lehman, "Explaining Hard Times," 205-11. Among the Bank's vocal critics were William Duane and a number of state legislators who passed a law in 1820 requiring that the banks chartered in 1814 return to specie payments or forfeit their charters. Findlay, echoing wisdom from Adam Smith that Carey emphatically rejected, simply refused to enforce the legislative measure and expressed that it was "most prudent to permit the fluctuating paper of our different banks find its level through natural rather than artificial channels." While Carey favored keeping the chartered banks, he almost certainly disagreed with Findlay about how to achieve that. The involvement of Girard and John Jacob Astor in the national Bank events of 1819 is more complicated to explain than space permits in this article; see Girard's correspondence, January 1817-November 1818, in Girard Papers, American Philosophical Society, and the running debate covered in William Duane's Aurora. For general conditions, see Rezneck, "Depression of 1819-1822"; Rothbard, The Panic of 1819, chap. 1; Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jack

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 480 I Early American Studies ' Fall 2013

With patience and consistency, Carey replied to the dispute over banking identity and policy with his much-rehearsed argument: that the real prob lem was not the national Bank in principle, or the efficacy of liberal lending by state banks, but rather Americans' addiction to speculating with bank notes. "The recent arrangement of the banks, whereby they pay interest on the balances due each other ... is highly pernicious. . . . The pressure of one bank upon the community, induces the pressure on all others." Perhaps Carey's steadfast position about banking, despite the public crisis of confi dence, was more than theoretical in 1819-20, for he had more firsthand experience of the humiliating hardships imposed by mismanaged lending that year. Otherwise trustworthy borrowers and lenders went insolvent—or went to debtors' prison—all around him that year. His personal friend J. M. Conner wrote desperately from debtors' prison to beg for thirty-five dollars to secure his release and return his "honor and integrity." In another instance, the Philadelphian John Babrach apologetically asked Carey for a small loan in early 1820: "I stand guilty of ten thousand sins. . . . however the crime of selfishness will never be fairly laid to my charge." The indignit ies of these personal debts were familiar to Carey—he had fallen into dire financial straits himself more frequently than he cared to remember—but during the panic the instances of personal penury and the humiliations of hounding brokers, insensitive creditors, and court appearances had become "too numerous to recount."28 As Philadelphians struggled through deepening "hard times" during 1820, the tenacious Mathew Carey forged ahead with many new publica tions and a few important organizational efforts to change the course of

sonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), who follows Rezneck and Rothbard; and the classic Bank narrative of Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), esp. 230-62. Further evidence of the second Bank fiasco in Philadelphia can be followed in writings of, e.g., Manuel Eyre, Samuel Wetherill Jr., Blair McClenachan, Tench Coxe, and Alexander Dallas. 28. For Carey's response to the Bank fiasco, see The New Olive Branch, 323-25, xix-xx; and "The Farmer's and Planter's Friend" (1821), in Essays on Political Econ omy, 465-510, at 470-74; J. M. Conner to Carey, June 21, 1819, and Babrach to Carey, February 6, 1820, Mathew Carey Papers, Edward Carey Gardiner Collec tion, box 88, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Carey's observations in 1819-20 echoed his earlier critique of the momentous crash of the Farmer's Exchange Bank of Gloucester in 1809, when "stock note banking"— whereby banks sold stock to each other, thus creating paper working capitals in inland banks that fueled speculation by coastal banks—brought down this bank in a spectacular fail ure; see Carey, Letters to Dr. Adam Seybert, 67-77.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Maison • Mathew Carey's Learning Experience | 481 economic policy. One collective effort stands out. Nationalists called the Convention of the Friends of Domestic Industry in New York in early 1820, a gathering of concerned political economists and policy makers from nine states. (Pennsylvania sent seven delegates.) Carey was secretary of the meet ing and later composed the primary memorial from the convention to Con gress, a document that carefully refrained from criticizing merchants (whose interests were still strongly served in Congress) but lambasted the presence of British agents at American auction houses and the persistent flood of foreign goods into American port cities. Carey also meticulously outlined the continuing crisis of low agricultural export prices, and he strongly blamed Congress for its persistent failure to raise tariffs high enough.29 The convention memorialists enlisted the support of Congressman Henry Baldwin, a representative from Pittsburgh who headed up the new federal Committee of Manufacturing and a friend of the protectionists in Philadelphia. Plumped up with letters and pamphlets from Carey, Baldwin did his best to get support for drafted legislation that would raise auction taxes to a high of 10 percent, and he took proposals to Congress for higher protective tariffs repeatedly during 1820 and 1821. But congressional oppo nents—Carey insisted they were mostly southern representatives—dug in their heels and defeated the Baldwin committee's proposals as well as those brought directly to Congress.30 Back in Philadelphia, Carey returned to a widely circulated earlier publi cation and updated its recounting of his recent efforts to change America's political economy. The result appeared as The New Olive Branch in 1820, published at significant private expense to Carey. Many of his "friends of protection" had given up stumping for issues that had been defeated for many years. The commercial and urban social crises were deepening, they lamented, and the effect of their arguments for commercial protection and auction taxes would "go still unheard" until "better times" returned. In the meantime, some turned to other issues. One of these involved promoting

29. On the convention and its memorial, see Niles' Weekly Register, December 11, 1819; Carey, An Address to Congress: Being a View of the Ruinous Consequences of a Dependence on Foreign Markets (Philadelphia, 1820), in Essays on Political Economy, 383-408; Carey, Autobiography, 325-27; Carey, "Addresses of the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry" (1819), in Essays on Political Econ omy, 18-26, 36-38, 67; Rezneck, "Depression of 1819-1821," 41-42; and Roth bard, The Panic of 1819, 152. 30. On Baldwin, see Dupre, "The Panic of 1819," 275-78. On congressional events, see extensive coverage in Niles' Weekly Register, April 1820 through March 1822. For blaming southerners, see Carey, Autobiography, 485.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 482 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

internal excise taxes, which had been the bane of frontier settlers for years, including whiskey producers and thousands of people who used inland transporting and milling services. Carey chose not to champion excise taxes, partly because they placed a great burden on struggling small producers and partly because the "harmony of interests" he had advocated for years required knocking down, rather than building up, inland trading barriers. Another issue of rising significance to the Carey circle by 1820 involved the disposition of western lands, the sales of which many congressional representatives had come to believe was "a better object" for raising revenues than import tariffs. The 1820 national land law, enacted during the depths of the panic, reduced the price of land from two dollars to one dollar an acre but required a minimum purchase of eighty acres and payment in cash. This amount, Carey reminded his friends, was beyond the means of most families wishing to start over in a new location. Yet Carey did spend some time thinking about the West as a part of his vision for a national "harmony of interests," especially in light of the Missouri Crisis during 1819, the new land policy of 1820, and the defeat of his protectionist goals in Congress. Carey began to pay closer attention to the economic benefits of inter regional cooperation, including reconciliation of regional quarrels over state formation and slavery.31 Carey also became more attentive to wider social issues as the panic grew into an economic depression. In 1820 he took proposals for debtor relief to the Friends of Domestic Industry, but, again, Carey was disappointed with the singular lack of interest in his home state and the federal Congress. In Pennsylvania legislators rejected most relief measures, such as stoppage and stay laws, loan offices, abolition of imprisonment for debt, and more exten sive insolvency laws. Congress was equally firm in rejecting new bankruptcy legislation, stay laws, curtailments on creditors' rights over debtors, and other measures to relieve the distress of poor and middling Americans dur ing the panic. By the end of 1820 Carey felt that his writings and organiza tional efforts that year were utter failures; instead of inspiring social legislation during dire times, he wrote, "I might as well have sought to raise the dead."

31. On the excises and western land policy, in this paragraph and the next two, see Carey, Auto-Biographical Sketches; for "raise the dead," see ibid., 87-88. For the banks, see Belden Daniels, Pennsylvania, Birthplace of Banking in America (Harris burg: Pennsylvania Bankers Association, 1976), 148-53; "Brutus" essays in the Aurora, 1822-23; and Shankman, Crucible of American Democracy, 202. For a differ ent view, see Blackson, "Pennsylvania Banks and the Panic of 1819," 335-58.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Maison • Mathew Careys Learning Experience | 483

By 1823 only twenty-two of the forty-one banks chartered in 1814 had survived the turmoil of the depression, a winnowing that many contempo raries (and quite a few historians) believed to be the consequence of overly expansive lending and inadequate reserves of specie. Carey, however, clung to his earlier minority point of view, that liberal lending from a number of state banks was essential for building the national self-sufficiency on which America's economic future must depend. During the coming years, Carey also pronounced the higher national tariffs of 1824 and 1826 to be "defeats" of the protectionists' goals. Rather than support small increases in tariffs as a step in the right direction, Carey pronounced that the new legislation was once again directed at the wrong commodities and that these new tariffs were inadequate for spurring new enterprises within America. Only after the mid-1820s, in a period of recovery from the depression, did Carey glimpse the possibility that his economic thinking and his pro posed economic policies might finally "turn to the good." Episodically, his writings during the 1820s reveal moments of satisfaction that his political economy was at last developing shallow roots. He had forged a close collab oration with Henry Clay to make the American System a success during the mid-1820s. Carey also championed the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal and other public projects during the later 1820s as practical and con sequential applications of entrepreneurial and banking resources in behalf of a large "public welfare." This public welfare was itself coming more into focus in Carey's writings. And Carey was finally somewhat content when Congress announced the steep tariff increases of 1828. That same year a number of celebrations honored Carey's indefatigable public efforts to secure stronger government intervention in the economy and his willingness to articulate the tenets of a political economy that was "wise in all its argu ments but too far reaching for our magistrates and the general public mind to adopt." Yet even as celebrations carried on, the Tariff of 1828 was deep ening sectional tensions and threatening to undermine the "harmony of interests" that Carey prized so highly; Clay's American System was encoun tering stiff resistance from many quarters, and the Second Bank of the United States was enduring intense public scrutiny shortly thereafter.32 Carey's political economy was remarkably consistent over many decades; his earliest appeals for protectionism, energetic entrepreneurship, sound but liberal banking, and active involvement of state and national governments all remained prominent in his writings. These bedrock issues became the

32. On post-1821 projects, see Carey, Auto-Biographical Sketches, 127-28; and Rowe, Mathew Carey, 87-89, 119-20.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 484 I Early American Studies • Fall 2013

basis for his affiliations with like-minded policy advocates, and they consti tuted the main subject matter of his writings on political economy. They also became Carey's constant source of frustration when stronger interests defeated them. Carey s fundamental political economy grew more sophisti cated during the hard times after the War of 1812. He conducted an inten sive study of opposing economic theories; he incorporated new issues such as higher auction taxes and interregional cooperation, which complemented his basic political economy and were of importance to a widening number of Americans; and he became an inspiring leader in organizations that prag matically collected information about economic conditions and aggressively disseminated printed materials about concrete policy remedies. The depth of Carey's involvement in shaping early American political economy should not be underestimated; the sheer quantity of his publications and the endur ance record he achieved in the cauldron of political battles are astounding. But Carey also had blind spots. One was his limited understanding about how Philadelphians (and North Americans in general) could raise invest ment capital to undertake development in practice. Carey consistently held that tariffs—revenues taken from commerce—would provide the most sig nificant inducement and indirect financial resource for infant enterprises, when, in fact, the capital needs of development would be satisfied only partially by government funding. As the historical record demonstrates, manufacturing would be at least equally reliant on merchants' investment of profits and the collective savings of petty entrepreneurial Philadelphians. Until there were sufficient real profits and savings to invest—as well as ideological readiness—the expansion of banknotes and easy loans provided only a small measure of aid to investors. And in periods of overexpansion, the "empires of paper" emitted to an eager public also left the economy unprotected in the face of persistent international wars, vulnerable foreign markets, unscrupulous speculators, and fragile public and private projects.33 A second blind spot involved Carey's misunderstanding about the far reaching alterations in labor that were taking place in the early republic and that would be required for capitalist manufacturing to get a toehold in Philadelphia (and beyond). To create manufactures, Carey rightly rejected Hamilton's proposals to employ "excess" women and children and to encourage immigration of thousands of unskilled, poor Europeans. But

33. For this paragraph and the next one, I am generalizing from Carey's writings cited above, as well as Essays on the Public Charities of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1829); Wages of Female Labour (Philadelphia, 1829); Appeal to the Wealthy of the Land (Philadelphia, 1833); and Case of the Seamstresses (Philadelphia, 1833).

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Maison • Mathew Carey's Learning Experience | 485

Carey clung to a vision of an independent householder republic that pro vided intensive training in apprenticeships, a scenario that was being eclipsed rapidly. Already in the 1820s Philadelphians were moving beyond Carey's perspective; skill remained important in many trades, but plenty of new manufactures used new forms of work discipline and wage labor of the kind that was soon associated with an emergent factory system. As Carey advanced into old age, many Philadelphians were addressing the particular issues facing the nineteenth-century working class and its place in the emer gent factory life of the city. By the 1820s few voices in the city's newspapers and circulating pamphlets described the new class arrangements in terms of the "harmony of interests" that Carey and other political economists of the early republic had envisioned. Along with sectionalism and emerging capitalist investment arrangements, class alignments by the late 1820s would require bold adjustments in political economic thought and policy making.

This content downloaded from 203.206.77.211 on Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:31:32 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms