A History of the Book in America: Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840 [1 ed.] 9781469627199, 9780807833391

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A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic:

Copyright © 2010. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

A History of the Book in America VOLUME 2

An Extensive Republic

Copyright © 2010. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840

A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

A History of the Book in America David D. Hall, General Editor . . . VOLUME 1 The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World edited by Hugh Amory and David D. Hall

VOLUME 2 An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840 edited by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley

VOLUME 3 The Industrial Book, 1840–1880 edited by Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship

VOLUME 4

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Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940 edited by Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway

VOLUME 5 The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America edited by David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson

. . . EDITORIAL BOARD David D. Hall (chair), Hugh Amory, Scott E. Casper, Ellen S. Dunlap, James N. Green, Robert A. Gross, Jeffrey D. Groves, Philip F. Gura, John B. Hench, Carl F. Kaestle, Mary Kelley, Marcus A. McCorison, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, David Paul Nord, Janice A. Radway, Joan Shelley Rubin, Michael Schudson, Michael Winship

A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

A History of the Book in America Copyright © 2010. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

VOLUME 2

An Extensive Republic Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840 EDITED BY

Robert A.Gross and Mary Kelley .

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Published in Association with the American Antiquarian Society by The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

Publication of this book was assisted by a grant from the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust. © 2010 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Set in Bulmer by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

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The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data An extensive republic : print, culture, and society in the new nation, 1790–1840 / edited by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley. p. cm. — (A history of the book in America ; v. 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8078-3339-1 (alk. paper) 1. Book industries and trade—United States—History—19th century. 2. Publishers and publishing—United States—History—19th century. 3. Books and reading—United States—History—19th century. 4. Printing—Social aspects—United States—History—19th century. I. Gross, Robert A., 1945– II. Kelley, Mary, 1943– Z473.E98 2010 381'.45002097309034—dc22 2009052183 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1

A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

CONTENTS

Contributors · xiii Editors’ and Authors’ Acknowledgments · xvii Introduction: An Extensive Republic · 1 Robert A. Gross

Section I. A Republic in Print: Ideologies and Institutions Introduction · 53 Mary Kelley

CHAPTER 1 The Revolution’s Legacy for the History of the Book · 58 Richard D. Brown

CHAPTER 2

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The Book Trades in the New Nation Part 1. The Rise of Book Publishing · 75 James N. Green Part 2. Case Study: Harper & Brothers · 128 Scott E. Casper Part 3. Case Study: Urban Printing · 137 Karen Nipps Part 4. “Printing is something every village has in it”: Rural Printing and Publishing · 145 Jack Larkin Part 5. “Of the paper cap and inky apron”: Journeymen Printers · 160 William S. Pretzer

A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

Section II. Spreading the Word in Print Introduction · 175 Mary Kelley

CHAPTER 3 Government and Law Part 1. Print and Politics · 179 John L. Brooke Part 2. Have Pen, Will Travel: The Times and Life of John Norvell, Political Journalist · 190 Jeffrey L. Pasley Part 3. Copyright · 198 Meredith L. McGill Part 4. Expanding the Realm of Communications · 211 Richard R. John

CHAPTER 4 Benevolent Books: Printing, Religion, and Reform · 221 David Paul Nord

CHAPTER 5

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The Learned World · 247 David S. Shields

Section III. Educating the Citizenry Introduction · 269 Mary Kelley

CHAPTER 6 Libraries and Schools Part 1. Libraries · 273 Kenneth E. Carpenter Part 2. Schools · 286 Gerald F. Moran and Maris A. Vinovskis Part 3. Schoolbooks · 304 Charles Monaghan and E. Jennifer Monaghan

A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

Part 4. Colleges and Print Culture · 318 Dean Grodzins and Leon Jackson Part 5. Female Academies and Seminaries and Print Culture · 332 Mary Kelley

Section IV. Gendering Authorship and Audiences Introduction · 347 Mary Kelley

CHAPTER 7 Men Writing in the Early Republic · 350 David Leverenz

CHAPTER 8 Women Writing in the Early Republic · 364 Joanne Dobson and Sandra A. Zagarell

Section V. Genres of Print Introduction · 385 Mary Kelley

CHAPTER 9 Copyright © 2010. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

Periodical Press: Newspapers, Magazines, and Reviews Part 1. Newspapers and Periodicals · 389 Andie Tucher Part 2. Harriet Newell’s Story: Women, the Evangelical Press, and the Foreign Mission Movement · 408 Mary Kupiec Cayton Part 3. Making Friends at the Southern Literary Messenger · 416 Leon Jackson

CHAPTER 10 Word and Image Part 1. Transformations in Pictorial Printing · 422 Georgia B. Barnhill

A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

Part 2. Novels · 440 Elizabeth Barnes Part 3. Travel Books · 449 Dona Brown Part 4. Biography · 458 Scott E. Casper

Section VI. New Reading and Writing Publics Introduction · 467 Mary Kelley

CHAPTER 11 Making Communities in Print Part 1. Readers and Writers of German · 471 A. Gregg Roeber Part 2. Give Me a Sign: African Americans, Print, and Practice · 483 Grey Gundaker Part 3. Literacy and Colonization: The Case of the Cherokees · 495 Barry O’Connell Copyright © 2010. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 12 Reading for an Extensive Republic · 516 Robert A. Gross Bibliography and the AAS Catalog: A Note on Tables · 545 Robert A. Gross Notes · 551 Index · 669

A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

F I G U R E S , TA B L E S , A N D G R A P H S

Figures I.1. A Display of the United States of America · 3 I.2. Mastheads on an American theme, 1787 to 1795 · 15 I.3. Mastheads on a theme: the watch, 1809 to 1820 · 19 I.4. Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous · 23 I.5. “Vulcan! Mars!! Jupiter & Clergymen!!!” · 39 I.6. Subscribers for History of Concord, Massachusetts · 45 1.1. Common Sense · 66 1.2. Excerpt, “A chronological table of the most remarkable events, in . . . American history,” Noah Webster, Elements of Useful Knowledge · 72 1.3. Lord Chesterfield, Principles, of Politeness · 73 2.1. Allegorical frontispiece, Dunlap, The Self-Interpreting Bible · 84 2.2. Carey prospectus for quarto and school bibles · 99 2.3. A volume of Harper’s Family Library showing titles in series · 130

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2.4. One title, four Harpers series · 133 3.1. King Andrew the First · 187 3.2. Prospectus for a political newspaper, 30 March 1840 · 188 3.3. Franklin Gazette, 25 November 1820 · 193 3.4. Memorial of the Columbia Typographical Society, 13 February 1838 · 210 3.5. John Lewis Krimmel, Village Tavern · 219 4.1. First American Bible printed with stereotype plates · 228 4.2. The Musical and Pictorial Alphabet, a Sunday School Union publication · 237 4.3. The Eventful Twelve Hours, a temperance tract · 241 4.4. The American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1840 · 244

A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

4.5. Slave’s Friend, an American Anti-Slavery Society periodical for children · 245 5.1. Antiquarian Hall, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1820 · 249 5.2. T. A. Conrad, New Fresh Water Shells of the United States · 259 5.3. The impact of linguistic study on biblical interpretation · 264 6.1. Library share certificate · 275 6.2. Illustrated bookplate, Circulating Library of Lewisburg · 276 6.3. Rewards of Merit · 291 6.4. The Schoolmaster · 294 6.5. Peter Parley’s Method of Teaching Arithmetic to Children · 317 6.6. The library building of South Carolina College · 323 6.7. Portrait of Sarah Pierce attributed to George Catlin · 334 6.8. “Miniature Panorama: Scenes from a Seminary for Young Ladies” · 335 6.9. Mount Holyoke Female Seminary by Currier & Ives · 342 7.1. Washington Irving · 355 7.2. Ralph Waldo Emerson · 358 7.3. James Fenimore Cooper · 360 7.4. Edgar Allan Poe · 362 8.1. Portrait of Mercy Otis Warren by John Singleton Copley · 365 Copyright © 2010. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

8.2. Portrait of Sarah Wentworth Morton by Gilbert Stuart · 365 8.3. Portrait of Judith Sargent Murray by John Singleton Copley · 366 8.4. Notice of copyright deposit by Judith Sargent Murray, Columbian Centinel, 28 March 1798 · 370 8.5. Lydia Maria Francis Child, engraving based on Francis Alexander portrait, 1826 · 375 8.6. Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart, 1835 · 380 9.1. Cherokee Phoenix, 6 March 1828 · 403 9.2. Harriet Newell, frontispiece to Leonard Woods, Sermon . . . in Remembrance of Mrs. Harriet Newell, 1814 · 415 9.3. Portrait of Thomas Willis White, artist unknown · 417 10.1. Joseph Seymour, “Queen of the Silver Bow!” · 423

A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

10.2. Asher Brown Durand, “Delaware Water Gap,” · 427 10.3. William Russell Birch, “Mount Vernon, Virginia” · 429 10.4. William Croome, “The Spirit of Poesy” · 432 10.5. John Gadsby Chapman, “The Last Arrow” · 434 10.6. Portrait of Susanna Haswell Rowson, artist unknown · 447 10.7. Gideon Davison, The Fashionable Tour · 456 11.1. Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles · 487 11.2. The new building of African School of Boston, 1834 · 489 11.3. Benjamin Bannaker’s Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac for the Year of our Lord 1795 · 491 11.4. Memoir of Catharine Brown, a Christian Indian of the Cherokee Nation · 510 11.5. Sequoyah, portrait by Charles Bird King · 511 11.6. Cherokee Alphabet · 513 12.1. David Claypoole Johnston, Taproom Scene, ca. 1840 · 519 12.2. New England Farmer’s Almanac, 1829, with diary pages inserted · 522 12.3. Sojourner Truth (1797–1883), carte de visite · 530 12.4. Account book of bookbinder John Whittemore showing titles bound for Isaiah Thomas Jr., 1808 · 534

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12.5. The opening page Miss Mary Eliza Donaldson’s 1832 “Album” · 541

Tables 2.1

Imprints from 1804 booksellers’ catalog · 94

2.2 Production costs (in dollars) per copy for three novels, each retailing for $2.00, 1820s · 113 2.3 Statistics for printing and binding trades and for publishers in seven cities · 120 2.4 New books, by place of publication, 1834 · 125 2.5. Distribution of Harper’s Family Library by genre · 131 2.6. Communities with printing offices, by state, 1790–1840 · 147 3.1. Newspapers, literacy, and voter turnout, 1840–1844 · 189

A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

3.2. Chronological list of U.S. court cases involving copyright and literary property, 1789–1840 · 205 6.1. Survival rates for libraries, 1790–1840 · 282 9.1. Number of newspapers by state, 1776–1840 · 391 9.2. Number of newspapers by state, 1790–1820 · 393 9.3. The periodical business: Printing and publishing by state in 1840 · 400 9.4. Contributors to the Massachusetts Missionary Society, 1802 and 1803 · 413 10.1. Number of line engravings published in the United States, 1789–1820 · 425 10.2. Publication of novels in the United States, 1790–1840: Editions and titles by national origin · 442 10.3. Most frequently reprinted novels in the early republic, 1790–1840 · 443

Graphs I.1. Editions of children’s publications per year, 1790–1840 · 31 6.1. Editions of schoolbooks per year, 1790–1840 · 306 6.2. Editions of schoolbooks by genre, 1790–1840 · 306 6.3. Editions of schoolbooks by genre, 1790–1815 · 307

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6.4. Editions of schoolbooks by genre, 1816–1840 · 307

A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

CONTRIBUTORS

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ELIZABETH BARNES is associate professor of English and American studies at the College of William and Mary. GEORGIA B. BARNHILL is Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts at the American Antiquarian Society and director of its Center for Historic American Visual Culture. She lectures and publishes extensively on aspects of the society’s print and illustrated book collections. Bibliography on American Prints of the Seventeenth through the Nineteenth Centuries is the definitive descriptive bibliography of books and articles on American prints of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. JOHN L. BROOKE is Humanities Distinguished Professor of History at The Ohio State University. He is author of The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County Massachusetts, 1713–1861; The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844; and Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (2010). DONA BROWN is associate professor of history at the University of Vermont. Her books include Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century and a collection of nineteenth-century tourist stories, A Tourist’s New England: Travel Fiction, 1820–1920. RICHARD D. BROWN is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus, University of Connecticut, and a Councilor of the American Antiquarian Society. He is the author of Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1600–1865 and The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650–1870. KENNETH E. CARPENTER is retired from Harvard University Libraries. SCOTT E. CASPER is professor of history at the University of Nevada Reno. He is a coeditor of The Industrial Book, 1840–1880, vol. 3 of A History of the Book in America, and collaborated with Joanne D. Chaison and Jeffrey D. Groves on Perspectives on American Book History: Artifacts and Commentary. MARY KUPIEC CAYTON is professor of history and American studies and chair of the Department of History at Miami University. She has published on various aspects of religion and culture in New England from 1790 to 1840. JOANNE DOBSON is a general editor of the Rutgers American Women Writers reprint series and a founding editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women

A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

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Writers, as well as the author of scholarly books and essays. Currently she writes the Professor Karen Pelletier mystery series, a witty and loving look at the pursuits of contemporary academic life. Until recently she taught at Fordham University. JAMES N. GREEN is librarian of the Library Company of Philadelphia, where he has worked since 1983. His essay is a continuation of his two essays in the first volume of A History of the Book in America, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, edited by Hugh Amory and David D. Hall. He is also coauthor, with Peter Stallybrass, of Benjamin Franklin, Writer and Printer. DEAN GRODZINS is a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Historical Society and the author of American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism. ROBERT A. GROSS is James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History at the University of Connecticut. Author of The Minutemen and Their World (25th anniversary edition, 2001) and Books and Libraries in Thoreau’s Concord (1988), he has served as chair of the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture at the American Antiquarian Society (1993–99) and as a member of the general editorial board for A History of the Book in America. GREY GUNDAKER is professor of American studies and anthropology at the College of William and Mary. She studies writing and graphic systems; psychological/cultural classifications such as “intelligence,” “creativity,” and “literacy”; and arenas of action such as schooling, landscape, artistic and material production, and religious practice. She specializes in the African diaspora and the contemporary United States. LEON JACKSON is an associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina. RICHARD R. JOHN is a professor of journalism in the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, where he teaches courses in the history of communications. His publications include Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1955) and Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (2010). MARY KELLEY is Ruth Bordin Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture, and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. The author, editor, and coeditor of seven books, she published, most recently, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (2006). She has served as a member of the general editorial board for A History of the Book in America. JACK LARKIN , chief historian emeritus at Old Sturbridge Village, is a consultant in public history and affiliate professor of history at Clark University. He xiv

CO N T R I B U TO R S

A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

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is the author of The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840 (1985) and Where We Lived: The American Home (2006). DAVID LEVERENZ is professor of English, University of Florida. He is the author of The Language of Puritan Feeling, Manhood and the American Renaissance, and Paternalism Incorporated: Fables of American Fatherhood, 1865– 1940. He is completing a book on fear, honor, and race-based shaming from the Barbary wars to Barack Obama. MEREDITH L. MCGILL is director of the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University. She is author of American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting and editor of The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange. CHARLES MONAGHAN , the former editor of the Washington Post Book World, is the author of The Murrays of Murray Hill. E. JENNIFER MONAGHAN is a professor emerita, Department of English, Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. She is the author of Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America and other works on the history of literacy. GERALD F. MORAN is professor of history, University of Michigan–Dearborn. His most recent publication is, with Maris A. Vinovskis, “Literacy, Common Schools, and High Schools” in “Colonial and Antebellum America,” in William J. Reese and John L. Rury, eds., Rethinking the History of American Education. KAREN NIPPS is head of the Rare Book Team at Houghton Library, Harvard University. DAVID PAUL NORD is professor of journalism and adjunct professor of history at Indiana University. He is coeditor of The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, volume 5 of A History of the Book in America. He has served several times as interim editor and associate editor of the Journal of American History. BARRY O’CONNELL is professor of English at Amherst College. He is the author of On Our Own Ground: Complete Writings of William Apess, A Pequot. JEFFREY L. PASLEY is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri–Columbia. His publications include “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic and, with David Waldstreicher and Andrew W. Robertson, Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic. WILLIAM S. PRETZER is director of the Museum of Cultural and Natural History, director of the Museum Studies Program, and associate professor of history at Central Michigan University. Until 2006 he was curator of political history and print communications at the Henry Ford Museum. He is the CO N T R I B U TO R S

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author of Working at Inventing: Thomas A. Edison and the Menlo Park Experience. A. GREGG ROEBER is professor of early modern history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University DAVID S. SHIELDS is McClintock Professor of Southern Letters in the department of English at the University of South Carolina and director of the Southern Texts Society. A historian of literature and culture, Shields has a particular interest in traditional foodways and heritage agriculture. ANDIE TUCHER is associate professor and director of the communications Ph.D. program in the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. She is the author of Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium. MARIS A. VINOVSKIS is the Bentley Professor of History, a Senior Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research, and a professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. He recently published From A Nation at Risk to No Child Left Behind: National Education Goals and the Creation of Federal Education Policy. SANDRA A. ZAGARELL is Donald R. Longman Professor of English at Oberlin College. The author of many articles on nineteenth-century American literature, she is completing a study of the cultural work of American narratives of community and is a senior editor of the Heath Anthology of American Literature.

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A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

EDITORS’ AND AUTHORS’ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities made it possible for the editors and many of the contributors to meet for crucial faceto-face discussions and supported the work of the project’s Editorial Board. Further financial support has been provided by The Elisabeth Woodburn Fund of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, Inc. American Booksellers’ Association, Inc., the Richard A. Heald Fund, the James J. Colt Foundation, the John Ben Snow Memorial Trust, and the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. We are most grateful for these contributions.

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Robert Gross and Mary Kelley are grateful, first of all, to our contributors for their generosity and patience, and then to David D. Hall, general editor of A History of the Book in America, for his discerning eye in reviewing successive plans and drafts of this volume; to Patricia Crain for her contributions above and beyond the duties of an external reader; and to our fellow members of the HBA editorial board for their suggestions along the way. This volume could also not have been completed without the steady administrative hand and continuing editorial assistance of Caroline F. Sloat, Director of Scholarly Publications at the American Antiquarian Society, as well as without the early guidance of the entire project by John B. Hench, retired AAS Vice President for Collections and Programs. For helpful readings of the introduction and of chapter 12, Robert Gross wishes to thank Matt Cohen, Pat Crain, Wayne Franklin, David Hall, Barbara Hochman, Leon Jackson (a font of bibliographical suggestions), Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan, Mary Kelley, Caroline Sloat, and Andie Tucher. The tables for this volume derived from the AAS catalog were assembled with instruction and cooperation from Alan Degutis, head of cataloging services, and Kathleen M. Haley, information systems librarian, at AAS , and with the skillful programming assistance of William Mathews, M.A. student at the University of Connecticut. Another M.A. student at UConn, Michael Goddard, did essential bibliographical research to provide the data on novel publishing. Vincent Golden, curator of newspapers and periodicals at AAS , supplied the tables on newspapers; Laura E. Wasowicz, AAS Curator of Children’s Literature, introduced both Robert Gross and Mary Kelley to the riches of her field. Charles

A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

and Jennifer Monaghan were congenial collaborators in chasing down statistics on the various genres of schoolbooks published in the early republic. With notable imagination and flair, Caroline Sloat collaborated with Mary Kelley in making final selections for the illustrations. For editorial assistance and for taking on research challenges large and small, Mary Kelley is indebted to Sara Babcox First, Kara French, Katherine Monteiro, and Christine Walker. Sharon O’Brien, Phil Pochoda, and the late Jeanne Boydston offered splendid counsel on the introductions and the chapter on “Female Academies and Seminaries and Print Culture.” Robert Gross adds: As in all my endeavors, Ann Gross has sustained the project from start to finish with both moral and editorial support. I am forever indebted to her understanding of books and of life. Mary Kelley adds: Author, editor, and publisher, Phil Pochoda shared both his exceptional knowledge and his passionate conviction that books matter. I am deeply grateful.

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Individual contributors wish to add the following particular acknowledgments. Richard D. Brown: The author gratefully acknowledges the editorial suggestions of Robert A. Gross, David D. Hall, and Mary Kelley. Kenneth E. Carpenter: I am grateful to The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation for support in gathering the disparate material relating to libraries in this period. I am also indebted to Robert Singerman for identifying material on libraries and to Michael Baenen for his critical reading and editorial assistance. James N. Green: Research for my essay was supported by fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the Bibliographical Society of America, and by several leaves of absence from the Library Company. An early version was presented as the Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania in 1993. I am deeply grateful to the staff at AAS , to my Library Company colleagues, especially Jennifer Rosner and Andrea Krupp, and to the many other friends who have helped me along the way, including Hugh Amory, John Bidwell, Stephen Botein, Joseph Felcone, David D. Hall, Marcus McCorison, Warren McDougall, Daniel Raff, Richard Sher, Roger Stoddard, Willman Spawn, Peter Stallybrass, Daniel Traister, Michael Winship, and Michael Zinman. My greatest debt, however, is to the late Edwin Wolf 2nd and to Rosalind Remer. Grey Gundaker: My thanks to Chandos Michael Brown, John Catanzariti, Robert Gross, Mary Kelley, Ray McDermott, John Szwed, Ann Taves, Albert Raboteau, and Robert Farris Thompson. xviii

AC KN OW L E D GM E N T S

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Leon Jackson: I would like to thank Christopher Grasso, Robert Gross, Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan, and Mary Kelley. Richard R. John: My thanks to Robert A. Gross for meticulous editing, to Mary Kelley for keeping the project moving forward, and to Jonathan C. Hall for his assistance in checking the notes. David Leverenz: I thank Robert Gross and Mary Kelley for various leads, as well as for exceptionally attentive editing, and Ed White for helpful comments. David S. Shields: In revising my chapter, I benefited from the extensive critiques of the argument by Mary Kelley, Robert A. Gross, and Patrick Scott. .

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Portions of Mary Kupiec Cayton’s essay in this volume appeared earlier, in somewhat different form, as “Canonizing Harriet Newell: Women, the Evangelical Press, and the Foreign Mission Movement in New England, 1800–1840,” in Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960, ed. Barbara Reeves Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie A. Shemo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 69–93. Copyright 2010, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher. A condensed version of Richard R. John’s essay in this volume was published as “Post Office,” in Finkleman, Encyclopedia of the New American Nation, 1E © 2006 Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc. Reproduced by permission. www.cengage.com/permissions.

AC KN OW L E D GM E N T S

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A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

A History of the Book in America VOLUME 2

An Extensive Republic

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Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840

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A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

INTRODUCTION

An Extensive Republic

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Robert A. Gross . . . An Extensive Republic charts the expansion of print culture in a new nation rapidly gaining in population and spreading across space. In 1789, at the inauguration of the federal government under the Constitution, the United States stretched a thousand miles along the eastern seaboard from the Bay of Fundy in the District of Maine to the St. Marys River in Georgia and eight hundred miles west into the interior up to the banks of the Mississippi. Though independent of the British yoke, the 3.9 million inhabitants remained tightly integrated into an Atlantic world of trade, communications, and culture. But the burgeoning population had already pressed beyond colonial limits, penetrated the Appalachian mountains, and planted settlements that quickly sprouted into states, with the speedy incorporation of Vermont (1791), Kentucky (1792), Tennessee (1796), and Ohio (1803) into the Union. The Louisiana Purchase (1803) doubled the area of the nation to 1.6 million square miles and extended its borders to the Continental Divide, even as the “Western country” awarded by the Treaty of Paris (1783)—the territories northwest and south of the Ohio River—was a developing agricultural frontier. In 1820, as Maine and Missouri were about to enter the Union in an early crisis over slavery that, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, sounded “a firebell in the night,” the American population totaled 9.6 million, up nearly 2.5 times from 1790, and it nearly doubled again to 17 million inhabitants, organized into twenty-six states, three territories, and the federal District of Columbia, by 1840. Struggling to serve these teeming numbers scattered across a vast terrain were the personnel and institutions of print— printers, binders, type founders, papermakers, manufacturers of presses and stereotype plates, booksellers, editors, authors, illustrators, engravers, proofreaders, postboys, and others—whose innovations on colonial practice and aspirations to meet the demands of a rising nation form the leitmotifs of an extensive republic.1 The idea of an extensive republic was familiar to political thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic during the eighteenth century, and it was not approved. In The Spirit of Laws (1750), one of the best-known works of the Enlightenment in British North America, the French baron de Montesquieu laid down

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the maxim that an extensive republic was a prescription for tyranny, because government would easily be dominated by “men of large fortunes” intent on serving themselves. Only a small republic close to the people could safeguard “the public good.” But the new nation constructed by the Philadelphia convention of 1787 overturned that conventional wisdom, as James Madison, the celebrated “Father of the Constitution,” made plain in the campaign for ratification. An “extended republic” encompassing “a great variety of interests, parties and sects,” Madison argued in The Federalist, formed a bulwark of liberty, for no single faction could readily gain sway. With competing interests canceling each other out, “justice and the general good” would prevail. “The larger the society, provided it lie within a practical sphere, the more duly capable it will be of self-government.” Anti-Federalists objected in the spirit of Montesquieu but to no avail. Divided among states and with differing political persuasions, the opponents of the Constitution proved Madison’s point through their inability to achieve concerted action.2 An extensive republic triumphed as the national frame of government and a new model of political geography. As early as 1789, Massachusetts governor John Hancock was enjoining “the people of this extensive republic” to exercise “the social and private virtues” necessary to the success of the uncertain experiment in continental self-government. The great distances separating the citizenry—the security of liberty, in Madison’s view—posed a challenge to overcome, inviting projects for national integration. Newspaper editors saw the extensive republic as an untapped communications network through which they labored to connect the citizenry. “It [is] a self-evident truth,” affirmed the Columbian Herald of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1795, “that the more we know, the better we shall like one another.” That proposition was debatable; if anything, closer contact between the people of different regions created conflict, not concord. But as the new nation secured its footing and surmounted both internal divisions and external invasion, the citizenry came to celebrate its huge domain. In 1830 President Andrew Jackson employed the patriotic rhetoric of geography to justify the removal of the Cherokee Indians from Georgia. “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute?” The very circumstances that once confounded philosophes—immense size, varied interests—served as a rallying cry for further expansion and a spur to democratic self-conceit. Not everyone agreed that bigger was better, particularly Whig opponents of Jacksonian designs on Texas. But the spread-eagle nationalist, impatient of limits, crowded the stage, an easy target of satire. Novelist Herman Melville captured the type in Mardi (1849), 2

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FIGURE I.1. A political print that capitalizes on the commercial potential of George Washington’s likeness. First issued in 1789 after Washington’s election, it marks his passage from military command to civilian rule, celebrating the Constitution and the new federal government. Washington is in the center of fourteen interlocking circles containing the arms of the United States and the state seals of the original thirteen colonies. Each frame indicates the population and the number of senators and representatives assigned to each state. A Display of the United States of America (New Haven: Amos Doolittle, 1794). Engraving. American Antiquarian Society.

depicting an allegorical island known as Vivenza. No sooner did a foreigner wash up on its shores than the inhabitants demanded: “Saw ye ever such a land as this? Is it not a great and extensive republic?”3 How Americans built their extensive republic, in the mental realm of myth and ideology and on the physical ground of everyday life, over the decades from 1790 to 1840 constitutes the subject of this second volume of A History of the Book in America. The story has often been told as a narrative of progress, charting the positive contributions of print to the making of a unique American nation. In this account, the United States embarked on independence with an underdeveloped economy, an untested government, and uncertain loyalties among a largely rural population dispersed across the countryside and rooted in local communities and provincial cultures (fig. I.1). The inhabitants of the states, loosely connected to one another by coastal vessels and rudimentary roads, still depended on the Old World and mainly on Great Britain, the former mother country, for ideas and information in print. Under these circumstances, the fundamental challenge before the new nation was to gather up the diverse people of a far-flung land and enlist them in a common life. To this formidable task the agents of print and the host of people and institutions who employed them dedicated themselves for a half century. They established the basic enterprises necessary to supply books and reading to the country. They adopted the I N T RO D U C T I O N

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latest technology to improve productivity and reach wider markets. By pooling resources and forming cooperative arrangements, they overcame limitations of localism, scarcities of capital and labor, and barriers of space. By 1840, books, newspapers, and periodicals were pouring from the press under the aegis of publishers and editors concentrated in the Northeast and reaching readers throughout the republic. Much of this printed matter, to be sure, came from abroad, owing to the absence of copyright protection for foreign works, and the press abounded with partisan invective, unverified rumors, and sensationalized events. Even so, a national print culture was taking shape amid a communications revolution driven by the steamship, the railroad, and the telegraph. Through this medium Americans conducted the dynamic affairs of a democratic people and fashioned a distinctive literature and culture. The early republic inaugurated an “Age of Print.”4 An expanding press was a visible force for change in the new nation, its impact registered in every area of American life. As the chapters in this volume document, print was intimately involved with the leading developments of the age: the rise of white manhood suffrage and the rivalry among political parties; the growth of agriculture, the takeoff of industrialization and urbanization, and the advance of national and international markets; the awakening of religion, the formation of denominations, and the propagation of evangelical revivals; the promotion of benevolent reforms and the opposition to them; the introduction of schools for common folk and the pursuit of learning by elites; the development of travel, leisure, and an assertive popular culture. But print could exercise its influence in opposing ways. It heightened both national attachments and sectional resentments. It undercut local economies and facilitated interregional exchange. It pursued inclusive audiences across social divides and carved them up into segments according to class, region, religion, occupation, ethnicity, gender, and race. It defined lines between the sexes, then challenged and transgressed them. It fostered rationality and faith, instruction and entertainment, virtue and vice. It contained the multitudes and contradictions of the sprawling nation it served.5 Yet the early republic was not merely a way station en route to a modern, consolidated system of commercial publishing, as the conventional account suggests. A single-minded focus on the rise of a national book trade and the production of American literature distorts our view of that past. Print culture was multifarious, embracing a great variety of enterprises and agents on local, state, and national levels, serving diverse purposes by many means, and running on separate tracks of development that only occasionally overlapped. The book trades—notably, printing, publishing, retailing, and binding—consisted of small, local businesses that were run by single proprietors or family partner4

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ships and often passed from fathers to sons (as with Philadelphia publishers Mathew Carey and Henry C. Carey), husbands to widows (from Philadelphia printer Robert Bailey to his wife, Lydia, who soldiered on for five decades), and among siblings (the Harper brothers in New York).6 Though they inclined to cluster in cities and commercial villages, thousands of ambitious men packed up shop, joined in the great migration to the West, sometimes well ahead of settlement, and grew up with the country. From these operations issued all sorts of publications designed for local needs—typically, newspapers, pamphlets written and financed by aspiring authors in the vicinity, advertisements, and commercial forms, along with a selection of books for sale from publishers back East. Booksellers (as publishers were known), from their principal outposts in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, struggled to create reliable channels through which to distribute their wares, with only limited success. Newspapers often joined in loose alliances affiliated with political parties, occasionally taking their lead from an official organ for the partisans in power and reprinting copy from one another; these coalitions were usually short-lived, owing to factional disputes and electoral defeats. During the 1820s and 1830s, national benevolent societies—the American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, the American Sunday School Union—pioneered in the use of stereotype plates and steam presses to produce books and pamphlets by the hundreds of thousands from their headquarters in New York and Philadelphia, but these grandiose plans to furnish the nation with a “general supply” of religious works foundered on the inefficiencies of the networks of pious volunteers charged with delivering the Word to needy souls.7 Where national ventures faltered, local enterprises flourished. By many noncommercial routes, readers and writers gained access to the printed word: via colleges, academies, and district schools; athenaeums, libraries, lyceums; gentlemen’s learned societies, women’s reading circles, mechanics’ institutes, young men’s debating clubs, African Americans’ mutual improvement societies; state and federal governments. So, too, did would-be authors find numerous outlets for their thoughts. Newspapers and periodicals welcomed contributions from readers; genteel periodicals relied on literary-minded friends. Often, if no publisher was willing to take the risk and issue a work under its own name, perseverant individuals hired a printer and assumed the costs themselves. Even paupers paid to get out their tales of woe.8 There was, then, no center of print culture in the new republic. In contrast to London, “the print hub” of England under the sway of a handful of elite publishers, the production and distribution of books took place at multiple sites across the United States. That was hardly surprising, given the “tyranny of distance” the vast American continent imposed on a scattered population I N T RO D U C T I O N

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with inadequate means of transportation. In December 1799 it took five days for the report of George Washington’s death to travel from Alexandria, Virginia, to Manhattan, another five to reach Hartford and Boston; to the south, Charleston, South Carolina, did not get the word until New Year’s Day, 1800. By the time Frankfort, Kentucky, on the western frontier learned the news, the “father of the country” had been dead for nearly four weeks. The situation had improved little by 1815, when almost four weeks elapsed before accounts of the American victory over British troops at New Orleans made their way to New York, followed five days later by the arrival from London of the treaty ending the conflict, signed forty-nine days earlier in Ghent. But the decentralization of print involved more than adaptation to geographic necessity. It was a deliberate creation, crafted by public policy and suiting popular preferences. Print served as a vital link to the wider world for dispersed communities eager to break out of rural isolation. “From realms far distant and from Climes unknown,” proclaimed the Vermont Journal (1783) in its masthead, “we make the Knowledge of Mankind your own.” Mediating between the near and far, selecting items from distant places for subscribers close by, the press gave a distinctive cast to popular reading. The print culture of the new nation was at once local and cosmopolitan but hardly national, and it retained this character down to 1840.9 The extensive republic in print marked a distinct epoch in American life. Diverging from centralized models of culture in the Old World, it responded to the centrifugal dynamic of the New: the sprawl of population across space, the weakness of national authority, the devolution of power downward to the states, the release of energies and the proliferation of projects to profit from the unprecedented “opening” of the social order. Seen through the lens of print culture, the history of the United States in its formative decades takes on a fresh appearance, with older views altered and new prospects in sight. An Extensive Republic intervenes in key debates about the character and direction of the new nation and through the evidence of book history challenges, complicates, revises, and enriches our picture of American life in an era of dramatic economic, political, social, and cultural change.10 The following three areas of longstanding interest to historians stand out as organizing themes of this volume. 1. Economic Growth and Capitalism. In its first half-century of national existence, the United States embarked on a decisive “takeoff ” into modern, selfsustaining economic growth.11 As historians have long recognized, the period was notable for the expansion of regional, national, and international markets, the extension of transportation through turnpikes, canals, steamboats, and railroads; the spread of banking and monetary exchange, the surge of agricultural and industrial production, and an advancing division of free labor in the North 6

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and an increasing dependence on slaves in the South. Taken together, these developments arguably formed a revolution in American life: a “transportation revolution,” according to one historian; a “communications revolution,” in the words of another; or, more broadly, a “market revolution,” as seen by a third. This scholarly consensus on the rapid pace of change masks a deeper disagreement about how the transformation took place and with what consequences. Did a small minority of merchants, manufacturers, and bankers, possessing the financial resources and political influence through which to pursue the drive for profits and wealth, set in motion changes in economy and society to which the rest of the working population, desiring only a modest “competency,” was forced to adapt at a severe cost of liberty and equality? Or did the farmers, craftsmen, and laborers who made up “the bone and sinew” of the land, as Jacksonian Democrats liked to call them, readily enlist in the market revolution in hopes of improving their standard of living, expanding their opportunities and choices, and joining the wider world? The debate reflects divergent assessments of the motives and methods with which various groups entered into the economic arena and of the disparate gains and losses they incurred. At its heart lie differing judgments, moral as well as historical, about the making of the modern economic order. Was the advance of capitalism in the early republic an expression of popular desires and hence a democratic achievement, or was it an imposition of power upon an unwilling people, benefiting the few at the expense of the many?12 The book trade, encompassing printing, binding, bookselling, publishing, and allied crafts, speaks directly to the issue, because the production and dissemination of information in diverse forms of print—newspapers, broadsides, advertisements, business directories, magazines, and books—came to play an integral part in the economic and political life of the new nation. With good reason these related activities are dubbed a “trade,” for they had been intimately involved with the market ever since Gutenberg, and at the start of the new nation, their operators were bursting with patriotic optimism and entrepreneurial zeal. In the expansive mood, such printers as Isaiah Thomas in Worcester and Mathew Carey in Philadelphia were no longer content to run their firms on the cautious colonial model, issuing almanacs, newspapers, and an occasional magazine, doing jobs to order for local customers, and selling stationery and imported books. They now ventured into producing books, both reprints of foreign titles and original American compositions, at their own risk. Eventually giving up printing altogether, these booksellers assumed a quintessentially capitalist role. As full-fledged publishers, they financed the publication of manuscripts composed or assembled by others and coordinated their production, marketing, and distribution, often in exchange for copyright. In the I N T RO D U C T I O N

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quest for profit, booksellers resembled their onetime brethren at the press, who cultivated patronage from local businesses and government to pay the bills, but the interests of the participants in the book trade steadily diverged in a fiercely competitive environment. The canniest booksellers concentrated on cutting costs, securing supplies, and increasing sales. In this effort, they pitted printers against one another in bidding for jobs, pushed down wages for journeymen, intensified reliance on the cheap labor of teenage apprentices, and put out work to country printers, who exchanged low-cost labor for books. Urban publishers may well have enlarged the audience for print and raised returns for the successful, but their capitalist initiative also undermined working conditions and economic security for many of their more traditional fellows in the trade. The “market revolution” had its winners and losers in the world of print.13 But such changes went only so far. The drive for profits in the book trade could not overcome the geographic barriers to a national market. Their potential sales constrained, booksellers hedged their bets in the conduct of business, preferring predictable earnings to larger but chancier rewards. In the interest of limiting competition and avoiding risk, publishing proved a conservative, inward-looking enterprise, whose members relied on one another to finance, produce, and sell their books. The cooperative practices among booksellers, indebted to one another for years on end, with no interest ever charged and money seldom changing hands, resemble nothing so much as the neighborly exchanges of cash-starved farmers in the New England hinterland. And just as booksellers traded imprints with their fellows, so they accepted all sorts of goods from country merchants as payment in kind. With caution back as the watchword, the entrepreneurs of print looked for proven authors and steady sellers, and when they did take a gamble on new titles, as became more common after 1820, they issued modest-sized editions at high prices. Nor did new technology win quick acceptance in publishing; with limited sales, most titles did not merit stereotyping or power presses. To be sure, the book trade was infused with fresh energy during the 1820s and 1830s, when the growth of cities and the coming of the railroad opened up markets on an ever-larger scale. For those with the capital and connections to tap the possibilities, such as the Harper brothers in New York and the brash innovators of the penny press, the new opportunities brought huge returns. But most enterprises in printing and publishing remained small operations down to 1840. And where printers packed up presses and type in ox carts, wagons, and canal boats and went west with the country, booksellers stayed mostly in eastern cities and towns and waited for the trains to carry their products throughout the country. Far from being a dynamic agent of a communications revolution, book publishing clung to familiar ways down to 1840. The forces for change lay elsewhere: 8

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in the nonprofit sphere of religion and philanthropy, where evangelicals and reformers were quick to seize upon the new means of disseminating their message and flooded the nation with print during the 1820s and 1830s, and in the realm of government, which promoted the proliferation of presses and newspapers in country and city alike for the purpose of informing the citizenry, publicizing its actions, and strengthening the bonds of union.14 2. Democracy and the Public Sphere. The Declaration of Independence affirmed the principle that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The early republic forged the institutions and practices to turn that principle into reality. Through frequent elections for an extensive roster of officials on local, state, and federal levels, an expanding electorate of white men, initially confined to property holders but widening by the mid1830s to include all male taxpayers in some states and all adult male inhabitants in others, acquired the deliberative arts of popular self-government. The press played a leading part in this achievement. Building on colonial precedents, newspapers printed laws, proclamations, and legislative proceedings; they gave notice of candidates for office and then of the election returns; they carried arguments for and against men and measures and called authorities to account. These services only gained in importance as political parties, unanticipated by the framers of the republic, emerged to organize the competition for power and enlisted printers and editors as their paladins. By the time of Alexis de Tocqueville’s tour of the United States in 1831–32, the newspaper had triumphed as democracy’s favorite medium of print. The American press, Tocqueville perceived, “is the power which impels the circulation of political life to all the districts of that vast territory. Its eye is constantly open to detect the secret springs of political designs, and to summon the leaders of all parties to the bar of public opinion. It rallies the interests of the community round certain principles and draws up the creed which factions adopt; for it affords a means of intercourse between parties which hear and which address each other, without having been in immediate contact.”15 In the age of Enlightenment, print was imbued with immense ideological importance as an instrument of public discourse. For the idealistic men and women of reason intent on building an international republic of letters, the press bore an exalted mission. Through this medium, private individuals could conduct a critical, rational conversation about public affairs, embracing all matters pertinent to the common good. In the forum of the newspaper, civicminded readers and writers would submit their views anonymously or under high-minded pseudonyms (“Citizen,” “Freeholder,” “Publius”) and focus on principles, not personalities. Ideas and information would then flow through I N T RO D U C T I O N

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the circuits of social life—through coffeehouses and taverns, parlors and salons, literary clubs, libraries, debating societies, academies, and allied associations devoted to “civil conversation” and belles-lettres—and eventually back into print. Out of these exchanges would emerge a new force—public opinion— crystallized in impersonal columns of type. So conceived, the newspaper was well suited to the republican ideal. It purported to embody the sovereignty of the people.16 This vision of the press has become familiar to scholars through the German social thinker Jürgen Habermas’s influential account of the rise and fall of the “bourgeois public sphere,” that social and discursive space, independent of church and state and separate from the family, through which “private people come together as a public.” Thanks to Habermas, the institutions of print have gained heightened significance for students of politics, society, and culture during the “age of revolutions.” “An Extensive Republic” reflects this influence in its close attention to “civil society,” the complex of voluntary activities and associations, beyond the realm of “organized politics” and the state, that link the cultivation of reading and writing, speech and print to the formation of citizens and “publics.”17 But this volume also challenges the tight connection between print and politics suggested by recent scholarship on the “public sphere.” Politics remained a personalized affair down to 1840, conducted through oral rituals and festivities—barbecues and banquets, rallies and parades—that brought candidates and voters face to face in town and country alike. Newspapers and broadsides served as auxiliaries to these exercises in persuasion. Party organs were not indispensable to getting out the vote; witness North Carolina, a largely rural state with newspapers in a mere half-dozen towns, but with a mass electorate as early as 1808 to 1814, with seven out of ten adult white males casting their ballots. Nor did newspapers sustain for long, if ever, the ideal of an impartial forum of public discussion. How could they when so many printers fed at the public trough? When the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1792 empowered the governor to hand out contracts to print the laws of the Commonwealth, a vigilant citizen was quick to sound the alarm. “The safety of the people and the principles of good government require, that of all men the printers should have the least to hope or fear from a governor.” With the rise of the party press, newspapers grew even closer to power, the fortunes of editors tied to victory or defeat at the polls. Instead of admitting all sides of a debate into their pages, they preached the party line; only through their attacks on opponents could alternatives be glimpsed. By the 1820s, the public sphere of politics no longer upheld a model of disinterested discourse. It relied on the uninhibited competition between parties in an open marketplace of ideas to come up with versions of the public good.18 10

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Yet the ideal of an impartial press, dedicated to the truth alone, endured. Many Americans never accommodated themselves to political brawls, and, in their disgust with the propaganda and invective of partisan organs, supported newspapers boasting of “neutrality.” Women and African Americans had other causes for complaint. Obliged to see themselves represented—and often caricatured—in the press through a white male gaze, they set about creating independent forums in voluntary associations and in print through which to express their own voices and fashion their own identities. In the male-dominated world of the early republic, as in the ancien regime of the eighteenth century, the “public sphere of civil society” furnished a vital means for those formally excluded from power to engage with the events and debates of the day and contribute to the making of public opinion, if not in the party press, then in the many other periodicals and newspapers that continued to proliferate all over the republic.19 3. Nationalism and National Identity. Americans established a new nation without the ingredients deemed necessary for a respectable state in the Old World. No ancient traditions, no homogeneous origins, no shared faith, no entrenched loyalties to king and court bound together a dispersed people who had been inspired by Thomas Paine to “begin the world over again.” Products of distinct provincial societies that had little in common except attachment to the British Empire, the colonists joined forces and made a revolution in order to uphold constitutional principles rooted in the Anglo-American political heritage. Out of that struggle eventually emerged a federal republic, overseen by a central government carefully circumscribed in its powers, whose citizens saw themselves as New Englanders or Virginians more than they identified as Americans. What prospect awaited a nation with so little purchase on its constituents’ lives and so little claim on their affections? The Federalist formula for a great national state on the British model was decisively repudiated by voters in 1800, and in its wake a decentralized polity prevailed for six decades. In the face of what one observer decried as “the want of an American feeling” and “our strong tendency to localism,” many citizens turned to the cultural realm for a wider sense of belonging. No instrument appeared better suited to the purpose than the press. As Philadelphia’s Federal Gazette philosophized in 1791, a newspaper takes readers beyond their immediate neighborhood and introduces them to “the facts” and “the opinions of the world.” “We keep company with the absent; we are . . . made acquainted with foreigners—we feel, in solitude a sympathy with mankind. . . . Men stick to their business, and yet the public is addressed as a town meeting. . . . the Gazettes follow us to our closets, and give us counsel there.”20 I N T RO D U C T I O N

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Andrew Brown, the schoolmaster-turned-editor of the Federal Gazette, anticipated by two centuries the anthropologist Benedict Anderson, whose innovative perspective on nations as “imagined communities” has become pervasive in contemporary scholarship on “the origin and spread of nationalism” from the colonial revolutions that rocked the Western world in the late eighteenth century down to the present. As formulated by Anderson, modern nationalism took shape under the aegis of “print capitalism” seeking out markets for readers with a common language and with inchoate sentiments and identities waiting for public expression. Out of the experience of reading the ascendant genres of the newspaper and the novel, “rapidly growing numbers of people” came “to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways.” Although they followed the news and absorbed the plots of novels in “silent privacy, in the lair of the skull,” they did so in an “extraordinary mass ceremony,” aware that thousands of others were doing the same thing more or less at the same time. Their outlooks were enlarged, their sympathies broadened, and by this means an impersonal aggregation of strangers, scattered across far-flung settlements, developed into a “remarkable community in anonymity” joined in mutual awareness, collective sentiments, and emotional bonds. It required only the misguided policies of politicians and bureaucrats in London or Madrid, transmitted to resentful subjects in the pages of the press, to convert this reading public on the periphery of empire into an incipient nation. Through the entrepreneurial energy and the political awareness of the print media, this process began in British North America, spread to the Spanish empire in the Americas, and has ever since multiplied across the globe.21 But could print culture sustain the loyalties of citizens in the new nations they helped to bring into being? The founders of the American republic thought so, as they made plain in the substantial government aid they gave to the fledgling press. Such expectations foundered on the shoals of political conflict. The bitter struggle between Federalists and Republicans split the imagined community of Americans into rival ideological camps, each upholding a banner of nationalism incompatible with the other. Through competing networks of newspapers, the two parties rallied their supporters as true patriots and summoned them into battle against the un-American schemers in their midst. Ironically, each side constructed its American identity in postcolonial terms, symbolically allied with Great Britain or France in the generation-long war set off by the capture of the Bastille. The transatlantic flow of culture strengthened these international affinities still more. Newspapers gave pride of place to reports from abroad; most novels carried a British vintage. Insofar as legions of strangers from Boston to Charleston identified with the trials and tribulations of characters moving through fictional scenes, they were linking themselves to readers all over the 12

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English-speaking world. An Extensive Republic documents the prominent and at times dominant place of British and European books in American reading and thereby unsettles narratives of nationalism based on Anderson’s model. It raises other objections as well. Far from conforming to a single type, newspapers and novels proliferated in diversified forms, geared to ever more differentiated audiences. What inclusive “imagined community” could encompass so sprawling and heterogeneous a people?22 At its inauguration in 1834, the Southern Literary Messenger, based in Richmond, called on Virginians to take up their pens and bring forth a body of writing “building up a character of our own, and providing the means of imbodying and concentrating the neglected genius of our country.” The character of that contribution remained ambiguous. “Are we to be doomed forever to a kind of vassalage to our northern brethren—a dependance for our literary food upon our brethren . . . whose superiority we are no wise disposed to admit?” In this challenge to Virginia pride, the Messenger aimed to encourage regional contributions to American letters, but such rhetoric would elicit an alternative brand of nationalism in the crucible of conflict over slavery. “Print capitalism” gathered up readers in all sorts of communities, extending, narrowing, and complicating identities in variegated ways that no group—not booksellers or editors, not politicians or philanthropists—could safely predict.23 It is, then, a world of mixed media, with diverse readers and communities, moving in no single direction and sustaining a host of interests, identities, and loyalties that An Extensive Republic seeks, like the fascinating nation it explores, to incorporate within its reach. The following sections trace the making of this novel set of arrangements, delineate its main features, suggest its implications for various groups in society, and point to gathering pressures for consolidation in the 1830s arising from technological and economic change and from the campaign by many writers, editors, and artists to bring forth a distinctive literature and culture expressive of the nation as a whole. .

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At the start of independence no one anticipated the development of an extended republic in print. In 1771, on the eve of the Revolution, British North America ranked as the leading export market for London publishers, absorbing more English books than all of Europe did, and as soon as peace returned, businessmen on both sides of the Atlantic rushed to resume that profitable trade. Charles Dilly, a pillar of London publishing, was first off the block with an advertisement in the Philadelphia and Charleston press highlighting his two decades’ experience shipping books “to the continent of America” and offering to fill direct orders from gentlemen “with the utmost dispatch, and at the lowest I N T RO D U C T I O N

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prices.” Confidence in American demand for British books was widely shared, and with English goods flooding the market following the Treaty of Paris, it furnished a strong argument against trade concessions to the former colonies. Books are “a considerable article of exportation to America from Britain,” the Earl of Sheffield advised Parliament in Observations on the Commerce of the American States (1783), “and must continue so as long as the price of labour is high there, and the language continues the same.” That was a safe prediction. Storekeepers up and down the seaboard boasted of their “large and valuable Collection of books, in most Branches of Literature, all in elegant Bindings, and genuine London and Edinburgh Editions.” These imports claimed pride of place in booksellers’ catalogs right after the war.24 Rising men and women of letters in the new nation pursued a different agenda. Their goal was the creation of a national literature fit for a republic. Well before the prospect of American independence dawned on the horizon, the Anglican philosopher George Berkeley had heralded “another golden age” aborning in the New World. “Westward the course of empire takes its sway,” with the arts at the head of the train, Berkeley prophesied in verses first published in 1752. Three decades later, with America ascendant over British arms, poets and patriots in the new nation descried the imminent arrival of the Muses on western shores and made haste to prepare a suitable welcome. Determined to build a new Athens in America, intellectuals projected ambitious schemes on a continental scale. An obscure Yankee schoolmaster named Noah Webster came up with a Grammatical Institute of the English Language (1783), better known as The American Spelling Book or “blue-back speller,” to teach children from Boston to Savannah how to speak and use the English language in the true American way, while a fellow Connecticut pedagogue, the aspiring minister Jedidiah Morse, aimed in the second edition of Geography Made Easy (1790) to give “the young masters and misses throughout the United States” a knowledge of “their own country, and an attachment to its interests.” “A national language is a band of national union,” Webster avowed. “Every engine should be employed to render the people of this country national; to call their attachments home to their own country; and to inspire them with the pride of national character.” In the same spirit Massachusetts patriots led by John Adams, James Bowdoin, and John Hancock founded the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1780 to promote the cause of learning among “a free, independent, and virtuous people” and to distinguish American culture on the international stage. A flurry of periodicals trumpeted nationalist ambitions in their titles: the American Magazine (1787–88), American Museum (1787–92), American Apollo (1792–93), American Musical Magazine (1786–87), American Monitor (1785), American Monthly Review (1795) (fig. I.2).25 14

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FIGURE I.2. Mastheads for five periodicals make clear their nationalist ambitions: American Museum (a monthly published in Philadelphia from 1787 to 1792 that included “essays on agriculture—commerce—manufactures—politics—morals—and manners. Sketches of national characteristics—natural and civil history—and biography: Law information—public papers— intelligence, moral tales—ancient and modern poetry, &c. &c.”); American Monitor (a Boston publication subtitled the Republican Magazine, of which a single volume, that of October 1785, survives); American Apollo (the title of a Boston weekly of 1792–93, while another periodical with the same name was published briefly in Norwalk, Connecticut, in 1801–2); American Magazine (a monthly appearing in New York from December 1787 through November 1788, which included “a miscellaneous collection of original and other valuable essays, in prose and verse, . . . calculated both for instruction and amusement”); American Monthly Review (a literary journal published in Philadelphia during 1795).

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All these projects overreached. The statesmen-philosophers of the Revolution could no more summon into existence an American republic of letters than they could impose a strong, centralized government upon an unwilling citizenry. Noah Webster’s dream of a nation as “independent in literature as she is in politics, as famous for arts as for arms” was tested during the 1780s by the obstacles he confronted in marketing his books, from the need to secure copyright in one state after another—a problem solved by the adoption of the Constitution and the ensuing passage of a Copyright Act (1790)—to the burden of licensing trustworthy distributors in distant states. John Macpherson had worse luck with a pioneering venture in business journalism. Sure that Philadelphia would quickly emerge as the financial as well as political capital of the new nation, he seized the moment of independence in 1783 and launched the Philadelphia Price Current, a weekly report of commodity prices, in imitation of a London model. The idea caught on, supplying timely “commercial intelligence” to traders in the Philadelphia market, but Macpherson quickly lost his monopoly over such information. Similar publications, tracking shipping news, exchange rates, stock and commodity prices, spread to Boston, Baltimore, and New York. No single city would ever dominate the American republic as did London the British Empire. Localism proved the rock on which high-minded intentions foundered.26 At the inauguration of George Washington and the opening of Congress in April 1789, an erstwhile teacher, innkeeper, and merchant named John Fenno made his way to the nation’s capital in New York City with the grand design of launching a “a national paper” in support of the new federal authorities. His Gazette of the United States aspired to a national character. Issued from the seat of government, it sought an audience of Americans throughout the land, whom it presumed to address with a quasi-official voice. Fenno even kept his distance from local life in Manhattan. Eschewing advertising from New York businesses, he counted on subscriptions from near and far and on public patronage to pay the bills. He was quickly disillusioned. The federal government declined to make the Gazette an official “State Paper,” so Fenno was driven by financial necessity to secure ads from neighboring businesses and to conduct his press like every other urban newspaper. He also cadged loans and printing contracts from Alexander Hamilton and his Federalist friends. Even so, Noah Webster could have advised Fenno not to rely on literary patriotism for a living. “The expectation of failure is connected with the very name of a Magazine,” Webster lamented in the third issue of the American Magazine he had begun with great hopes in December 1787; nine months later the periodical expired. With subscription agents in but seven towns outside New York City and only one, in Charleston, South Carolina, below the Mason-Dixon 16

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Line, the American Magazine was stymied, like Fenno’s Gazette, by American geography.27 Visions of the “Rising Glory” of American literature burst like bubbles on the financial markets of the early national economy. Yet print continued to expand along a course no one had foreseen. In the generation after independence, Americans sought out books and periodicals from abroad as avidly as ever, but they supplied their needs in new ways, thanks to the spread of printing offices and bookstores beyond the seaports and capitals where they had long been concentrated. In Britain’s colonies as in the mother country, the press had kept close to the centers of political and financial power on which it depended for custom. Government, in turn, maintained a watchful eye over the printer’s products. The London trade was based at St. Paul’s Churchyard and Paternoster Row, close by Stationer’s Hall, for several centuries, though by the 1770s it had spilled beyond those limits and set up shop on Fleet Street, the Strand, and elsewhere in the City. From these headquarters London dominated the supply of books to the country and its overseas empire. Taking advantage of a welldeveloped system of canals and roads, publishers easily distributed their wares through an extensive network of provincial retailers and reached a national market. Across the Atlantic, printers and booksellers imitated the London example and gathered in little districts of the leading port cities: on Cornhill, Court, and State Streets in Boston; around Hanover Square in lower Manhattan; and on Chestnut and Market Streets between Front and Third in Philadelphia. But no “Publishers’ Row” could rival London and wield comparable power over its hinterland.28 The Revolution set the pace for decentralization, when Patriot printers fled cities occupied by British troops and found refuge in the interior. Newspapers moved beyond tidewater and the rivers and bays with which they had been inextricably linked and took root in the countryside. Isaiah Thomas, printer of Boston’s Massachusetts Spy, led the way by relocating his press in Worcester, which, after a decade of struggle, became the base for an expanding publishing empire with outlets in Walpole, New Hampshire, Windsor and Rutland, Vermont, and Portland, Maine, and with a strategic partnership with the savvy Ebenezer Andrews in Boston. In 1775 the thirteen mainland colonies had supported some thirty-nine newspapers in twenty-one towns, roughly the same number operating in England’s provincial towns; by 1790, the United States boasted ninety-nine papers in more than sixty communities, including new places on the frontier, such as Lexington, Kentucky, which recruited a printer in advance of settlement. Country presses proliferated faster than the population, doubling their numbers by the decade; in 1840, after a half century of growth, two-thirds of the nation’s printing offices and three-fourths of all weekly newspapers were I N T RO D U C T I O N

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located in rural villages. Issuing almanacs, schoolbooks, pamphlets, and other occasional publications mainly for local markets, these small presses “extended and diversified” the offerings of the urban book trade.29 Cosmopolitanism and localism advanced together in a pattern of decentralization shaped, ironically, by the new national government. Republican rule required informed citizens: in this conviction, leaders of all political persuasions—supporters of the Constitution and opponents, Federalists and Republicans—committed themselves to the “extensive diffusion of useful knowledge” through print. Newspapers, in particular, served a vital public purpose. In the Whig ideology that had animated the Revolution, the press stood as a “watchman on the tower” of liberty, a sentinel ever on the alert to sound the alarm against abuses of power. “Knowledge and virtue” sustained freedom; ignorance spawned tyranny. Even proponents of strong, energetic government agreed. If the experiment in federalism were to succeed, it needed popular support from subjects who were far from the nation’s capital and disposed to distrust distant officials. “It is owing in great degree to the want of information,” explained Loring Andrews, printer of the Western Star in the Berkshire County town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, nestled in the mountains remote from any metropolis, “that the people are so often suspicious of their rulers, and entertain the idea that the interest of the people and the interest of the government [are] unconnected.” The statesmen of the new nation thus cultivated the press as a conduit of “correct information” about public men and measures as well as a champion of popular rights. The extensive republic they had labored so long and hard to erect was dependent on its constituent parts, the very news of its existence resting upon a loose chain of “impartial” printers among a thinly connected people (fig. I.3).30 Building a communications system capable of knitting together a “distended society” became a key priority of the federal government during its first half century. “Whatever facilitates a general intercourse of sentiments,” James Madison observed in an essay on “Public Opinion” in 1791, “as good roads, domestic commerce, a free press, and particularly a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people . . . is equivalent to a contraction of territorial limits, and is favorable to liberty.”31 That blueprint for nation building achieved reality, thanks to a steadily expanding network of post offices and post roads carrying newspapers all over the land. The Post Office Acts of 1792 and 1794 allowed newspapers and magazines to circulate through the mail at cheap rates, subsidized by high charges on personal letters; books were banned from the mailbags. Subscribers paid a small fee for the delivery of their papers; editors paid nothing at all to exchange issues through the mail, and they were free to reprint whatever they pleased. 18

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FIGURE I.3. The mastheads of five newspapers established between 1800 and 1820 describe the role of the press in the new republic. Christian Watchman (religious) appeared in twentysix weekly issues between 29 May and 20 November 1819. First published in Wilmington on 2 August 1809, American Watchman and Delaware Republican appeared semiweekly through 29 December 1813. The Farmer’s Watch-Tower, an agricultural newspaper, was published under this title in Urbana, Ohio, between 1 July 1812 and 19 January 1814. The People’s WatchTower of Ballston Spa, N.Y., appeared between 13 May 1818 and October 1820. Beginning publication as the semiweekly Republican Watch-Tower in New York City in 12 March 1800, this title ceased with the issue of 16 November 1810. American Antiquarian Society.

Government put few obstacles in the way. Liberty of the press was guaranteed by state and federal constitutions, and following the storm over the 1798 Sedition Act, official efforts to regulate newspapers faded. In contrast to Britain and France, the new republic forswore the state powers customarily employed to police opinion. No stamp taxes restricted the availability of newspapers to an economic elite. No public authorities inspected the mail to hunt out dissent. No customs officers barred dangerous books from crossing American borders. Information and opinion were free to circulate through the voluntary associations I N T RO D U C T I O N

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of newspapers that came to constitute a national bulletin board, posting stories to the “imagined community” of fellow citizens across the republic. When the Marquis de Lafayette made a triumphal tour of the United States in 1824–25, on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution, Americans could readily follow his movements through all twenty-four states of the Union. The “Nation’s Guest” crisscrossed the land along the route of the post roads (though he opted for more comfortable steamboats when available), and wherever he stopped for an official ceremony, there was a newspaper to report it and a post office to send the story on its way. In the North, it took only a day after Lafayette arrived in a town for an account of his reception to appear in the local press, and within two days the news was being reprinted elsewhere. His southern swing received less notice, hampered by the roughness of the roads and the scarcity of newspapers in a region of dispersed plantations and farms. Ten days typically elapsed before reports of Lafayette’s welcome in the South reached readers in the North, even from New Orleans. That was a great advance in speed since Jackson’s victory over the British ten years before—tribute to the improvements promoted by federal policy and to the efficiency of the stagecoach and steamship. John C. Calhoun rightly called the mail and the press “the nerves of the body politic.”32 While government fostered the infrastructure necessary to deliver the news, it was politics—the rise of organized parties and the furious fight for power among them—that drove the expansion of the press from the turn of the century onward. At Washington’s inauguration, most newspapers claimed to be “open to all parties but influenced by none,” as the Freeman’s Journal of Philadelphia declared,33 in a return to the journalistic credo of neutrality that had steered the conduct of the colonial press until the gathering conflict with Britain had forced every printer to take sides or go out of business. A disinterested stance proved no more feasible in the 1790s than it had in the crisis of empire back in 1775–76. As the factions centered on Hamilton and Jefferson developed into full-fledged parties contending for power, each enlisted its own cadre of editors to carry on the struggle in print. The party press provided a leading vehicle of electioneering, publicizing the official ticket, denouncing rivals, and rallying the faithful to the cause. In their appeals to the voters, newspapers promoted the democratization of politics— but only up to a point. As spokesmen for the juntos and regencies employing them, editors remained close to power and dependent upon it. In the 1790s the emerging parties in the federal capital of Philadelphia supported rival Gazettes, one issued by the Federalist John Fenno, the other by Jefferson’s literary friend, the poet Philip Freneau; each paper claimed the mantle of authority that had been accorded to official gazettes in England since 1665. Notoriously pre20

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carious enterprises seldom lasting more than a few years, newspapers counted on political patronage—government printing contracts, public advertisements, petty appointments—for essential income. They returned the favor by speaking for “the court,” the party in power, or “the country,” the politicians in opposition. Their pages were normally closed to minority and dissenting voices; only by starting their own periodicals could such voices be heard. Up to 1820, newspapers tried to cloak their partisanship in seemingly impartial language stressing the common good. In succeeding decades, Jacksonian Democrats eliminated the pretense and turned their house organs into virtual party headquarters, with successful editors climbing from the printer’s bench into legislative halls and executive offices, even the president’s “Kitchen Cabinet.” The Whigs quickly followed suit. So determined were the competing parties to win supporters that newspaper editors signed up subscribers with abandon and sent out issues month after month, year after year, without ever receiving payment; despite endless dunning notes, deadbeat readers were unapologetic, in the certainty that a free press was a democratic right and a reward for loyalty at the polls. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Not the “hireling” party press, which lacked the moral and financial independence to serve as a Fourth Estate. If the public sphere of the new nation was more open, diverse, and competitive than in the colonial era, it remained a forum circumscribed by the interests of the politicians in power or aspiring to it.34 The same Enlightenment commitment to the greater diffusion of useful knowledge that spurred the growth of newspapers shaped the emerging book trade of the new nation. In 1790, implementing its power under Section 8 of the Constitution to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” the first Congress passed “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning” prescribing the terms by which American authors could claim copyright in charts, maps, and books of their creation. That law sought to establish an unfettered literary marketplace, where books could circulate freely, to the profit of their authors or publishers, before entering swiftly into the public domain for the benefit of society as a whole. By its terms, authors could obtain a limited monopoly of fourteen years over the production and sale of their works throughout the republic—a privilege renewable for another fourteen years in the copyright owner’s lifetime and that could be bought and sold like any other species of property. The provisions were taken from an English model, the Statute of Anne (1710), the first copyright law in the Western world, and they were designed to encourage the dissemination of information and ideas in print. That was not what had happened for much of the eighteenth century in England, where booksellers, with the tacit approval of the courts, had successfully colluded for six decades to evade the law, constructing a tight cartel to monopolize intellectual property. I N T RO D U C T I O N

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Through an “elaborate regime of restrictive trade practices,” publishers kept book prices high, edition sizes low, and maximized returns at minimal risk. By such means, the bulk of the English public was excluded from the “reading nation.” But the booksellers’ hold over the market did not go unchallenged. In Edinburgh and Dublin, brash entrepreneurs seized an opening in British law. Arguing that neither Scotland nor Ireland was covered by the Statute of Anne, they took to reprinting the most profitable books issuing from London—without paying for permission, of course—and to selling them at low prices to customers all over the British Empire. The London booksellers denounced the reprinting as “piracy”—a shameless theft of “other Mens Copies,” as Daniel Defoe once put it, “as unjust as lying with their Wives, and breaking up their Houses.” The renegades were undeterred by the threat of legal action, occasionally defending their practice as a blow for freedom against monopoly. In 1774 the cause of enlightenment prevailed; in the landmark case of Donaldson v. Becket, the House of Lords overturned the London booksellers’ claim to perpetual copyright. With the Statute of Anne finally in effect, the huge backlist of British books was suddenly transformed into a substantial public domain free for the taking.35 The Copyright Act of 1790 embraced the new era of publishing in the transatlantic world and turned it to American advantage. Combining nationalism and cosmopolitanism, it simultaneously encouraged the rise of American authorship and bookmaking and the burgeoning of a domestic market for British and European writings. Under its provisions, aspiring American writers eager to profit from literary activity acquired an economic asset of considerable value: exclusive control over the production and sale of their work across the entire territory of the United States for a period lasting up to twenty-eight years. It would take decades before a national market developed to realize this potential, but that did not stop an impressive company of authors—the ubiquitous Webster, an ardent campaigner for intellectual property laws; Joel Barlow; Jeremy Belknap; Jedidiah Morse; Charles Brockden Brown; Judith Sargent Murray, among others—from taking quick advantage of the new resource made available by Congress. Mercy Otis Warren, the Patriot poet, playwright, and historian of the Revolution, was one of the earliest authors and the first woman of letters to do so, registering her Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous for copyright in October 1790, five months after passage of the law. Warren took pardonable pride in that possession; it was, she said, “the only thing I can properly call my own” (fig. I.4). Booksellers were slower to seize the opportunity, with hardly anyone following the lead of Ebenezer T. Andrews, the Boston partner of Isaiah Thomas, and taking a financial risk on American authors in exchange for the copyright.36 Such entrepreneurship did not stir up the publishing world until 22

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FIGURE I.4. Taking pride in authorship, rather than anonymity, Warren identified herself as Mrs. M. Warren on the title page of Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous and registered copyright in her own name. American Antiquarian Society.

the 1820s. The book trade preferred to imitate the business formula pioneered in Edinburgh and Dublin and concentrate on reprints. In 1785 English booksellers launched a bid in the House of Lords to kill off the Irish upstarts. In the face of that threat, a Dublin newspaper rallied local publishers to defend their interests vigorously. “With prudence and spirit,” the Irish patriot observed in an account that appeared widely in the American press, “Ireland might become an emporium for the book trade in America.” Instead, owing to a combination of English repression and American opportunity, Ireland came to the United States, its booksellers and printers emigrating by the dozen to the leading seaboard cities. Scottish traders had the same idea I N T RO D U C T I O N

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in the 1780s and 1790s, and together the newcomers replenished the ranks of booksellers that had been emptied during the Revolutionary War and its aftermath. The Celtic wave transformed the publishing landscape. In short order the Irish and Scottish entrepreneurs resumed the practices they had perfected back home, but now in the name of American patriotism and with the endorsement of American law. Under the Copyright Act, intellectual property rights were conferred only on United States citizens (and resident aliens); foreign authors need not apply. That exemption allowed for the unbounded reprinting of any and all works from abroad. Buoyed by a faith in “the more extensive diffusion of useful knowledge,” such newcomers as William Young, a transplant from Glasgow to Philadelphia, devoted themselves to bringing the Scottish Enlightenment to their new country. By 1787, Benjamin Rush judged reprinting “the most profitable method of dealing in books in our country.” In the ensuing decades it became the foundation of the entire publishing industry.37 The house that reprinting built was a replica of the original edition—and with good reason. The same economic dilemma challenged booksellers on both sides of the Atlantic. Publishing a book required substantial investment of capital up front—obtaining copy; buying paper, type, ink, and other materials; hiring printers, engravers, and binders; advertising and distribution—and then a long wait before the returns came in. Issuing new titles by unknown authors was a serious gamble; reissuing works with proven sales a safer course. All the more so in Dublin and Philadelphia, where London copy could be had at no cost. Everywhere publishing was a small-scale enterprise struggling to stay afloat and frequently going under. Not surprisingly, the operators of these firms did everything possible to cut costs and limit risks. Setting themselves off from the manual workmen of the trade, the men at the press and the case, booksellers built alliances with their own kind. They loaned each other money, exchanged books to increase and diversify their inventory, pooled funds in copublishing ventures and divided up the territory for sales. Competition was avoided wherever possible. In the interest of stable markets and steady returns, new editions were modest in size (typically, 500 to 750 copies), priced for the upper end of the market, distributed to retailers on standard terms (331⁄3 percent discount with six months’ credit), and reissued in less expensive forms as demand warranted. It was common to cut costs by pushing relentlessly downward on printers’ wages and by obliging authors to share in the financing of publications. These practices, formed in the heyday of the Stationers’ Company, endured for several centuries, along with the technology of the wooden press, and though developed to regulate a centralized trade in London, they were called upon to manage affairs in the unprecedented circumstances of the extensive American republic.38 24

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In the novel context of the new nation, neither copyright nor custom could order the conduct of book selling over a great geographic expanse. As in Dublin, so in the United States a “courtesy of trade” was devised to regulate the competition for reprints. Booksellers agreed on a simple rule: whoever first issued a foreign text was its rightful owner, de facto if not de jure. Under that compact, a single reprint of an English title could circulate up and down the nation, free from competing editions, enter into the flow of exchanges within the trade, and sell at retail for well below the cost of an import. But this system was the undoing of many a bookseller. Despite the best efforts of such short-lived trade organizations as the American Company of Booksellers, the open-ended exchange of texts, abetted by liberal credit, encouraged overproduction, drove down prices, and ended in a massive wave of bankruptcies after the War of 1812. Cooperation broke down whenever a foreign title proved so popular that no one firm could supply the demand, prompting erstwhile allies to turn rivals and poach one another’s property, as happened when Harper and Brothers in New York combated Carey & Lea in Philadelphia for control over Sir Walter Scott’s hugely profitable Waverley novels in the 1820s. And no association, however strong, could overcome the geographic obstacles to national distribution faced by publishers based in eastern cities and towns.39 In England, booksellers could readily promote their wares to a national audience through a well-developed network of provincial newspapers. Not so in the United States, with so many local journals rising and falling all the time that it was impossible to put together a coordinated advertising campaign. Nor could books be sold through the mail before 1851. To reach customers scattered across the country, the leading firms relied on face-to-face expedients. Philadelphia’s booksellers started up branch stores in the Chesapeake and in developing towns in the West, while their New York counterparts had outlets in Savannah and Charleston. Books were marketed through general stores, printing offices, and local notables, particularly, ministers and postmasters working on commission. An army of agents traveled the land in quest of orders for new titles fresh from the press, dead stock sitting on the shelves, and speculative ventures whose fate hinged on whether enough subscriptions could be rounded up. The best-known agent was “the peddling parson” Mason Locke Weems, employed by Mathew Carey to dispose of books that were unsalable at his Philadelphia store or through other established channels. In Weems’s footsteps followed a legion of publishers’ representatives, colporteurs for benevolent societies, selfpromoting authors, and free-lance peddlers. In the 1820s Harpers enlisted two hundred agents to drum up subscriptions to its new periodical, the National Preacher. Peddlers offered an informal alternative to the regular commercial network of village stores and printing offices, but they were little appreciated, I N T RO D U C T I O N

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especially by the retailers with whom they competed. Massachusetts outlawed “hawkers, pedlars, and petty chapmen” for six decades (1785–1846); other states restricted their wares and required them to obtain licenses. Publicly, they were branded “a set of designing sharpers” slipping through the land with shoddy goods, “bad books and vile songs.” Privately, many people in remote rural hamlets set aside misgivings and gladly bought the latest offerings from the developing consumer culture stuffed in the peddlers’ packs—wooden nutmegs and all.40 Book agents were also viewed with suspicion. Would they take your down payment on a subscription and never return with a book? Or were they pests you could never get rid of ? One fictional piece circulating in the press told of a book agent, dressed in “the peculiar costume of a Yankee backwoodsman,” who one “sultry” summer day came calling on an unsuspecting clergyman in a Massachusetts village. Pretending to be hard of hearing, the wily stranger made small talk with his polite host and cleverly misinterpreted whatever was said. By this ruse, he stayed for dinner and then the night. The sales pitch followed. “I’m getting subscribers . . . for a valuable book—it’s the works of John Bunyan, or Jonathan Bunyan—I don’t remember exactly which.” When the minister demurred, the agent put him down for a subscription. Better to go along, the man reasoned, and be done with the unwelcome guest. A month later the clergyman was visiting a neighboring town and unexpectedly came across the agent with a wagon full of books, including the unwanted Bunyan. Would he like them delivered right away? The minister protested “as loud as he could”—to no better effect than before. Alas, there was only one way out of this slough of despond. “The clergyman, finding that he must keep the books, or keep the fellow three or four days, paid him the money, as the easiest way to get rid of him.” The backcountry Yankee trickster had the last laugh on the clerical representative of polite, urban culture. Usually, the situation was reversed. After struggling to sell books in the rising community of Wheeling, Virginia, one salesman for a Philadelphia firm sighed wearily in 1823, “To bring books among such rabble is like throwing Pearls before Swine.” The cultural gap between country and city kept most booksellers comfortably ensconced in the great metropolises of the East, their stock in trade out of reach to the great agricultural hinterland.41 Congregating in port cities carried the commercial advantage of proximity to the wharves and customhouses into which flowed crates of books in mounting numbers aboard ships from Glasgow, Bristol, Southampton, and Le Havre. Far from slackening with the rise of reprinting, the American appetite for imported literature expanded by the decade. Accustomed to reading books written and printed abroad, many citizens of the new nation were unmoved by the campaign against foreign works waged by such literary nationalists as Philip Freneau. In 26

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1788, through the satirical figure of “the late Mr. Robert Slender,” a stocking weaver by trade and poet by avocation, Freneau advocated a stiff duty on “all imported authors,” with the revenue to be used as a social security fund for the support of “real American writers, when become old and helpless and no longer able to wield the pen with advantage.” A year later, in the nation’s first tariff act, Congress included books among the items subject to a 5 percent duty. In subsequent decades, as protectionist sentiment waxed and waned, the rate fluctuated, climbing as high as 15 percent after the War of 1812. The unstinting demand for literary imports is striking, considering that by the mid-1790s, domestic booksellers were reprinting the most popular new books in London within a year or two of publication. Why import when cheaper editions were available at home? The answer lies in the changing character of the books in demand. Before independence, London dominated the colonies in nearly every genre, except for almanacs, sermons, newspapers, and pamphlets on local subjects. After 1790, Americans satisfied most of their utilitarian needs from native presses and chose selectively among titles from abroad. Serious learning bore an Old World lineage. The Charleston (S.C.) Library Society built its ambitious collection from books ordered directly from London, as did the Baltimore Library Company and the Portsmouth (N.H.) Athenæum. These supplies grew uncertain in an era of trade embargoes and wars on the high seas. After losing a couple of shipments, Baltimore’s literary gentlemen turned to domestic sources and never went back to imports. “Many [American reprints],” the managers of their library concluded, “are in no wise inferior in typographical excellency, quality of paper, [and] correction of execution” to the most highly regarded English editions. The Charlestonians held their course; of 3,019 titles in their library’s 1811 catalog, only 50 or so were American editions. Fifteen years later the collection totaled 5,057 items, with six out of ten coming from England. Educational institutions enjoyed an exemption from the tariff on imported books, but the savings were not the main reason why colleges and seminaries, learned societies, and social libraries provided a sturdy market for British books well into the nineteenth century. The plain truth is that the United States lacked both the technical expertise in printing and engraving to produce complex works of art and science and the well-endowed patrons necessary to subsidize them in the absence of a broad enough commercial market, as artists and naturalists from Joel Barlow to John James Audubon unhappily discovered. If citizens of the new nation wished to keep up with the progress of learning, they would have to rely on scholarly imports from the Old World. The New York firm of Wiley & Putnam profited as much from the specialized business of importing books from Britain and Europe for colleges and libraries as it did I N T RO D U C T I O N

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from publishing new American works. Anglophilia was not confined to learned circles. Prosperous Americans indulged their love of luxury with elaborate English Bibles and illustrated children’s stories and with fancy gift books gotten up in London for the Christmas season. By the late 1830s, the international literary marketplace was booming, with about four books entering the United States from abroad for every one exported.42 Transatlantic currents ran through every aspect of the early republic’s print culture. Technology came from abroad, as did the craftsmen trained to use it. In 1789 American typographers celebrated the start of the new federal government with much the same wooden presses as Gutenberg had employed two and half centuries earlier, and they did so with machines and materials—type, paper, ink—acquired from Britain and Europe. Over the next half century the printing industry gained in self-sufficiency and vastly expanded in productive power, thanks to an industrial revolution with its origins across the sea. Americans applied their vaunted technical ingenuity to improving on British designs and came up with the “Columbian” iron press and the Hoe cylinder press powered by steam. Technological changes undermined the autonomy, skills, and wages of compositors and pressmen, who defended their interests by developing a craft culture with its roots in Old World practices, the details of which could be learned from manuals first printed in England and adapted to American circumstances. Many skilled artisans brought their techniques and traditions with them after finishing apprenticeships in their native lands. Without Scottish and other immigrant engravers, the Philadelphia bookseller Thomas Dobson, a transplant from Edinburgh, could never have carried off his eighteen-volume reprint, with almost six hundred copperplate illustrations, of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1790–97), that magnum opus of the Scottish Enlightenment. Nor could Dobson’s son Judah have succeeded in illustrating Timothy A. Conrad’s learned treatise on conchology, New Fresh Water Shells of the United States (1834), with lithographic images, had he not recruited a sophisticated practitioner of the new pictorial technique from Paris. In the first decades of American publishing, both texts and illustrations were being taken, without permission or even acknowledgment, from London; by the late 1820s, even as reprinting continued to flourish, artists and engravers trusted their talent to create images of their own.43 Americans did not merely reprint British books by the hundreds. They adapted and altered both single texts and entire genres, often claiming to Americanize them in the process. It was not uncommon for London titles to undergo metamorphosis upon translation to Boston or Philadelphia. Following the economical practices of the Dublin trade, booksellers shrank expensive quartos into more affordable octavos and duodecimos and through the use 28

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of cheaper paper and smaller type reduced multivolume works to one or two. The “three-decker” English novel was cut down to size, as a result of typographical ingenuity and editorial ruthlessness. One Boston publisher had no apologies for condensing Scott’s Waverley novels: “There is a great deal of rubbish—such as the long introductions &c.” Some texts were rewritten to suit republican tastes, especially in the early years of independence. In 1785 Isaiah Thomas joined with several Boston booksellers to bring out a version of The Instructor, or Young Man’s Best Companion, a popular manual for English clerks and mechanics that went through some twenty-five editions from 1737 to the end of the century. Among its features were “Instructions for Youth, to spell, read, and write True English” with appropriate examples. Take capital letters, whose use at the beginning of sentences was illustrated as follows: “Fear God. Honour the King.” Such prescriptions appeared differently, albeit with equal concern to uphold authority, in the reprint Thomas subtitled American Young Man’s Best Companion: “Fear God. Honour Your Rulers.” So, too, did a textbook on natural history, An Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature by Sarah Trimmer (London, 1780), shift its perspective and alter its illustrations when reprinted by Boston bookseller David West in 1796. In a fictive conversation between a mother and her two children, the author urges son Henry to study the circumstances of “every country in the world” but to “love England the best.” And why not? England offers abundant material comforts, including “plenty of corn to make bread; barley to brew beer; wool to spin for clothing; flax for linen; the best roast beef in the world.” In the Boston reprint explicitly “adapted to the United States of America,” Henry becomes an American whose duty to love his homeland is no less strong than in the original edition. “You are an American, Henry, so you must love America the best.” But the rationale for American patriotism rests on higher ground than the sheer standard of living. True, the inhabitants of the United States, like their counterparts in the onetime mother country, benefit from ample supplies of grain, wool, and flax, along with apples for cider (instead of barley for beer). “But above all, we have the best government in the world, and no people enjoy so much liberty, both civil and religious, as we do.” Through such reprints, the new nation did more than acquire its reading from abroad; it subjected foreign texts to a kind of literary naturalization, making it as easy for them to assume an American identity as it was for European immigrants to obtain American citizenship.44 But the print culture of the early republic could hardly conceal its indebtedness to progenitors across the sea. Nor in their aspiration to participate in the transatlantic world of letters did many Americans wish to deny that cosmopolitan affiliation. Many genres—the evangelical magazine, the gift book, the picturesque “tour,” the sporting newspaper, the illustrated weekly, the juveI N T RO D U C T I O N

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nile miscellany, even the Valentine writer—originated in the Old World, then spread to the New, where they won large followings.45 Harper’s Family Library took its inspiration and most of its titles from a series of the same name inaugurated by London bookseller John Murray. The most popular textbooks in colleges and seminaries carried the prestige of British authorship, even when they were edited, revised, and annotated by American faculty. The same was true for advanced instruction in the English language; Lindley Murray, a Loyalist expatriate, sold sixteen million copies, virtually all reprints, of his English Grammar and English Reader in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. Only in the basics—notably, elementary reading, where Webster’s speller held sway, and arithmetic—and in such subjects as geography and history did American authors refute Lord Sheffield’s prediction that “all school books can be sent cheaper from Britain than they can be printed in America.”46 Children’s books were slow to cut the leading strings of the mother country. In the mid-eighteenth century “a new world of children” took shape on the printed page, when the entrepreneurial London bookseller John Newbery began issuing the first titles expressly designed for the young. Tapping an expanding audience of parents influenced by Lockean ideas of education, Newbery fashioned his books to appeal to the child’s eye and imagination, even as they provided solid information and moral instruction. Books for beginners, alphabets and primers, were set in large type and full of illustrations. More advanced readers could learn about geography, history, nature, and the classics in attractive works tailored to their abilities and interests. “Tom Telescope” set forth Newton’s philosophy. A series of fables featured conversations among birds—The Swallow, The Crested Wren, The Canary Bird—deprecating human cruelty to animals. In the hands of Newbery and his many imitators, nearly every genre acquired its juvenile counterpart; Thomas Day’s Sandford and Merton (1783) became an immediate hit as the first novel about children written specifically for children. Such popular works added to the flow of books across the Atlantic before 1776, and hardly had independence been won than Isaiah Thomas, the Worcester printer and bookseller, set about building his business with reprints of such Newbery staples as The History of Little Goody Twoshoes and The House That Jack Built, produced in child-sized formats, with lots of woodcuts, and sold for as little as four cents. Thomas’s success spurred a rapid growth in publishing for children, as “juvenile literature” of all sorts—alphabets, primers, catechisms, hymnals, and abridged Bibles; fairy tales and Mother Goose; riddle books and game manuals; advice on etiquette and “good manners”; collections of “street cries” from London, New York, and other cities; and original novels—generated steady sales for printers and booksellers and 30

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EDITIONS

400 300 200 100

6

1

0

02

1

06 18

6

0

1 18 18 18 20 18 22 18 24 18 26 18 28 18 3 18 32 18 34 18 36 18 38

7

18 08 18 10 18 12 18 14

17 9

1

80 4

2

0 79 17 94 1 9 79 8 18 0 18

0

18

40 18

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GRAPH I.1. Editions of children’s publications per year, 1790–1840

enabled a few, such as Samuel Wood and Mahlon Day in New York and Sidney Babcock in New Haven, to specialize in the field. Despite occasional calls for “American books for American children,” English titles dominated well into the 1820s. Even native pioneers in the field deferred to British authority. When Lydia Maria Child, editor of the popular Juvenile Miscellany (1826–34), drew up a list of recommended reading for boys and girls in an 1831 guidebook for mothers, the “moral tales” of Maria Edgeworth (“full of practical good sense, philosophic discrimination, and pure morality”), along with didactic fiction by Amelia Opie, Barbara Hofland, and Mary Martha Sherwood and the historical romances of Walter Scott, stood out, although a few American writers, notably, Washington Irving and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, also claimed notice. Children’s stories did more than entertain the young; they helped to advance the genre of fiction in the literary marketplace. Characteristically, it was British fiction that benefited most (graph I.1).47 Religious publishing was just as dependent as the book trade on London for its models and texts. The Connecticut Evangelical Journal started up in 1800 in imitation of the Evangelical Magazine launched seven years earlier in London. The New England Tract Society followed in the wake of London’s Religious Tract Society; the American Bible Society took after the British and Foreign Bible Society. Fittingly, the ABS established its headquarters in “the London of America,” as one founder dubbed New York City. The steady sellers of ProtesI N T RO D U C T I O N

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tant divinity—Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted, Doddridge’s Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul—and Anglican tales of religious faith, such as The Dairyman’s Daughter (1805), were staples on the lists of the benevolent societies, distributed far and wide in the evangelicals’ campaign for American souls. For all the rhetoric of nationalism, printing served universalist goals of secular enlightenment, genteel refinement, and religious salvation.48 No group of Americans was more committed to the project of advancing universal knowledge than the cosmopolitan men of letters who founded a host of learned societies in the states and cities of the new republic. Such ambitious organizations as the American Philosophical Society, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and the Linnæan Society of New England emulated the model of learning epitomized by the Royal Society in England. Eager as they were to promote American contributions to the arts and sciences, the participants in these ventures took their intellectual agendas, their fields of interest, and their standards of achievement from the Old World. But it proved difficult, if not impossible, to realize such aspirations in an emerging democratic culture hostile to aristocratic traditions. For centuries in Europe and Britain the advancement of learning had rested on the patronage of crown and church and on the largesse of privileged men and women with great fortunes and ample leisure. But the federal government declined to become a state sponsor of scholarship, except when the discovery of new knowledge would serve practical political and economic interests, as with the expedition of Lewis and Clark. Time and again Congress rejected the importuning of presidents from George Washington to John Quincy Adams and refused to establish a national university in the District of Columbia. The people’s representatives proved no more willing to create an American counterpart to the British Museum Library or the Bibliothèque Nationale. In 1814 the House barely agreed, by a vote of 81–71, to accept Thomas Jefferson’s offer of some sixty-five thousand volumes to replace the modest congressional library burned by British troops, and it remained adamant against subsequent bids to enhance those holdings through the purchase of rare-book collections from the estates of European bibliophiles, which periodically became available on the international market. Unmoved by appeals to show the world that the United States is not “a mere lucre-loving nation, devoid of all nobler aspirations than those of making and keeping money,” the guardians of the public purse restricted their legislative library to utilitarian ends: the provision of information relevant to policy making and of recreational reading for federal officials and their families. If private individuals wished to pursue esoteric interests of little relevance to the public good, let them do so on their own. The same principle that gave rise to postal subsidies and copyright laws justified the lack of support for learned culture. The new republic put its faith 32

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in the extensive diffusion of useful knowledge to the many, not the promotion of arcane knowledge for the few.49 Free from the constraints of copyright, reprints and extracts from foreign publications moved through every medium of print—books, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets—along decentralized routes subject to local control. Unlike their neighbors to the north in the sprawling territory from Prince Edward Island to the Niagara border, Americans could set the terms by which they gained access to information and entertainment from the wider world. In the several provinces that would eventually come together as the Dominion of Canada (1867), the loyal subjects of the British Empire suffered the cultural disadvantages of their colonial situation. For a thinly populated society scattered across space, printing was necessarily a local affair surviving on patronage from church and state. The Canadian press was also burdened by copyright laws enacted in Whitehall and designed to serve the interests of the London book trade. Parliament’s statutes protected intellectual property in the British isles and not in the colonies, so aspiring authors like Thomas Chandler Haliburton, the Nova Scotia author of the immensely popular Clockmaker; or, The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, of Slickville (1837), had to cross the Atlantic and find a publisher willing to make arrangements with an outsider in order to secure the profits of their literary labors. At the same time, British North America was obliged to respect the rights of writers and booksellers at the seat of empire. With reprinting of new titles barred by law, Canadians got the bulk of their current reading from abroad. Bookstores, operated chiefly by immigrants, were stocked with imports from London, Paris, New York, and Boston, on which stiff duties were charged, making them affordable chiefly by the privileged classes. Unable to encourage either local authorship or native publishing, Canada remained a cultural colony of Britain down to the twentieth century. By contrast, the United States enjoyed the fruits of independence in an expanding world of books.50 Indeed, exercising the prerogatives of sovereignty through copyright law, Americans gained a broad exposure to the latest literature of the Western world that the English could only envy. London booksellers had never reconciled themselves to the liberal “intellectual property regime” upheld by Donaldson v. Becket, and over the first four decades of the nineteenth century they lobbied relentlessly to expand the scope of the monopoly awarded by Parliament. The copyright term steadily lengthened from the fourteen years allowed by the Statute of Anne to twenty-eight years (1814) and then to the lifetime of the author plus seven years or forty-two years from the original publication date, whichever was greater (1842). Through such emendations of the law, publishers succeeded in keeping book prices high and edition sizes low. In the great age of romantic literature, new works by Byron, Wordsworth, and Scott were well I N T RO D U C T I O N

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beyond the means not merely of tradesmen, mechanics, farm workers, and servants but also of respectable merchants, clergymen, and university students. Across the Atlantic the heirs of the Revolution followed Parliament’s lead and doubled the term of copyright to twenty-eight years (1831) but held fast against a drive by British writers and publishers, in league with American supporters, to put an end to the “culture of reprinting” and grant copyright protection to foreign books. Despite arguments that American authors would benefit from a change in the law by making it more expensive to publish works from abroad, Congress heeded the pleas of reprinters and readers intent on preserving easy access to books. Let British texts enter the U.S. market and compete equally with domestic productions, warned one critic, and “English prices and styles of publishing would soon begin to be fashionable here.” The law remained unchanged, ensuring that the American reading public had a wider selection of current books, both foreign and domestic, at lower prices than anywhere else in the Atlantic world.51

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.

.

.

Starting in the mid-1820s and quickening in ensuing decades, the pace of change in print culture accelerated, in tandem with dramatic innovations in transportation and communications. With the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, the great heartland stretching from the Hudson Valley to the Old Northwest was linked to markets on the East Coast and across the Atlantic. The first railroads began operating a decade later, with hubs in Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Steamboats, which had been navigating the inland rivers and lakes since 1807, came to ocean travel in 1840, when the Canadian Samuel Cunard introduced fortnightly transatlantic steamer service carrying passengers and news from Liverpool to Halifax, Boston, and New York. These improvements eased the movement of people and goods across the geographic expanses that had made for an extensive republic; the telegraph, inaugurated in 1844, transcended physical distance altogether, “annihilating time and space,” as contemporaries repeated time and again with awe. In 1817 it took six days for news to travel to Boston from the District of Columbia and appear in print, a trip that had required eighteen days back in 1790. By 1841, not even seventy-two hours were needed. The telegraph shattered those limits; it enabled Americans in every major city to read about events in the nation’s capital the day after they had occurred. James Madison’s dream of a republic united by information was at last becoming reality.52 But not entirely and not so fast. The “transportation revolution” did tighten interregional ties, joining cotton and sugar plantations in the South and wheat fields in the Midwest to textile mills in New England and to the expanding 34

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ports of New Orleans, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, and it made possible for the first time a national market in goods of all kinds, including periodicals and books. To realize that economic potential, printers and publishers employed new technologies of production, most of them originating abroad— papermaking machines, stereotype plates, steam-powered presses, lithography and electrotyping, case bindings—and turned out printed goods in profusion, which were shipped across the republic through a developing network of trade sales, wholesale jobbers, and traveling salesmen. Such developments took time, and in 1840 the “industrial book,” a machine-made product sold through a national trade system, was still a distant prospect, while most newspapers remained local productions reliant on circulation through the mails. On the eve of a presidential election, the United States had not yet embraced its “manifest destiny” to span the continent; neither Democrats nor Whigs were ready to push for the addition of Texas to the Union. If anything, “the appearance of [those] first Cunard steamers in the bay,” which Henry Adams vividly recalled many decades later, brought Europe and America still closer together, as became evident in the nearly tenfold increase of book imports from 1846 to 1876.53 The first group to seize on the new opportunities for publishing comprised the entrepreneurs of faith, propagating a Christian message in print to starving souls wherever they lived. The target audience was not local but national and potentially universal. Sectarianism defined the agenda of the many magazines that sprang up to serve Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Universalists, and a host of newer faiths, including the Disciples of Christ and the Mormons. Of the 193 religious periodicals founded by 1830, two-thirds were aimed at adherents of a particular creed. Others pursued a nondenominational mission dedicated to winning converts to Christ. Carving out their constituencies so broadly, the evangelical publications reaped as fruitfully as they sowed. In 1829 the Methodist Christian Advocate went out to twenty thousand subscribers across the country, the nondenominational American National Preacher to twenty-five thousand, at a time when no secular periodical could claim more than forty-five hundred. Based in New York City, the magazines enjoyed close ties to the “benevolent empire”; the Reverend Austin Dickinson, founding editor of the American National Preacher from 1826 to 1838, served for a time as editor for the American Tract Society (ATS ) and author of several of its pamphlets. The publishing operations of the ATS and its sister societies were state of the art, relying on stereotype plates and power presses well in advance of the regular book trade. But producing Bibles and tracts by the million proved an easier task than disseminating them from Manhattan to “destitute” persons all over the nation. The ATS and the AmeriI N T RO D U C T I O N

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can Bible Society (ABS ) depended on a network of local auxiliaries to finance and distribute their publications, and therein lay the problem. Rich, respectable communities, abounding in professed Christians and concentrated in the Northeast, were quick to answer the call to philanthropy, while hardscrabble frontier settlements went unserved. The dilemma hamstrung the benevolent societies through the 1830s. Then in 1841 the ATS devised a solution by jettisoning the local volunteers and hiring its own sales force to crisscross the country with cheap Bibles and pamphlets for everyone in need. That fateful decision, soon imitated by the ABS and others, transformed the benevolent societies into national organizations operating on an unprecedented scale. Forerunners of the nonprofit sector in twenty-first-century America, they pioneered in the conduct of modern corporate bureaucracies, with central headquarters in New York overseeing a chain of regional offices that directly employed scores of agents in the field. To extend its influence still further, the ATS inaugurated two monthly magazines, the American Messenger and the Child’s Paper, which were reaching as many as 250,000 subscribers by the early 1850s. No other enterprise in publishing matched this elaborate model.54 Publishing projects were most effective when particular groups in the population could be singled out for notice and engaged with materials addressed to their special interests. By this means, small minorities within dispersed cities and towns could be aggregated on a regional or national level and embodied in print as visible blocs with common opinions and shared identities. Reform groups benefited from the self-identification of supporters. Temperance advocates drank from The Fountain and enlisted in the Cold Water Army; health reformers looked to the Sanatarium; abolitionists championed the cause of the slave in the Emancipator and the Liberator. Starting with Freedom’s Journal in 1827, African Americans fought not only for their own liberty but for the Rights of All (as the paper was renamed). Occasionally, such publications transcended their local areas and reached a broad readership, thanks to formal institutional support, as was the case with the Emancipator, which the American Anti-Slavery Society maintained as its official organ and distributed through a network of three hundred agents based in towns and cities in the North from Maine to Michigan and extending into Lower and Upper Canada. But most reform periodicals resembled William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, which was often taken to be the voice of abolitionism, but was, in fact, owned and operated by a single individual and dependent on voluntary subscriptions from near and far.55 Targeting a specific demographic could generate substantial rewards. There were “amulets,” “garlands,” “mirrors,” and “toilets” for ladies (and an Agitator for women’s rights), “assistants” and “companions” for mothers, “compan36

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ions” for children, and “friends” for orphans and youth. Philadelphia publisher Louis A. Godey found his fortune with the Lady’s Book he launched in 1830 and, under the helm of Sarah Josepha Hale from 1837 on, shepherded to immense national success. In 1839 he anticipated an “astonishing” circulation of 25,000; a decade later, the magazine was up to 40,000 subscribers in a steady course of growth that peaked at 150,000 before the Civil War. Godey’s and its rivals Graham’s and Peterson’s magazines devised editorial formulas with particular appeal to women—Godey claimed his periodical “brought unalloyed pleasure to the female mind”—combining short stories, poetry, and essays with elegant engravings, and unlike earlier American periodicals, they paid writers well, thereby advancing the development of authorship as a vocation for the relatively few individuals, such as Lydia Huntley Sigourney, who succeeded in supporting themselves with the pen. Writing for special interest magazines was not an unmixed blessing; while female writers gained a larger audience through periodicals aimed at “the fair sex,” they had to accept a circumscription of their literary role. Subject to the imperatives of an expanding publishing marketplace, such figures as Sigourney and Child were now promoted for their womanly qualities as mothers and wives, rather than for the pointed opinions they had once expressed about the dispossession of Indians and the oppression of slaves. In like manner, white male writers in the 1830s and after—Cooper, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow—redefined the social identity of the man of letters from a civic-minded republican to a savvy entrepreneur adapting creatively to a changing economy and society. Domestic women, adventurous men: these and other limiting personas were the price the new professional authors bore for success in paying court to the multiplying niches of readers populating an ever more segmented and stratified marketplace.56 No medium of print was more local in its ownership and operation than the newspaper, which continued to proliferate across the republic. The press grew at an astounding rate, nearly doubling its ranks every decade and a half, faster even than the surging population: 365 newspapers in 1810, 861 in 1828, 1,403 in 1840. The great majority, eight out of every ten, were weeklies, single sheets of paper printed on both sides with hand-operated presses and folded into four pages in a process that Gutenberg would have found familiar. So ubiquitous were these mercuries of information and opinion that Tocqueville guessed “that there is scarcely a hamlet which has not its own newspaper.” That very localism, the Frenchman added, served as a safeguard of liberty, for no single organ could exercise undue influence over the affairs of the republic. “In the United States each separate journal exercises but little authority, but the power of the periodical press is only second to that of the people.” Actually, at the very moment that Tocqueville was making these firsthand observations, national poliI N T RO D U C T I O N

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tics were assuming heightened importance in American journalism. With the election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1828, the nation’s capital was gripped by ferocious struggles for power over issues—nullification, the Bank of the United States, the dispossession of the Cherokee Indians—commanding attention all over the land. A new party system took shape, and it harnessed the press in its service more tightly than had ever been the case in the contests between Federalists and Republicans. Integrated into opposing national networks and lured by the prospect of political appointments and other patronage plums, Democratic and Whig editors increasingly took their cues from administration and opposition organs in Washington and the states. New York City’s leading papers, such as the Jacksonian Courier and Enquirer, dispatched correspondents to report on actions in Congress and the White House, and they competed energetically to be the first to print the latest intelligence of business and government. In the late 1820s the Journal of Commerce spent $30,000 on a regular express service from Washington to New York, with twenty-four horses covering the distance in as little as twenty hours. The city papers were equally intent on getting out business news as fast as possible. When ships sailed into New York harbor, the journalistic rivals dispatched fast boats to intercept them and raced each other back to the printing office with the “freshest advices.” Speed sold, and it spurred an increase in the size and scale of the press. Noted for its up-to-date coverage of the news from Albany, Washington, and London, by the mid-1830s the Courier and Inquirer, edited by the onetime merchant and military officer James Watson Webb, was producing forty-five hundred copies a day on its modern cylinder press—the highest circulation in the nation.57 Ironically, the ascendancy of these cosmopolitan papers was overturned by a new model of journalism remarkable for its localism. When the penny press burst onto the New York scene in the mid-1830s, with the daily Sun (1833), Transcript (1834), and Herald (1835), its struggling founders, starved for cash, lacked the means to compete with the established journals for foreign and national news, so they looked for stories immediately around them, especially in the police court, in a style of urban reporting that had been tried out first in London. The brash upstarts, of necessity, reversed the century-old formula for a successful newspaper; instead of carrying “knowledge from distant climes,” they featured fresh reports on events close at hand—crime in the streets (sexual assaults, prostitution, robberies, drunken brawls), notorious divorces, murder trials, the state of the markets and stock prices on Wall Street, political gatherings at Tammany Hall, parties, weddings, and other “scenes of fashionable life,” theater reviews—mixed in with reprints from the establishment press, uninhibited editorial commentary, scores of classified ads, and, in the case of the Herald, the colorful, self-promoting activities of its editor and owner, Scot38

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FIGURE I.5. The New York City sporting papers traded in sensationalism, both in word and image. As this broadside advertisement suggests, scandal, gossip, police reports, theater news, crude jests, and anecdotes were the “news.” “Vulcan! Mars!! Jupiter & Clergymen!!! . . . All Published in This Day’s Polyanthos” (New York: George Washington Dixon, 1838). American Antiquarian Society.

tish immigrant James Gordon Bennett (fig. I.5). The Herald was unapologetic about its focus on everyday life in the city. “We have no news from Europe,” Bennett acknowledged one day amid his all-out coverage of the murder of the prostitute Helen Jewett. “Who cares? We have enough of interest on this dear delightful continent, to occupy all our feelings—all our soul—all our sensibilities. In a short time, Europe will be like an old woman, without a tooth or a touch of sensibility.” Sometimes the papers simply made things up, as did the Sun with its notorious hoax of August 1835 announcing the existence of strange living creatures on the moon or the Herald with its revelation of Andrew Jackson’s annual message to Congress before it had even been written.58 Bennett bragged about the fresh reporting and political independence of the Herald, but the key to the penny papers’ success was their business model. The Courier and Enquirer and other “mercantile advertisers,” available exclusively on a subscription basis for sixteen dollars annually, catered to the political and business elite; by contrast, the Sun and the Herald could be bought by the broad middle and working classes in single copies for one or two cents. The penny papers were tiny; at 81⁄2 by 11 inches, the Sun easily folded into a man’s I N T RO D U C T I O N

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pocket, whereas its well-established rivals, three times that size, were “blanket sheets” most conveniently read at a table in a merchant’s countinghouse. Crucially, the newcomers were sold on a cash basis to newsboys, who obtained their supplies from the publishers at an attractive discount and aggressively hawked them on the streets or delivered them to homes. Thanks to their burgeoning circulation—the Herald reached twenty thousand daily by 1840, seventy-seven thousand on the eve of the Civil War—they earned huge profits from the many advertisers eager to pay cash for access to the massive urban audience. As Bennett saw it, the “cash principle” drove the entire operation of the Herald. It paid for the reporters and editors who gathered the news, the steam-powered presses that printed the papers, and the army of salesmen who “cried” each day’s issues on the streets. It freed him from dependence on political sponsors and business investors. And it obligated him to his readers alone in a relationship governed strictly by the impersonal rules of the capitalist marketplace. “Business is weaned—is divorced from politics.”59 As it turned out, local events in Manhattan captivated readers elsewhere. The Herald and the Sun, along with such later entrants into the field as Horace Greeley’s Tribune (1841) and Henry Raymond’s Times (1851), took off at the very moment that New York City was starting its rise into the financial, publishing, and entertainment capital of the nation. Penny papers in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans also fascinated audiences in their hinterland with the excitement and dangers of America’s fast-growing cities. Soon the Herald and the Tribune were issuing influential national editions offering compendia of the week’s news adapted to the tastes of small-town readers. In effect, the local was the cosmopolitan in the penny press, expressing the variety, color, and rapid pace of urban life. Into this mix were introduced original reports about national politics and international affairs as soon as the Herald and its compatriots could afford them. Having promised early on that “in every species of news the Herald will be one of the earliest of the early,” Bennett threw himself into the race for scoops, employing every means from carrier pigeons to sailboats to beat the competition and eventually joining with his sixpenny rivals to establish telegraph companies and to create the Associated Press. By the start of 1840, the paper was employing five editors and reporters in Manhattan, six domestic and four European correspondents, along with 120 “men and boys, as clerks, compositors, pressmen, engineers, agents, boys, and devils of all kinds.” In time, as the penny papers raised their prices and enlarged their size, their differences from the political press blurred, and as wealthy, large-scale enterprises, they entered the journalistic establishment.60 The spirit of competition for the new and different stirred even in the book trade, which gradually became concentrated in Boston, Philadelphia, and New 40

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York, even as it gained new outposts along the trade routes to the West, especially in Cincinnati. In a business with a heavy mortality rate, booksellers had become accustomed to the cooperative arrangements by which they tried to uphold prices, regulate reprinting, and limit their risks. But the safe and steady path lost its appeal in the heady environment of the 1820s and 1830s. Just as the newspapers raced for the latest news from Europe, so booksellers hastened to reprint the most popular works in London as soon as they arrived in American ports. Propelling this enterprise was the craze for Scott, whose historical romances lent a new respectability to reading fiction and stimulated James Fenimore Cooper, Sedgwick, and many of their contemporaries to produce novels devoted to American characters and scenes. No longer could publishers afford to wait and see if a title sold well enough in England to merit reprinting. With speed of the essence, booksellers paid to obtain advance sheets from London— a compensation of sorts to the publishers and writers being pirated. The “author of Waverley” and his imitators appeared in print as soon as they sailed into harbor. Courtesy of trade dissolved. Booksellers invaded each other’s territory with competing editions of the same title, undermining profits for all through overproduction. A modus vivendi was negotiated in the trade, only to fall apart in the 1830s as Harper brothers contended with Carey & Lea for control of every promising new work. The situation grew even more unstable at the end of the decade when clever newcomers seized upon a loophole in the postal laws and began reprinting massive editions of the latest novels by Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer, and other popular writers. Printed on steam-powered presses in large newspaper format and sold for twelve cents a copy, these “story papers,” sporting such patriotic names as Brother Jonathan and The New World, evaded the ban on books in the mailbag and went out to tens of thousands of readers at cheap, subsidized rates. “We are friends of the people,” boasted the New World, “and our motto is ‘The greatest good to the greatest number.’ ” Mainstream publishers were forced to respond with price cuts of their own in a destructive competition that ended only after the postmaster general, fed up with the burden of delivering the huge quantities of story papers at so little return, barred the books in disguise from the mail.61 A new model of publishing took hold in the decades after 1820, in response to growing demand for contemporary books attuned to the needs and interests of the age. Mathew Carey had built his Philadelphia firm on the solid rock of reprints and the Bible, with the scriptures, kept in standing type and reissued as needed, ensuring steady returns over the years. His son and successor took a riskier course and trusted to the shifting sands of popularity. Under his leadership, the publishing house greatly expanded its line of new titles, especially of novels and romances, which by the middle of the 1830s made up more than I N T RO D U C T I O N

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half of the annual list. Prominent in the catalog were the blockbusters by Scott and fellow novelists Irving, Cooper, and Sedgwick, among others. Carey & Lea paid handsomely for copyrights, kept Cooper and Irving in print by stereotyping their books and bringing out a continuing stream of editions aimed at different markets, and sponsored the popular literary annual, the Atlantic Souvenir, with its authors prominently featured. The aging Mathew Carey, looking over his son’s shoulder, was nonplused by so much innovation. “There is nothing on earth worse than an old stock of books,” Henry C. Carey patiently explained. “Five-sixths of the whole sales are of books manufactured within the year,” including medical textbooks for students at the University of Pennsylvania, a secure source of revenue to offset potential losses on new and untested titles. The Philadelphia firm’s principal rival, Harper & Brothers in New York, pursued similar practices, with as keen a competitive edge. The fierce contest between the two houses briefly brought down prices in the 1830s. Harpers was quick to adopt new technology, installing power presses as soon as they became practicable and eventually integrating all aspects of bookmaking into the fourstory headquarters it opened in 1855. From this flagship on Franklin Square in the traditional publishing district of New York the Harper imprint went west on the expanding railroad network, its latest publications advertised in the new monthly magazine the firm established to promote its authors and brand. By such ingenious means the book trade modernized its practices. Its products not only were new but also looked new, packaged in attractive cloth bindings designed to catch a shopper’s eye in store displays.62 Many of these titles stood on the shelves of libraries, colleges, and schools, though not for long. Instead of preserving and perpetuating timeless wisdom, these institutions caught the impetus for change and redefined their missions to emphasize the rapid circulation of new ideas and information. At one time, Webster’s “blue-back speller” and other primers would serve a family for years, handed from one child to the next in the course of their schooling until it literally crumbled from overuse. But such customary arrangements fell afoul of the gathering movement for school reform in New England and New York, which aimed to impose greater regularity on public education. “Should we think that man sane who would confine his reading to one book for years in succession,” asked one reformer, “and then offer for a reason ‘that the old one was not worn out?’ ” Massachusetts authorized its school districts in 1826 not only to prescribe texts for their pupils but also to order them directly from the booksellers, putting the charge on each parent’s annual tax bill and exempting those too poor to pay. That policy, coupled with support for little libraries in district schools and with new ideas about pedagogy originated by the Swiss thinker Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, inspired the development of a new genera42

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tion of schoolbooks, which publishers competed energetically to supply to entire towns and states. So many new texts were introduced so frequently that parents raised a familiar complaint: all the changes were calculated to improve the profits of publishers, rather than the education of children. College textbooks aroused fewer objections, in part because many were effectively subsidized by the institutions where they were put to use.63 Most of the social libraries that were started in the early republic aimed to bring “useful knowledge” to their members, chiefly in the form of substantial works of nonfiction—histories, biographies, geographies, travels, practical science. In fulfillment of this pledge they bought one after another of the “interesting, instructive, and moral books” the Harper brothers kept adding to the Family Library, until the publishers miscalculated and saturated the market. For a library to succeed, it had to be a contemporary collection, offering the “useful, popular works of the day,” without which few people were willing to pay the borrowing fees essential to its existence. The books in demand were kept in motion by short-term loans; like a daily newspaper, they got to readers promptly, passed through their hands quickly, and soon enough were retired from active use. An up-to-date collection could not avoid novels, and so long as they were thought morally improving and restricted to a modest number, the social libraries gave in to popular demand and furnished them. But the popular enthusiasm for fiction overwhelmed the custodians of culture. Few were willing to follow the example of the Concord (Massachusetts) Social Library, which devoted half of its acquisitions to current novels. If potential borrowers were dissatisfied with the meager supply of entertainment, let them patronize circulating libraries instead. And so they did in the cities and large towns where such commercial enterprises thrived as dispensaries of fiction and other popular books. In this competitive climate, it proved difficult, if not impossible, for many nonprofit institutions to maintain their original purpose and survive. Even the Charleston Library Society, with its preference for “serious & erudite subjects,” had to accommodate members’ desire for “light & trivial reading.” Witness, too, the transformation of libraries started by moralistic businessmen to improve the character of their apprentices, mechanics, and clerks. In order to attract readers, they had to keep adding current titles and especially novels to their holdings, until the collections were indistinguishable from circulating libraries.64 The new vigor and buoyancy in publishing stirred expansive visions of a nation remade by print (fig. I.6). Supreme Court justice Joseph Story discerned “an age of reading” unfolding in the mid-1820s, marked by “the general diffusion of knowledge.” Others hailed the arrival of “a reading generation.” The faith in reading took on an almost utopian fervor, as reformers urged their fellow I N T RO D U C T I O N

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citizens to cast aside custom on the farm, in the shop, at home and school and to follow the advice of experts in print. Forget the hard-earned wisdom passed on orally from father to son and mother to daughter in the transmission of traditional ways. The progressive, wide-awake American did everything “by the book” from raising crops and livestock to bringing up children. Farmer’s almanacs and agricultural periodicals labored tirelessly to overcome objections to “book farming.” In an instructive dialogue printed by the Cultivator, a leading voice for agricultural reform based in Albany, New York, “a hereditary farmer of the old school” and his son, just back from classes in “scientific farming,” argue the case between tradition and change. The old man, proud of his skill in growing corn and hogs as his father and grandfather had done before him, dismisses the notion of learning “my trade anew from books, written by a parcel of lazy fellows, who never hoed a hill of corn in their lives.” The youth demurs with respect. If the father is a good farmer, thanks to his “industry and attention to business,” the son will do even better by applying the latest knowledge to obtain greater yields with less effort. “I shall feel additional pride in meriting the appellation of a book farmer.” Who could ignore such sound advice? Only a man so addicted to spending his evenings in the tavern, “smoking segars, telling stories, and beating the flip-iron,” that he has no time to read the newspapers or to instruct his children, “listening while they read some useful book or improving their minds by reading themselves.” In like manner were women upbraided for frittering away time on useless social calls, instead of staying at home and studying the science of housekeeping. The ideal marriage was a union of readers, joined by shared love of books. Newlyweds should spend an hour a day together in connubial reading, William Alcott advised “the young husband.” At a rate of ten pages an hour, with time off for the Sabbath, he estimated they could complete ten to twelve volumes a year. But that pace might be too fast. It allowed “little, if any, time for conversations, explanation, illustration, or review.” Still, even five pages an hour would be sufficient to get through five good-sized volumes a year and fifty every decade. So absorbed in their books, the couple and their children withdrew from the wider society into the sanctuary of the home. In the blueprint of reformers, reading had a critical role in the privatization of the Victorian family.65 The highest mission of print was to express the unique character of American democracy. So insisted a new generation of artists and writers reviving calls for a national literature distinct from the writings of Britain and Europe. Unlike the earlier movement at the start of the new nation, this literary campaign drew substance from the coming of age of American authorship. In 1820 seven out of every ten titles from presses in the United States were originally written and published abroad, but in the 1830s and early 1840s Americans gained a majority 44

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FIGURE I.6. Like many an author in eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Lemuel Shattuck financed the publication of his History of Concord, Massachusetts (Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Co.; and Concord: John Stacy, 1835) by issuing a prospectus in May 1832 and soliciting subscriptions. Shattuck promised an octavo volume with three hundred to four hundred pages, printed “on a good fair type,” to cost $1.50 bound in boards, $1.75 in sheepleather. Insisting that “few places have so many interesting incidents associated with their history as Concord,” he appealed to local pride and attracted some 220 advance orders from 160 individuals, nearly all local residents. The local elite strongly backed the publication, with ministers heading the list, followed by the leading officeholders and businessmen. The biggest subscriber was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who took ten copies of the proposed book, which appeared just in time to mark Concord’s bicentennial as a town. As it happened, Emerson would consult Shattuck’s manuscript in preparing his own Historical Discourse for the official celebration of the anniversary. Courtesy Concord Free Public Library.

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share (55–60 percent) of book production. Nationalists could celebrate at last that most books read in America were made in America from start to finish. But did they express an authentic voice? “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,” Ralph Waldo Emerson regretted in his famous address on “The American Scholar” in August 1837. That speech was part of a rising chorus sounding from Boston to Richmond on behalf of “the genius of this young America.” “We have no national literature. We depend almost wholly on Europe, and particularly England, to write and think for us,” agreed the brash young editor John L. O’Sullivan in the opening issue of the United States Magazine, and Democratic Review (October 1837), one of a series of new monthlies providing fresh outlets for such emerging writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. A protégé of Martin Van Buren and ardent backer of New York’s radical “locofocos,” O’Sullivan was adamant that “the vital principle of an American national literature must be democracy.” Literary nationalism was capacious, embracing contributions from every region. Ironically, such patriotic rhetoric was hardly indigenous; it traced its sources to Britain and the continent, to the romantic writings of Goethe, Carlyle, and a host of other new thinkers whom cosmopolitan Americans were just discovering. The mid-nineteenth-century champions of a national literature were as dependent on Old World inspiration as their eighteenth-century forebears had been on Enlightenment models.66 The language of literary nationalism was easily exploited for self-serving ends. Months before Emerson and O’Sullivan issued their manifestoes, James Gordon Bennett claimed the laurels for his New York Herald, whose bold reports on high society were thrilling and appalling readers, especially in the social elite. “We never can be an independent, a happy, an original people,” the Scottish-born editor maintained, “unless we rely on our resources either for fashion, gaiety, politics, potatoes, flour, or manufactures.” To this end the paper’s gossipy stories of balls and soirees presented a vivid picture of American life, with “a variety, a piquancy, an originality that will entirely outstrip the worn out races of Europe, who have been degenerating for the last twenty generations.” The Herald hardly helped the case for America’s literary standing. With its coarse language, its “miserable whity-brown paper, its dingy, uncomfortable print,” its “jumble” of items in “one hopeless mass,” and, most of all, its despicable invasion of privacy and assault on personal character, all for the sake of “money, money, money,” the Herald was singled out for unsparing dissection in a much-publicized essay on “The Newspaper Literature of America” in the October 1842 issue of England’s Foreign Quarterly Review. London had its counterparts to Bennett’s disreputable rag, the journal acknowledged, but they were peripheral—“part of the social dregs and moral filth which will de46

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posit somewhere in so large a city.” By contrast, Bennett’s “broadsheet of lies and filth” swelled beyond the gutter to enter respectable homes, win the patronage of a president ( John Tyler, having broken with the Whigs, was courting Bennett’s support), and occupy a central place in American journalism. The Herald thereby made plain the declension of the American mind and character since independence. “The country which can boast of a greater expenditure of Paper and of Printing than any other in the world, is the country which can NOT boast of even an approach to a National Literature. All that is matter of trade in the literary art lives on the fat of the land in America. Every thing intellectual starves as it can.” As a cheap publication appealing to the broad middle and working classes of the city, the Herald was perhaps the first expression of popular culture in print to represent the United States to the world at large, for good and ill. Obscured by the hostile stereotype projected onto American letters by the Foreign Quarterly Review were the many serious scholars, male and female, college-trained and self-taught, laboring conscientiously to fashion a learned culture worthy of international respect.67 The expansive material circumstances of print culture posed a fundamental challenge to the decentralized arrangements that had long governed the extensive republic. By the early 1830s, the elements were coming into place to make possible, for the first time in American history, the efficient production and distribution of printed goods—notably, pamphlets and periodicals—in massive quantities throughout the nation. But that development, once eagerly anticipated by such national-minded statesmen as James Madison and John C. Calhoun, now loomed as a powerful threat to those who had prospered under a loose communications regime. Three initiatives, in particular, precipitated intense conflict both in Washington and in numerous local communities. First came a proposal in the Twenty-first Congress, on the eve of the presidential election of 1832, to eliminate all charges on the circulation of newspapers through the mail. Intended as a boon to ordinary citizens whose votes were up for grabs, the measure aroused opposition from country editors, who feared an invasion of their turf by the metropolitan press. Even more ominous was the campaign launched by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1835 to flood the South with pamphlets denouncing the sin of slavery and urging immediate abolition. Produced on steam presses with inexpensive, machine-made paper and distributed through the mails, the massive effort was patterned on earlier projects by the national benevolent societies to furnish a “general supply” of Bibles and tracts to every person in the country. Abolitionism proved far more controversial than religious philanthropy. Angry crowds in the North destroyed abolitionist presses, while southerners seized and burned the unwelcome mail in a crescendo of protests that were stilled only after federal postmasters refused I N T RO D U C T I O N

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to deliver antislavery materials. Finally, from 1837 to 1842 Congress wrestled with petitions calling on the United States to grant copyright protection to foreign authors. That step, too, jeopardized the varied institutions and interests that had grown up in the wake of the 1790 Copyright Act. Were cheap reprints of foreign works barred by law, opponents feared, competition would dry up, prices of new titles rise, and the book trade would fall into the hands of a few major publishers in reversion to the Old World model of monopoly.68 At stake in all these conflicts was local control over communications in the extensive republic. From its start in the early eighteenth century, the press had served as a local portal onto the wider world, mediating and shaping views of national and international affairs through the accounts from abroad it chose to reprint. The major task for an editor was to select from the many papers he received a weekly picture of life in other places. Events close at hand seldom made it into the columns; in one-newspaper towns, where a small clique of politicians or merchants might be the real power behind the printer’s bench, dissent was often denied a forum and obliged to seek a hearing elsewhere. But with faster communications and accelerating competition for news, it became increasingly difficult to police the boundaries of knowledge and exclude unwelcome information. In 1827 the editor of the Orange County Patriot in Goshen, New York, worried about the encroachment of city newspapers into his territory. How was he to survive against the weekly and semiweekly editions of New York City newspapers that were being offered to country subscribers at lower prices than he could ever afford to charge? “If this system is to continue and increase, as it has done of late years,” he warned, “we shall by and by have very few country papers published, and the poorer class of our population will be doomed to remain in ignorance, like the same class in the monarchies of the old world.” Pressures were also mounting from the political parties, which were tightening control over their local organs in the intensifying struggle for power between Democrats and Whigs.69 In this setting, country editors took alarm at the Whig plan to allow all newspapers to travel through the mails for free. The change, it was argued, would give rural readers direct, inexpensive access to the same urban sources on which country editors relied and would thereby advance the democratization of knowledge. “The idea that news should not come to the people from abroad or if it does, that it should be first fashioned, fitted, and pruned by a village editor, before it would be safe to see it, is a caprice so bordering on the ridiculous that I can hardly treat it seriously,” scoffed Maine senator John Holmes. But rural editors, backed by Jacksonian politicians, clung to the local advantage conferred by differential postage rates—in effect, a tariff on competing news providers from beyond the vicinity. Without such protection, they feared, country folk 48

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would give in to their “prevailing curiosity” and fall under the sway of big cities, “whose political atmosphere is not always the most congenial to a spirit of independence.” No problem of curiosity got in the way of southerners intent on keeping abolitionist pamphlets out of the mail and away from the enslaved. Beyond taking crowd actions and pressuring postmasters, they demanded a federal law to criminalize the sending of antislavery publications through the mail and called for state prosecution of abolitionists in Massachusetts and New York. The Jackson administration was happy to comply, but Congress declined to censor the mail or abridge liberty of the press. Southern localists would have to rely on outsiders’ deference to their feelings and on extralegal methods to stave off the communications revolution embodied in the American Anti-Slavery Society’s pamphlet campaign.70 The prospect of American recognition of international copyright prompted the first full-scale defense of the “culture of reprinting” that had flourished since 1790. Whig congressmen pushed the measure as a form of justice to foreign authors long denied the opportunity to profit from the American market and as a way of encouraging domestic writers, whose books allegedly suffered an unfair disadvantage in competition with cheap reprints pirated from abroad. International copyright was, paradoxically, a form of literary nationalism, Henry Clay’s protectionist “American system” applied to the world of books. Democrats rejected that innovation in the name of local diversity. Cheap reprints, they argued, brought the light of knowledge into every home. With no restrictions on who could reprint foreign works, publishers sprang up everywhere, issuing whatever titles they wished in a competition for sales that brought down prices and distributed books widely. But let international copyright come to pass, and “monopolizing” English booksellers would employ their immense capital and advanced technology to take over the U.S. market. “English prices and styles of publishing would . . . begin to be fashionable here,” at prices ordinary people could not afford. Soon Americans would cease to be “a reading people.” And the distinctive character of the extensive republic, joining the local to the cosmopolitan in the provision of ideas and information to an informed and inquisitive citizenry, would be lost.71 The legislative threats to localism were kept at bay, owing, in large part, to Democratic opposition, which stymied the nationalizing projects of Whigs as effectively in the realm of print culture as in the areas of banking and tariffs. But what government could not accomplish, businessmen did on their own. In the decades after 1840, the forces of consolidation advanced through the effective deployment of capital and technology—the same instruments of concentrated power said to be the signature techniques of British booksellers. New York City did win out over Boston and Philadelphia and prevail as the publishing capiI N T RO D U C T I O N

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tal of the nation. Both penny and political papers did develop into large-scale commercial enterprises dependent largely on advertising and serving a mass public, with weekly versions of the Herald, the Tribune, and other metropolitan editions traveling all over the countryside. National periodicals were not always a cosmopolitan agent carrying unconventional opinions into parochial communities. Godey’s never said a word about slavery in the decades before Civil War, and Graham’s, which boasted of being “thoroughly American,” eschewed any articles that could cause offense, whether to southern sensitivities on the subject of slavery or to anyone else. Nor was speed necessarily a good thing. In its haste to get the latest news—or, more precisely, unverified rumors—into print, Bennett’s Herald may well have helped to bring on the Panic of 1837. Even so, the nationalizing of print culture did prompt a gradual redefinition of the country press, which took on a new mission to focus on news close to home and to be a voice of “local spirit.”72

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.

.

.

In the retrospect of historians, the early republic swiftly gave way to the antebellum period, but for Americans in 1840, the contest between the gathering forces of nationalism and sectionalism that would rock the decades from 1840 to 1860 and explode in civil war was held in abeyance. Tensions were rising, to be sure, with many local communities, in North as well as South, resisting the diversity and competition that the “communications revolution” ushered in. Americans were paying more attention to domestic affairs than ever before, and contrary to the confident prediction of the Columbian Herald of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1795 that “the more we know” about each other, “the better we shall like one another,” increasing familiarity bred growing conflict. But those divisions were matters for the future. It was through an expansive and decentralized world of print that Americans put their extravagant display of popular democracy on view in the Log Cabin campaign between Van Buren and Harrison, and it was through European and British books and journals from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to Charles Dickens’s American Notes for General Circulation, reprinted by American presses, that they took in foreign criticisms of their boisterous politics and society. Local and cosmopolitan, British-oriented yet nationally aspiring, the extensive republic of print was still flourishing in 1840, even as changes were on the horizon that would shortly bring about its eclipse.73

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Section I

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A Republic in Print: Ideologies and Institutions

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A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

Introduction

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Mary Kelley . . . In the three decades preceding the American Revolution, families who counted themselves members of the British American elite began to offer their daughters an education that went well beyond reading, writing, and ciphering. Welcomed into their families’ library, these young women embarked on the study of belleslettres, or polite letters. The child of a prominent merchant and shipowner in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Polly Warner was one of the most fortunate of these daughters. In 1765 Warner’s parents presented the sixteen-year-old Polly with a 155-volume library, which they had ordered from London. Volume by volume, periodical by periodical, the library replicated the course of study that other members of the provincial gentry were importing from Great Britain. With a twelve-volume edition of Charles Rollin’s Ancient History, a three-volume edition of Lady Mary Wortley’s Montagu’s Letters, a four-volume edition of Joseph Addison’s Works, a three-volume edition of Charles Rollin’s Belles Lettres, three volumes of the Ladies Library, a total of fourteen volumes of the Spectator and the Tatler, Isaac Watts’s Improvement of the Mind, and William Darrell’s A Word to the Ladies, which was appended to his Gentleman Instructed in the Conduct of a Virtuous and Happy Life, Warner was fully equipped to make herself into an accomplished woman.1 Polly Warner’s library illustrates the linkage between the books on its shelves and the eighteenth century’s institutions of sociability. The Gentleman’s and Lady’s Key to Polite Literature, the Beauties of Shakespeare, the Essay on the Genius and Writing of Pope, and the Preceptor were all designed as conversational tools. In presiding at salons and tea tables, which had emerged as counterparts to the male taverns and coffeehouses, women of Warner’s standing were expected to “give Life to civil Conversation,” as the Word from the Gentleman Instructed reminded Warner. Dedicated to inculcating “the first principles of polite learning” as the Preceptor informed readers, the Key, the Beauties, and the Essay were instructional manuals that indexed, defined, condensed, and explained the literature women were supposed to command at tea table and salon. Volumes such as the Gentleman Instructed and the Word to the Ladies, both of which had originally been written for members of the titled nobility, signal a

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diffusion of gentility taking place in British America in the decades before the Revolution.2 For the Warners, the library served at least two purposes. Perhaps most obviously, the material artifact testified to the family’s membership in the provincial gentry. Bound in calf with red and gold trim and stamped with “Miss Warner” on the boards, the volumes lining the shelves of the secretary bookcase distinguished this daughter from the middling and lower sorts. The schooling they offered in conduct and demeanor did considerable service as yet another marker of elite social standing. Volumes in the transatlantic discourse of sociability, they schooled Warner in polite letters, the stock-in-trade for the institutionalized practices of civility in British America.3 Polly Warner’s world of print and the institutions of sociability that enlivened that world continued to play an important role in the establishment of a postrevolutionary republic of letters. Simultaneously, that republic expanded rapidly as those who qualified for citizenship engaged in the production, dissemination, and consumption of print. As Richard Brown tells us in “The Revolution’s Legacy,” “the American republic of letters would not be exclusive,” at least in terms of white men and women. Although members of British America’s elite who called for independence had looked to print as a crucial vehicle in the struggle with Great Britain, they had expected that the newly minted citizenry would continue the practices of deference that had prevailed in colonial America. However, the revolutionary movement and a republican ideology, which called an informed citizenry to play a decisive role in the nation’s civic discourse, pointed the United States in a more egalitarian direction. Polycentric in character, the republic of letters expanded to encompass a wider and more diverse readership. This republic was marked as well by geographic expansion as printers and booksellers moved into the Appalachian periphery north and south and westward into the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys. In contributing to the expansion and dispersion of printing, especially in newspapers, the revolutionary movement and its attendant ideology played an equally important role in fostering the increasing competition and pluralism that marked political culture. The expansion in the republic of letters fostered and was fostered by a striking increase in social aspirations. Families of farmers, village professionals, tradesmen, small merchants, and artisans began to claim genteel status that Polly Warner’s family had seen as their entitlement. In addition to British American “steady sellers,” including the Bible, devotional works, and almanacs, men and women from the lower and middling ranks began to take to the books that had lined Warner’s library. In the same fashion as Warner, they relied on books, periodicals, and newspapers to school them in the dress, manners, and taste 54

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in reading that she had been expected to display. They also looked to print for lessons in architecture and furnishings. Initially, as James Green’s essay on the book trades shows, members of this newly expanded republic of letters relied on British imports. Printers and booksellers on this side of the Atlantic began supplementing British imports with reprints in the late 1780s. Instead of relying on a few “steady sellers” bought at full retail price and shipped across the Atlantic as colonial printers had done, they stocked their shelves with the latest British imprints, which they either imported or reprinted. These entrepreneurs, whom Green labels the nation’s first “publishers,” began with the printing of Bibles, which appeared in a dazzling array of formats and versions. The profits they earned from the Bibles became the basis for a thriving reprint trade in a wide variety of books, which had been imported from England, Scotland, and Ireland. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, “buying American,” or the purchase of a British reprint manufactured in the United State, had begun to be the norm. “Buying American” did not necessarily involve the sale of American writers, however. Required to fend for themselves, most American authors either paid for the printing of their books or gathered subscriptions in advance. In the 1820s the definition of an American book did begin to change. Increasingly, the designation was applied less to British-authored reprints than to books written by an American author on an American theme. Washington Irving’s financially successful Sketch Book led the way. James Fenimore Cooper was second. After The Last of the Mohicans was a hit, he was able to command $5,000 for each of his novels. Catharine Sedgwick entered this pantheon in the late 1820s with historical novels such as Hope Leslie, another tale about Indian and white relations. Still, and from the early 1820s on, Sir Walter Scott was by far the best-selling novelist in the United States. Competition among publishers in the search for profits does not tell the whole tale. Having struggled to replace imports with reprints, publishers understood the risk posed by rivalry and instituted various forms of cooperation and selfregulation, including a series of trade fairs at which publishers sold large quantities of books to each other. Competition proved less a threat to prosperity than the discrepancy between supply and demand. In the economic depression that began with the Embargo of 1808 and continued through the War of 1812, the trade faltered before gluts in books and strings of bankruptcies. Green details the innovative strategies deployed by leading publishers Mathew Carey and Ebenezer Andrews, both of whom survived the crisis. However, an elusive prosperity would be achieved only with the reconfiguration of the book trades that took place in the 1820s. The balance struck between competition and cooperation by Carey and the Harper brothers would drive that reconfiguration. I N T RO D U C T I O N

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At sales held exclusively for the trade as many as 150 publishers consigned from twenty to two hundred titles in quantities ranging from a dozen to several hundred, which were sold rather than exchanged. Trade sales served as an effective means of self-regulation. They also led to the separation of retail and wholesale bookselling from publishing. At the trade sale, large numbers of books were sold to wholesalers, who then offered discounts to retailers, which allowed for the cost of transportation all over the country. By the mid-1830s Carey and Harper & Brothers, who had battled for supremacy over the phenomenally successful novelist Walter Scott, had risen to the top of the trade. Carey and the Harpers distinguished themselves as publishers of American authors with literary ambitions. Carey issued Cooper and Irving; Harpers claimed Longfellow, Bryant, and Sedgwick. Nonetheless, literary publishing was the specialty of only a few firms. Most publications were still the familiar “steady sellers” and reprints. Scott Casper’s case study introduces us to Harpers’ precedent-setting strategy in which titles were packaged in series and published as libraries. Beginning in the 1830s, Harpers issued a host of these libraries, two of which were spectacularly successful. The 187-volume Family Library, which was modeled on a British series, offered readers history, biography, and travel literature. The School District Library, which reached 295 volumes, divided into six series, instructed thousands of the nation’s children. Those readers who presume that New York City achieved ascendancy as the locus for publishing in the early decades of the nineteenth century will learn that Boston and Philadelphia were also primary centers well into the 1840s. While publishers in each of these cities sought a national market, they still functioned most efficiently in the specific geographic regions they had marked off in previous decades. The boundaries of those regions expanded dramatically with the opening of the Erie Canal. The Ohio and the Mississippi along with their tributaries carried books to readers in Cincinnati, Louisville, and Saint Louis. Karen Nipps and Jack Larkin introduce us to the experiences of master printers, whose pursuit of stability and profits was determined by the distinctive settings in which they were located. Focusing on leading Philadelphia printer Lydia Bailey, Karen Nipps weaves a personal tale into a larger narrative about urban printers between 1790 and 1840. When Lydia Bailey’s husband died in 1808, she was left with four children and a printing office that was close to bankruptcy. The widow paid the debts and completed the tasks that her husband had left behind. She then pondered how she might make printing profitable. Facing expanding demand for print and accelerating competition, Bailey decided to separate the roles of publisher and printer and to concentrate on the latter. Instead of relying on a specific genre, such as the textbook, she took on job, contract, and small book printing. A mistress who was fully in control of 56

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her operation, she carefully watched her accounts, supervised her employees, and took advantage of the political and social patronage that came her way. The key to her success was none other than printer turned publisher Mathew Carey, whose business in books earned Bailey tens of thousands of dollars annually. Lydia Bailey was amply rewarded for her shrewd choices and management. Five decades after she had been left virtually penniless, she retired an affluent woman. A village location and a rural clientele led Bailey’s counterparts to pursue a different set of strategies. As Larkin documents, in addition to the job and contract printing on which Bailey relied, rural printers made their living as booksellers and as publishers of newspapers, books, and pamphlets. Despite this diversification, country printing was a risky business. The large majority of those who entered the trade did not come close to achieving Bailey’s prosperity. The number of failures cited by Larkin is striking—in Vermont, North Carolina, and Illinois, more than half of all the rural printing offices established between 1790 and 1840 disappeared within three years. Equally important, many journeyman printers tried but failed to achieve a proprietorship. Those who did succeed operated in a system of exchange in which goods and services were substituted for dollars. And, as the demand for cash by paper suppliers increased, the expansion of postrevolutionary and early antebellum decades ended. In the years after 1840, a steadily declining number of publications from rural printers would enter the national streams of book distribution. Whether urban or rural, journeymen printers, who had prospered in the decades after the Revolution, experienced a dwindling of opportunities for advancement and upward social mobility. William Pretzer explains why. With the introduction of stereotype plates, machine presses, and increasing reliance on semiskilled workers, journeymen printers experienced a radical reorganization of their work, involving a split between compositors and pressmen and a substitution of women and boys for adult males. However, journeymen did realize their own success. Refusing to submit to deteriorating labor conditions, they fashioned a work culture that combined Anglo-American traditions with the revolutionary ideology of republicanism. Representing themselves as proud artisans with a valid stake in the practices in the shop, those journeymen who were able to secure regular employment achieved a codification of craft practices in union regulations and relatively high wages.

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CHAPTER 1

The Revolution’s Legacy for the History of the Book

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Richard D. Brown . . . Those who participated in the Revolution never aimed to make it a crucial episode in the history of the book. Although there were important authors among the leading revolutionaries—John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Rush, Mercy Otis Warren—they were not pursuing literary fame. Their objective was national independence and an enlightened republic of liberty. Printing was, in their view, simply a means to these ends. Yet the world of books and reading was itself transformed by the revolution it helped to set in motion. From the struggle for independence and the creation of the republic sprang unanticipated changes in how Americans produced, disseminated, and employed the printed word. The unintended revolution in print was multifaceted and profound. The ideology of the Revolution not only sanctioned but also directly promoted the dramatic multiplication in the number of printing offices and booksellers in the decades after 1783.1 Whig and republican ideology insisted that only an informed citizenry could properly identify and repel threats to liberty, particularly from government officials wielding the levers of power. In this conviction, Patriot printers mobilized their presses as “watchmen on the towers of liberty” during the resistance to British imperial policies in the 1760s and 1770s and provided a crucial medium of communication between officials and people in the prolonged war for independence. Thanks to their labors, the printed word acquired an unprecedented importance in public affairs. Face-to-face dissemination of ideas and information remained vital, of course, and public oratory was being heard beyond the pulpit, but for Americans, with their decentralized governments and dispersed populations, printing took on enhanced significance. In the new republic, the press was far more than a source of commercial intelligence and a cultural amenity. Ideologically and practically, it had become a key instrument in the conduct of politics and the spread of information by and about government on the federal level and in the states.2 The imperative to achieve an informed citizenry prescribed that government

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actions be publicized in a free press where public policies could be tested by debate and citizens could criticize officials and hold them to account. George Mason asserted in his draft of Virginia’s June 1776 Bill of Rights that “the freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotick governments.”3 Press freedom was critical for the formation of a republic of letters; it assured the necessary forum for realizing the Enlightenment ideal of civil and political society. Contrary to the regulatory regimes of continental Europe, the British government, at home and in its overseas empire, had imposed neither licensing laws nor official censors; freedom of the press meant no prior restraint. To control discussion of matters involving church and state, crown and Parliament relied on laws punishing seditious libel against the authorities. In revolutionary and republican America, even the idea of seditious libel was repeatedly challenged and sharply curtailed. Now, in an expansion of free-press doctrine, legislators asserted that if citizens were to be informed, they needed to know the truth. As early as 1765, John Adams had proclaimed in the press that “the people . . . have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible divine right to that most dreaded, and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.”4 Though stormy controversies erupted over the precise boundaries of press freedom, there was unanimous support in the new republic for the principle that telling the truth about government must never be prosecuted. This new rule undermined orthodoxy in church and state. Advocates of different truths could no longer routinely use the law to suppress their rivals; they had to compete for allegiance. Within relatively broad limits, the British enlightenment and the Revolution bequeathed a free market of ideas to the new nation. In contrast to France, in the United States the republic of letters flourished in the open.5 The ideology of an informed citizenry also had profound social and cultural ramifications. It not only brought government into the open but also expanded participation in the public sphere. In order to safeguard liberty from the rapacious jaws of tyranny, the patriots’ prescription ran, it was necessary that male citizens become readers, attending to history and public affairs in every form of print, from broadsides and newspapers, to pamphlets, periodicals, and books. In this spirit, Americans remade the world of communications for many people but not for all. In colonial America, political print constituted the preserve of the few, although the audience for newspapers and pamphlets—“the general source throughout the nation, / Of every modern conversation,” according to one poetic enthusiast—was steadily widening in the decades after 1740.6 But in the wake of the Revolution, writers and printers sought to increase the audience for their work, courting readers with the means and motives to purchase a newsT H E R EVO LU T I O N ’ S L E GACY

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paper, a magazine, or a book. In practice, the literary marketplace restricted commercial publications to those possessing the literacy, money, and leisure necessary for their use. Until the mid-1830s few books or periodicals aspired to a general audience reaching beyond “the better sort” to the laboring classes and embracing whites and blacks, men and women alike. Even so, membership in the republic of letters expanded significantly, owing both to elite initiatives and to demands for inclusion by those previously left out, especially white women. The world of print touched even the poor and the unlettered, who could gain access to newspapers at local taverns and were the target of campaigns by national benevolent societies from the 1820s on to distribute religious pamphlets and bibles to the people en masse and often for free.7 Although this expansion of communications was neither the intention nor the expectation of the Patriot leadership, the political upheaval of Revolution subverted, without entirely supplanting, the social and cultural hierarchy that had sustained a significant measure of aristocracy and patriarchy in the colonial era. As the unprecedented popularity of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense made plain in 1776, the Revolution opened the way for a wider range of writing genres and for different reading publics.8 Although hierarchy and central authority did not disappear from the world of printing and books or from society at large, ultimately a dynamic and pluralistic marketplace developed, especially during the 1820s and 1830s, and brought forth an expansive republic of letters. Like the nation it served, the American republic of letters was polycentric, encompassing diverse audiences stratified into different ranks and orders. The sources of these changes were practical and concrete as well as abstract and ideological. Closely tied to commerce and politics, printing suffered severely from wartime dislocations of trade and the reorganization of public affairs. Military operations interrupted the flow of books from Britain to America and created shortages of paper and type; the output of American books, never a major element of colonial printing, plummeted. When British troops seized the colonial capitals of Boston and New York, Philadelphia and Charleston, they cut off communications between the press, concentrated in seaboard towns, and rural readers in the countryside. Printers quickly adapted by moving to new locations in the interior, and though the quantity and quality of their production declined, they continued to turn out newspapers and a stream of public documents.9 With peace and independence, all kinds of printing took off. Far more decentralized than ever before, extending into the Appalachian periphery from northern New England to Georgia and then heading westward across the mountains into the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys, printers and booksellers became familiar figures in the countryside. No state or territory was left out of the ex60

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panding marketplace, though the North gained far more than the South. As white Americans—a people more generally literate than those of Europe or the United Kingdom—moved west, they brought their distinctive preferences for reading with them. Print cultures in the West broadly reflected their settlers’ region of origin.10 The extension of the market for print and the expansion of the republic of letters displayed self-intensifying features. First, economic motives lured settlers into what had been the colonial hinterland; settlements brought commercial development and political organization, and both demanded printing. Advertising, mercantile and government job printing orders, and then partisan newspapers provided the economic base for the dozens of one- and twopress printing offices spread across the landscape from state capitals to county seats. Lawyers, physicians, and clergymen, for whom books were occupational and cultural necessities, were ubiquitous; and they and their families were disproportionately both customers of and contributors to the press. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 granted the new nation sovereignty over Britain’s vast territories in the West. The Constitution of 1787 established a federal republic, with power divided between the central government and the states. Together, these legal arrangements laid the foundation for a polycentric rather than a centralized world of print. Not only Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, but also Richmond and Charleston and a host of lesser towns—Worcester and Pittsfield, Hartford and Litchfield, Hudson and Trenton, Lancaster and Baltimore, along with a dozen others—were publishing centers by the time that Thomas Jefferson entered the White House. In contrast to Britain and France, there would be no single capital and nucleus for American print culture. The consequences were profound: the new republic could never sustain a single national, unified, elite culture. The Revolution magnified the political importance of printing and significantly altered its purposes. In the court-centered capitals of Britain and Europe, printing had originated as a medium for disseminating sacred works, theological texts, treatises of humanist learning, and schoolbooks. From the end of the fifteenth well into the seventeenth century, kings and courtiers strived to control printing and employ it in the service of state power. Initially, the British crown perceived any printing outside its control as a threat to order, but in practice the Stuart monarchs lacked the full capacity to impose their will. The commercial interests of the book trade frequently collided with the demands of royal censors, while a growing audience for political “intelligence” provided a burgeoning market for printed news-books, broadsides, proclamations, sermons, libels, and pamphlets. The English Civil War witnessed the collapse of official censorship and the advance of a “news revolution” that was only temporarily set back first by Cromwell’s Protectorate and then by the Restoration.11 Still, even T H E R EVO LU T I O N ’ S L E GACY

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after the last royal licensing statute expired in 1695, political discussion operated under constraint. Seditious libel laws, with harsh punishments for violators, gave British authorities a substantial measure of protection from criticism, while additional acts against blasphemy and libel sought to contain the disruptive potential of the unofficial printed page.12 Over the course of the eighteenth century, the court model of politics, already compromised by the opening up of avenues for dissent, gave way to a new civic culture that eased state control over expression, even in once absolutist regimes; and public officials came to appreciate the usefulness of a more open literary marketplace for achieving and maintaining order. In France, authorities tolerated a flourishing “gray” market of quasi-legitimate books, making only sporadic efforts to suppress the extensive distribution of “forbidden” books.13 Across the channel, radical Whigs from John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in the 1720s to the Wilkes movement of the 1760s and the British republicans’ protests in the 1780s and 1790s contended for a free press as the best mechanism for maintaining order. As the Continental Congress pointed out in 1774, a free press allowed the “ready communication of thoughts between subjects,” promoting unity in the state and discipline for public officials whose misbehavior could be “shamed or intimidated” in newspapers.14 According to republicans, governments derived legitimacy only from the support of a citizenry informed by a free press. British Tories, of course, were not entirely persuaded, and they controlled the government most of the time. They responded to criticism ever more harshly, especially during the 1790s, when they set out to stem the spread of French radicalism to Britain with stringent sedition laws.15 Even so, printing and newspapers became securely established as legitimate instruments of politics during the eighteenth century. The only questions involved the nature of their political role, the extent of their freedom, and the legitimate boundaries of the republic of letters. The American Revolution bequeathed a mixed legacy of press freedom to the new republic. Patriots rhetorically embraced radical Whig hostility to state monopoly over communications, while they compiled a tangled, uneven record of repression directed at unpopular printers. The new state constitutions and bills of rights, adopted in the aftermath of independence, proudly proclaimed liberty of the press. But as Americans threw off the yoke of monarchy in 1775 and 1776, they also destroyed the presses of their loyalist adversaries. Revolutionaries defined opposition to the independence movement as treason and, in the wartime crisis, resorted to vigilante law to silence it. Patriot crowds were not hindering free speech, the defenders of their extralegal actions claimed; they were halting the abuse of that liberty. This reasoning recalled arguments once used against John Wilkes and his followers in London, but similarities to the 62

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suppression of the loyalist press were misleading in one crucial respect. Wilkes denounced individual officeholders, not the monarchy they served; if his rhetoric was extreme, his radicalism was muted by his acceptance of Britain’s legitimacy as a nation and his readiness to reform its government from within. By contrast, American loyalists denied all legitimacy to the nation whose independence patriots declared in 1776, refused their allegiance, and campaigned to restore the old regime. Unlike king and Parliament of the Wilkes era and after, the revolutionary governments tolerated criticisms of both their measures and their men. During the long, hard struggle for independence, citizens freely criticized the Continental Congress and the state governments without hesitation. But they would not suffer criticism of the cause of independence. Once peace was restored, republican officials no longer tolerated crowd violence to stop abuse of the press. Regular law and judicial processes held sway. Because the states had routinely adopted the English common law to guide their courts, the old principles of seditious libel still controlled American jurisprudence in cases involving free speech. To contemporary statesmen trained on Blackstone, no contradiction existed between the assertion of Virginia’s 1776 Bill of Rights that “the freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments” and that same state’s 1792 “Act against Divulgers of False News.”16 Pennsylvania alone departed substantially from the common law; its 1790 constitution granted juries the power to decide the law as well as the fact in libel cases and allowed truth as a legitimate defense—the only state to do so.17 In this context the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which took effect in late 1791, offered no broad guarantee of free speech. It provided only limited protection of liberty: a prohibition against congressional restraint on “freedom of speech, or of the press.”18 The states remained free to curb the press as their citizens and representatives saw fit. It would take a generation before Pennsylvania’s liberal regime became the norm. Ironically, the notorious Sedition Act of 1798, enacted by Federalists outraged at Republican attacks on the administration of John Adams, adopted Pennsylvania’s latitudinarian approach to the press. Its standard of libel allowed truth as a defense and referred questions of law as well as fact to the jury. Because the statute applied only to speech and publications deemed “false, scandalous and malicious,” Federalists believed they were not limiting press freedom but only controlling its abuse.19 Jefferson and Madison denounced the law in the famous Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions they secretly drafted, but not for reasons commonly assumed. Far from upholding freedom of the press, the resolutions argued on “strict constructionist” grounds that the Sedition Act usurped a legislative power properly belonging to the states—a power that T H E R EVO LU T I O N ’ S L E GACY

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Virginia and Kentucky exercised more restrictively than did the federal lawmakers they condemned. The issue became moot after 1800, when the triumphant Jeffersonian Republicans let the law expire.20 In actual practice, neither the Sedition Act nor the several state-initiated common-law prosecutions for seditious libel during the ensuing decade were as benign as their apologists claimed. Juries disappointed the hopes of libertarians and were readily persuaded to convict proponents of unpopular views. In contrast to the colonial era, prosecutors in the new republic brought cases before juries constituted by the same popular majorities that had put them in office. In New Hampshire, for example, where the legislature voted 137 to 0 to condemn the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, any jury drawn from the body of freeholders was an unlikely guardian of minority opinions.21 For all the reforms in the definition and prosecution of seditious libel, the punishment of dissent as a crime against the state remained appealing to rulers operating under the sanction of public opinion. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, a new generation of libertarians exploded the very notion of seditious libel.22 Even Jefferson, who came to loathe “the lying and licentious character of our papers,” gave up on the law as a weapon to curb abuses of the press. “The censorship of public opinion,” he concluded, was safer and more reliable.23 After his death, when Jacksonians and Whigs vilified each other’s characters in the partisan press of the 1830s, they did not systematically prosecute their opponents’ printers. Instead, a new wave of actions, both official and extralegal, revived the revolutionary tradition of checking the “abuses” of press freedom. Together, public officials and popular vigilantes took steps to suppress antislavery discussion, banning abolitionist publications from the mails and, through the operation of the “gag” rule imposed in 1836, prohibiting the reading of abolition petitions in the U.S. Congress. Encouraged by “gentlemen of property and standing,” crowds in northern cities and towns disrupted public meetings of abolitionists and destroyed antislavery presses in an eruption of violence that culminated in 1837 with the murder of printer Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois. Outraged southerners demanded that northern legislatures ban abolitionist publications and meetings, but no government in the North was prepared to go so far. Control over the press would have to be exercised through “the censorship of public opinion.” The visiting Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville called this populist democracy “the tyranny of the majority.”24 Excluded from elitist discourse on civic affairs in colonial America, common people now entered into the reading public. “Steady sellers,” such as the Bible and devotional works, had once predominated in common households, promising help on the path to piety and salvation. In the new republic, good Chris64

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tians were also called on to be active citizens. To perform their social duties properly, they needed to be informed about politics and history. By raising this standard of civic virtue, the Revolution established a new, more secular ethos for reading among common people. Moreover, by attacking the legitimacy of hereditary social ranks, the Revolution justified popular striving for social mobility. Beginning in the late colonial period, a broad movement for social advancement was manifest in the goods Americans bought for their persons and homes. Men whose social aspirations had been blocked in the colonial era now sought to earn prestige and power by acquiring the accoutrements of gentility in their dwellings, furnishings, and dress and by displaying the proper appearance, manners, and reading tastes.25 Thomas Paine’s Common Sense played a surprising and paradoxical part in the expansion of the reading public (fig. 1.1). Before the appearance of his incendiary thirty-three-page pamphlet early in 1776, the whole discussion of colonial rights, whether in newspapers or in pamphlets, had been conducted in the genteel diction of the drawing room and coffeehouse. The most widely read author among all the polemicists had been John Dickinson, the Pennsylvania gentleman-lawyer who wrote in the persona of a “farmer” leading a retired, leisurely life among his books. In 1767–68 Dickinson’s “Farmer’s Letters” appeared serially in the Pennsylvania Chronicle; they were gathered and soon reprinted in eighteen of the twenty-three other English-language newspapers in the colonies, as well as in nine separate pamphlets. Before a year was out, some fifteen thousand copies of Dickinson’s subtle dissection of Parliament’s authority over the colonies had circulated in newspapers and an estimated twenty-seven hundred more as pamphlets.26 Common Sense dwarfed the sales of the “Farmer’s Letters.” In the single year 1776 it went through some twentyseven editions and printings published in fourteen towns and seven colonies, selling as many as seventy-five thousand copies.27 Paine’s incendiary essay was utterly unlike the carefully reasoned discourse of Dickinson and other revolutionary leaders. Common Sense carried blunt messages in blunt language that mobilized a truly popular audience in the northern colonies. Speaking as one commoner to another, he used a familiar vocabulary and homespun illustrations to press his attack on monarchy, the hereditary principle, and imperial rule. In the vernacular language of the public house and the market square, he ridiculed the notion that royalty acquired legitimacy from genealogical descent: William the Conqueror was nothing more than a “French bastard.” Turning to the Bible for authority, he reminded readers steeped in Protestant tradition that the adoption of monarchy was one of the sins of the Jews, of which God, a natural republican, disapproved. Paine also delivered a message of soaring, millennial hope. Americans, he contended, were engaged in T H E R EVO LU T I O N ’ S L E GACY

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FIGURE 1.1. [Thomas Paine], Common Sense, Addressed to the Inhabitants of America (Philadelphia. Printed: Newbury Port, Reprinted by John Mycall, [1776]). American Antiquarian Society.

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a providential mission, fighting not just for themselves but for the liberation of all mankind. America was destined to become the world’s last, best hope—an asylum of liberty on a globe overrun by tyranny.28 Through variegated rhetoric and multiple messages, Common Sense found its way to wider and more diverse audiences than any previous political writer in the British colonies had ever called forth. Paine crystallized a broad, popular sense of citizenship, jealous of privilege and eager to use print to enter into discussions of public affairs. Although they were suspicious of privilege and galvanized by Paine’s earthy rhetoric, in the quest for greater political influence common folk would in time be reading many of the same literary, historical, and political texts that circulated among the elite and emulating genteel rhetoric. As the American Revolution made plain, the audience for political writing burst traditional social boundaries.29 At the start of the republic, this prospect was not widely recognized. As in Britain, gentlemen considered the republic of letters their exclusive domain. Never did they anticipate that Mercy Otis Warren, a home-schooled woman from a prominent family, and Lemuel Haynes, a propertyless black, would contribute to civic discourse. Despite their exclusion from the suffrage, Warren published powerful attacks on royal officials in Massachusetts, argued against ratification of the Constitution, and eventually became a respected “woman of letters” and historian of the American Revolution, while Haynes entered the Congregationalist clergy and preached the gospel to a parish in rural Vermont.30 By Jefferson’s presidency, even conservative Federalists paid tribute to an inclusive “republic of letters [where,] as every man has some influence, it is very natural he should use what he has to recommend his own notions of government.” It was “the right of all men to debate and chat about political principles, and to build castles in the air, or governments on paper . . . and to shed ink in discussing speculative points . . . at their pleasure.”31 In practice, barriers of race, class, and gender kept many from joining in the conversation. The Billerica, Massachusetts, farmer William Manning complained bitterly in 1798 that, with their incessant propaganda, Federalist politicians had so driven up the price of newspapers and depreciated their real value that “their is not one fift part of the common farmers & labourers that are the most interested in the measures of the times, that git any information from them for they cannot be at the expence of the time & money they cost.” As a remedy for too many newspapers “good for nothing ondly when they are fresh from the press,” Manning urged the creation of an affordable monthly magazine in the defense of liberty. In his scheme, the Republican periodical would be supported by a network of voluntary societies of farmers and laborers across the country, each taking a subscription to be shared among the members.32 The idea came to naught, T H E R EVO LU T I O N ’ S L E GACY

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but it attested to popular interest in politics and to the growing demand for reading matter addressed to all ranks of citizens. Although Federalists excoriated Paine’s Age of Reason (1795), a passionate attack on the established orders of Europe issued in the high tide of the French Revolution, they accepted his freedom to publish the pamphlet and the right of anyone to read it. Indeed, conservatives sought to rebut it in dozens of pamphlets of their own. This realization that as “citizens . . . of the republic of letters” Americans were answerable only to “critics and readers,” not the civil authorities, was a central legacy of the Revolution and of the competitive electoral politics it generated.33 Yet a republic of letters in which the radical works of Paine and of Mary Wollstonecraft, the English champion of women’s rights, circulated freely posed risks to liberty and threatened social stability, in the opinion of many gentlemen. It was imperative to create a correctly informed citizenry, and to this end prominent figures in the governing class set about creating new educational institutions. Pennsylvania and North Carolina paved the way in the new constitutions they adopted in 1776, with provisions favoring the establishment of public schools and universities. Today, a “public” school derives its funding from taxes; in the eighteenth century, it was an institution open to all who could pay.34 At independence, only New Englanders had tax-supported schools, a practice reaching back to the seventeenth century, when the Puritan founders of Massachusetts and Connecticut recognized a need for informed piety, a learned clergy, and an educated magistracy and set out to meet it with town schools and the colleges of Harvard and Yale. Thomas Jefferson was so impressed by the civic advantages of the New England model that he formed his scheme for educational reform upon it. But the Virginian had secular purposes in mind. His Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, submitted by James Madison to the Virginia legislature in 1779, made liberty, not piety, the central concern. Under Jefferson’s proposal, every free boy and girl would receive three years’ free primary education; a multitiered, tuition-based system of higher schools culminating in the College of William and Mary would train a select few to be public servants for the state. Virginia’s reading public would thus include the entire free white population, whose basic knowledge went beyond the three Rs to include the histories of Greece, Rome, and America.35 By providing for one poor but gifted youth to enter the College of William and Mary annually at public expense, the proposal gave explicit sanction to the aspiration of people of all ranks to acquire the credential of gentility. Madison reported that Jefferson’s proposals earned broad approbation. But the legislature declined to enact them, owing to two interconnected reasons: the plan would have required the prosperous to pay taxes for children of commoners to attend school; and it would have interfered with 68

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the autonomy of local governments.36 An informed citizenry had to be created on a voluntary, tax-free basis. This outlook prevailed in the South, and its consequence was to limit education and literacy in the region, compared to other parts of the Union. Even in New England, the region where taxes had long been used to support literacy training, voters preferred rhetorical endorsements to actual expenditures. Everywhere aspirations for an informed citizenry and a republic of letters were given voice by the revolutionary leadership, and schemes for their development through tax-supported institutions were chiefly top-down rather than grass-roots enterprises. America’s first magistrate George Washington encountered the same kind of agreement-in-principle coupled with oppositionin-practice that stymied Jefferson in Virginia. He intended his pet project, a national university, to produce a unified, national leadership cadre. Through common schooling in the classics and shared experience at the highest level of learning, young men from all parts of the union would shed provincial loyalties and embrace the broad public vision required to achieve the national good.37 But, as with the Virginia Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, the plan foundered when its lofty goals ran into entrenched interests. Few in Congress publicly doubted the merits of a specially trained leadership class for guiding national policy, but states’ rights principles and strict constructionism, as well as rival universities and grass-roots anti-elitism proved insurmountable. By 1816, when the last of the great national founders, James Madison, called for a national university, the plan had become a dead letter. Instead, state universities like Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia, opened in 1825, moved into the vanguard of elite education. For such instruction, available at growing numbers of colleges for males and private academies for both sexes, upwardly aspiring Americans had to dig into their own pockets.38 Projects that aimed to promote American culture thrived—but only if they were, like the United States, decentralized. The United States Post Office, which Congress created, reflected the polycentric character of American culture. The postal system had a single head, the postmaster general, located in the nation’s capital; but its officeholders and contractors were widely scattered and interwoven with state and local politics.39 Through communications by the mails and through public subsidies for internal improvements for transportation—roads, canals, and coastal lighthouses—the early Congresses and state legislatures created the infrastructure for an informed citizenry and a republic of letters. With the fierce competition for power between Federalists and Republicans in the frequent elections mandated by state and federal constitutions, a network of politically connected printers took shape across the republic, extendT H E R EVO LU T I O N ’ S L E GACY

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ing to communities of only a few thousand inhabitants. Although these printers mainly reprinted texts from metropolitan centers, they did seek out original material and so made the press widely available to would-be authors.40 Whether they wrote a letter to a newspaper, a short essay, a religious or political tract, a textbook, or a manual, authors faced few obstacles in bringing their ideas into public view. “Many men, many minds,” ran the old proverb. The Revolution sharply elevated the value of ordinary citizens’ ideas, so that they actively patronized the press, both as authors and as readers.41 A fundamental paradox lay at the heart of the Revolution and its legacy for the history of the book: through the act of reading, every individual could cultivate a sense of social superiority. On the one hand, books remained emblems of learning and high rank, as they had been since colonial days; on the other hand, such benevolent organizations as the American Bible and Tract Societies made printed works inexpensive and accessible to most American households—albeit works carefully selected to inculcate piety and morality.42 In the ideology of the Revolution, political and religious liberty was deemed inseparable from literacy. The two most important social classes that had once been outsiders to the republic of letters, women of all ranks and ordinary men, shared much in common as readers. In the North, their literacy rates converged at the end of the eighteenth century. Newspapers, almanacs, and the Bible furnished the most typical reading matter for both sexes, and apart from works intended for lawyers, doctors, and ministers, there is little evidence of a sharp divide between male and female reading. Patriarchal authorities warned girls and women away from the corrupting influence of novels, but the popularity of the genre suggests that all sorts of men and women ignored these admonitions. Other genres, such as history, geography, belles-lettres, and a vast array of religious works, were open to both sexes; and the aspiration to refinement, once confined to the top ranks of colonial society, led respectable women, like men, to become culturally well informed.43 Ultimately, the Revolution’s most powerful legacies were the uncapping of social aspirations and the opening of the republic of letters to diverse voices. Many farmers, tradesmen, and professionals and their families sought marks of social distinction and achievement, in the conviction that gentility was open to them and their children. Much as they might scorn hereditary aristocracy, Americans were putting a genteel face on the new American meritocracy. Without this outpouring of social aspiration, reading and writing would have continued the colonial pattern of division between common white men and women, whose fare was limited to the Bible, devotional works, and almanacs, if they read at all, and a privileged minority of gentlemen and some of their wives 70

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and daughters ranging extensively across politics, history, religion, science, and literature.44 Republicanism undermined this stratification by enfranchising common men broadly. Cherishing new identities as equal citizens rather than subordinate subjects, the lower and middling orders felt freer to emulate the gentry, even if their efforts looked superficial and clumsy in the eyes of their “betters.”45 Rising social aspirations gave impetus to the practice of extensive reading. In the pursuit of ideological, evangelical, and commercial objectives, ambitious men sought out secular books and magazines as markers of respectability, not just as requirements for responsible voting. Women and girls read extensively to become fit wives and mothers to citizens. Many heeded the evangelical call to read the Bible and other religious works for the sake of their souls and the well-being of the nation. Magazines, compendia, and textbooks supplemented newspapers in meeting the demand for a varied array of reading matter. In a society where face-to-face encounters dominated social relations, people whose conversation was limited to local gossip, crops, and the weather were disparaged as backward and inferior by their aspiring neighbors. This was one reason why in 1822 the largely self-educated, Vermont-born, Indianapolis lawyer Calvin Fletcher made sure his Kentucky wife, who had even less schooling than he, read Chesterfield’s Letters before attending a neighborhood quilting party. The preparation proved useful. At the gathering “several ladys . . . who were formaly from Kentucky . . . use[d] a gradeal of vulgarity,” Mrs. Fletcher condescendingly reported. Happily, no one associated her with them. But the victory was short-lived. Mrs. Fletcher was mortified at a more formal occasion because she “made no convercesion and [was] trembling fearing there might be some question asked that would expose my ignernce.” The patina of cosmopolitanism, which extensive reading had long supplied to the gentry, had a broad appeal for upwardly striving common folk.46 A New Jersey printer expressed this cosmopolitan aspiration in 1789 when he began publishing a periodical that aimed to provide the cultural finish of a college education for traders and shopkeepers as well as farmers and mechanics. “Calculated, in an eminent degree, to promote religion; to disseminate useful knowledge; to afford literary pleasure and amusement, and to advance the interests of agriculture,” Shepard Kollock’s Christian’s, Scholar’s, and Farmer’s Magazine would furnish home instruction in the liberal arts so that all citizens “should possess considerable degrees of literature.”47 Similarly, and with spectacular success two decades later, Noah Webster brought out a multivolume series of textbooks, The Elements of Useful Knowledge, (1806–12) that supplied an extensive sampler drawn from higher learning (fig. 1.2). Everyone did not have the discretionary time, the money, or the inclination T H E R EVO LU T I O N ’ S L E GACY

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FIGURE 1.2. A list of events—Shays’s rebellion, Washington’s farewell address, and historical and cultural categories such as treaties, the founding of colleges and universities, of literary societies and the establishments of newspapers—appears as “A chronological table of the most remarkable events, in or respecting America, intended as the outline of American history.” Webster provided information about the United States in a “simplified and methodized” fashion “to encourage the youth in our schools” to learn about their own government and not only those of Rome, Sparta, and Athens. This work was expanded from a one-volume edition—with copyright registered on 21 July 1802—into four volumes. Noah Webster, Elements of Useful Knowledge containing a Historical and Geographical Account of the United States; for the Use of Schools, 3rd ed. (New London: [Printed for O. D. Cooke of Hartford, by] Ebenezer P. Cady, 1807), 207–8. American Antiquarian Society.

to respond to these initiatives. But the prosperous farmers and village professionals, merchants, and tradesmen who patronized the social and circulating libraries that were springing up sponsored this movement and made its ideals the prevailing social standard for Americans.48 In the 1820s and 1830s, when lyceums and popular lectures spread over the northern landscape, a reputation for respectability required of women no less than of men a smattering of the cosmopolitan culture that had once defined the gentleman.49 72

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Such long-term changes were unexpected outcomes of a revolution devoted to the antihierarchical principle that “all men are created equal,” and sparked by a radical pamphlet ridiculing aristocratic pretension in favor of homely virtue. Embracing cultural hierarchy in the name of republican citizenship was hardly the spirit of 1776. But Americans held competing values, as Thomas Jefferson, as fitting an emblem of the revolutionary leadership as one could find, made plain.50 A democrat who insisted that ultimate political power be entrusted to the yeomanry, Jefferson also called for an aristocracy of talent, to be selected on the basis of educational achievement. In his republican vision, cultural hierarchy would rest on proven merit and not, as in the Old World, on hereditary legal privilege. This ideal had staying power. Even as popular, anti-elitist politics surged in the early republic, the refined cultural values of the well born endured in matters of architecture and furnishings, in modes of dress and manners, and in reading. The rude diction of Common Sense had stirred engagement in print

FIGURE 1.3. These letters of advice, first published in 1774, received wide circulation in numerous editions, many produced as elegantly as their texts and others, such as this modest pocket-sized edition of 149 pages, that speak clearly to the broad dissemination of this work. The 4th Earl of Chesterfield (22 September 1694– 24 March 1773) was a British statesman and man of letters, whose son, Philip Stanhope, died in 1768. Lord Chesterfield [Philip Dormer Stanhope], Principles, of Politeness of Knowing the World (Dover, N.H.: Jesse Varney, and Co., 1814). Private collection. T H E R EVO LU T I O N ’ S L E GACY

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culture, but after independence it was Lord Chesterfield’s letters, often published with Mrs. Chapone’s advice on female deportment, that taught manners to the middle class (fig. 1.3).51 Nevertheless, because the Revolution transformed the context in which cultural hierarchy operated, it put the hierarchical principle and its cousins, religious and ideological orthodoxy, on the defensive. Henceforward, advocates of hierarchy or orthodoxy could no longer assume their legitimacy; they would have to justify themselves publicly.52 As a result, the American marketplace for print took on the character of a competitive free-for-all. Authors and publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, from printing centers as distinct as London and Lexington, Kentucky, competed for the dimes and dollars of women and men, youths and adults, who came from all free walks of life. In the marketplace as in society, people competed amid a host of inequalities: not only of birth and wealth but also of location and transportation costs, of labor supplies and markets, of access to capital and political patronage. The rapid turnover among successful printers and publishers and the fluidity and dynamism of their trade are indicators that no hierarchy or orthodoxy could strangle competition for any length of time. Essentially the Revolution’s legacy for the history of the book and printing was to destroy publication “by authority” and thereby create the material, political, and cultural bases for opening the republic of letters to competition as never before.

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CHAPTER 2

The Book Trades in the New Nation PA R T 1

The Rise of Book Publishing

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James N. Green . . . The rise of American publishing was one of the fruits of independence, but paradoxically the trade was built on a foundation of British books. Independence had not changed the basic fact that London was the center of Englishlanguage book culture, and in the years immediately following the Revolution, Americans continued to rely on imports from London, Dublin, and Edinburgh for most of their books. In the late 1780s, however, printers in almost every state began to reprint British books in order to replace imports with what they termed “native manufactures.” Their motivation was both nationalistic and entrepreneurial, and their goals proved difficult to achieve. The postwar economy was a shambles, British booksellers flooded American markets with cheap books, and American reprinters had to struggle to raise capital and establish the transportation and communication links that were essential to success. In the mid1790s most of the printers who had entered this business became booksellers, specializing in marketing and distribution and leaving the production to others. They all sold each others’ publications, and by working cooperatively, they were able to offer all the most popular new British books and reprints of steady sellers for schools, churches, and homes, as well as an increasing number of original American books. After 1800, as imports began to recede, competition among American publishers in the various regions grew more pronounced, resulting in reckless overproduction of popular books. The embargo of 1808 and the War of 1812 curtailed imports but further stressed an already fragile trade. By 1820, most of the entrepreneurs of the 1790s were out of business. The firms that survived this crisis were the most heavily capitalized, such as Carey & Lea in Philadelphia, and brash newcomers, such as Harper and Brothers in New York. In the 1820s these firms took the first steps toward putting the trade on a sounder financial foundation, creating a distribution system that reached the growing markets to the south and west. This ensured the future dominance of eastern urban publishers, though in the 1830s Cincinnati

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emerged as the principal western publishing center. These firms also resumed the mutually beneficial relations between American writers and publishers that had begun to take shape in the 1790s, and, for the first time, publishing new American books became an important part of the business. At the same time, the race between publishers to be the first to reprint the latest works of Byron, Scott, and their compatriots became increasingly frantic. By the late 1830s, the American book trade was still facing many of the same problems it had begun to overcome in the 1790s, but like the country it served, it had emerged from its postcolonial phase full of optimism and self-confidence. This account of American book publishing from 1785 to 1840 shows how the trade developed almost from nothing, before most of the broader cultural transformations that are usually associated with the rise of publishing took place: before the first great flowering of American literature and the emergence of a national mass market of readers, during a period of only modest improvement in the technologies of transportation, communication, and bookmaking. This development was anything but inevitable or uninterrupted, and it involved as many failures as successes, but it deserves to be studied in its own right, not merely as a forerunner of the more dramatic expansion of book publishing that was to come.

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Beginnings: The Reprint Trade The printers and booksellers who specialized in the reprint trade were concerned not only with printing and binding books but also with distributing and marketing them. Because they produced these reprint editions at their own expense, they had to raise the capital to finance the venture, and they risked losing their investment if a book failed to sell, or failed to sell quickly enough at the full retail price, whereas they reaped the profit if it was a success. In America the word “publisher” first came to be applied to the printers and booksellers who engaged in this activity extensively in the 1790s. Some specialized so fully in printing and binding that they either stopped importing books or closed their printing offices or did both, preferring to hire others to do the manufacturing while they concentrated on sales and distribution. The printer had been the central figure in the colonial book trade, but in the early national period the trade quickly came to be dominated by these new publishers.1 The colonial printer usually operated a store stocked with imported books and occasional titles he published and sold at his own risk and expense. He paid the full retail price for imported books plus shipping across the Atlantic and added a markup to cover his costs. Typically, the printer confined himself to a few steady sellers and special orders from gentlemen customers. James Riv76

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ington, the black sheep of a famous London book-selling family, was the first American bookseller to offer imports at London prices and the first to stock all the latest books almost as soon as they were published. In the 1760s his branch stores in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia integrated colonial readers for the first time into the book culture of the metropolis. Robert Bell, a Scot who reached Philadelphia in 1768 after a career as a reprinter of English properties in Ireland, was the first American bookseller to reprint systematically new and popular British books in direct competition with imports. Just before the war he reprinted Blackstone’s Commentaries and similar multivolume works, the most ambitious publishing ventures of the colonial period. Unlike colonial retailers who expected books to sell themselves, Rivington and Bell were innovative and dynamic promoters of their printed wares. Rivington provided a taste of what the American book trade might have been like had the continental colonies remained within the British Empire. Bell offered the alternative—a model of what the book culture of an independent country might be like, and he foreshadowed the transformation of the book trade in the postwar years.2 The Revolution brought the entire book trade to a standstill. The loyalist Rivington was reduced to printing a craven newspaper in New York, and Bell’s reputation as a Patriot was tarnished by a public spat with Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense he had printed. During the war hardly any books were issued, with the notable exception of Robert Aitken’s printing of the Bible. This Bible had been deemed a necessity by Congress and the clergy because the war had cut off the supply from Britain. After the peace in 1783, imports of cheap Bibles from Britain quickly resumed, and Aitken had to cut the price of his Bible to a fraction of what it had been, bringing him to the brink of ruin. Robert Bell, on the other hand, greeted the end of hostilities with a flurry of reprints of entertaining works published in England during the war, such as Henry Mackenzie’s novel The Man of the World in three volumes. Three other booksellers in Philadelphia and New York joined him in publishing Buchan’s Domestic Medicine (540 pages in octavo), and Aitken reprinted a quarto edition of Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric. It looked as if the reprint trade was picking up where it had left off before the war. Such was not the case, however. In 1784 a severe economic depression disrupted the revival, and the death of Robert Bell deprived the book trade of its most ambitious entrepreneur. The war had already caused a large turnover in the trade owing to retirement, financial ruin, and political disgrace. Of 107 printers and booksellers in business in 1775, only 31 remained in 1785, while more than 100 newcomers had filled the gaps in the ranks.3 Newspaper printers who had played an important role in the war enjoyed high prestige, but most of them emerged with no assets except debts payable in inflated paper money. T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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Bell and Aitken, neither of whom had ever been involved with newspapers, were among the very few in the trade with capital to expend on book publishing. With Bell gone and Aitken concentrating on his original craft of bookbinding, publishing dried up; the only books American publishers issued in the late 1780s were small ones in constant demand, such as school textbooks, Psalters, and Testaments. Even the full Bible was too large and risky, and there was not another edition printed in America until 1790. From a purely economic standpoint, this state of affairs seemed unavoidable, especially in a depressed economy. American printers could not afford serious competition either with the British or among themselves. The British had the capital to produce books more efficiently and markets allowing for larger editions and lower unit costs. All the established paths of trade and transport were east-to-west across the Atlantic, not north-to-south among American seaboard towns. Most printers produced strictly for a local market and concentrated on the old colonial staples of newspapers, almanacs, government printing, and pamphlets relating to current events. The only books it made sense for them to print were those written locally and the few small basic books mentioned previously for which local demand was sufficient to absorb an entire edition in a short period of time. For most other books, it was far less risky and more profitable to import a few copies at a time. In defiance of these economic constraints, a number of American writers, flush with hopes for a republican literary culture, published books at their own expense: Hannah Adams, Jeremy Belknap, John Filson, David Ramsay, Jedidiah Morse, Noah Webster, Timothy Dwight, and Joel Barlow, among others. They either paid for the printing outright or gathered subscriptions in advance, in effect supplying the capital and doing much of the marketing themselves. (Today the most famous American book of the decade is The Federalist, but its publication in book form was an afterthought. Its real impact was as a series of newspaper articles, and they were hardly known outside New York. The book version, presumably intended to reach a wider audience, was almost certainly paid for with Federalist Party funds, but it was published by a novice who seems to have done nothing to distribute it.)4 All these writers had hopes of making a profit and perhaps even a living from their books, but most were disappointed, and some—like David Ramsay, who financed the printing and binding of his two histories of the American Revolution—lost heavily on their investments. “Readers are increasing in these states, and I trust the day is not far distant when the sale of two thousand copies of an original work might be counted upon,” Ramsay reflected, “This would make it worth while to write books. All that I have ever done in that way, has not cleared actual expenses.”5 However unsuccessful these books may have been economically, they were 78

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frequently cited as signs of the progress of letters in the newly established republic. American authors, it was said, deserved an independent domestic publishing trade to foster their work. Printers and booksellers seized on this goal but for purposes of their own. They put a higher priority on building American manufactures than on encouraging American writers. In their calculations, an American book was a book printed in America, employing American laborers, preferably on paper from American mills and with American-made type. If the author was American, so much the better, but it was not essential. The maker of the book was the manufacturer, not the author. This strictly materialist view prevailed up to the 1820s and beyond. Yet, publishers of the early republic were not in bookmaking simply for the money. In the classic republican formulation, they saw themselves as virtuous artisans doing well by doing good. As one of them put it, “to cultivate . . . a taste for reading, and by the reflection of proper books to throw far and wide the rays of useful arts and sciences, were at once the work of a true Philanthropist and prudent speculator.”6 In the years after the war, British booksellers scrambled to reopen business with their old American customers. While some raced to clear their shelves and make money by dumping unprofitable books at low prices and easy terms on the volatile market, others took a longer view of the business. In hopes of reestablishing the lucrative transatlantic book trade that had been interrupted by the war, they sent choice selections of new books to carefully chosen agents with detailed instructions on how to cultivate and secure a potentially enormous market. One such bookseller was Charles Elliot of Edinburgh, who sent his most trusted clerk, thirty-three-year-old Thomas Dobson, to Philadelphia in 1784 to open a bookstore with a stock worth almost £2,000, supplemented almost immediately by a shipment of fourteen hundred more books. Lest Philadelphians shun him as the agent of a British firm, Dobson was instructed to pretend he was his own man, an ardent republican drawn to America to seek his fortune. Within a couple of years, Dobson turned that fiction into a reality. On the pretense that business was slow, the clerk sent his employer only token payments for the books he had sold and used the remainder to publish books on his own. By Elliot’s death in 1790, Dobson owed £3,691, a debt that was not paid off until 1805.7 Dobson’s stock as a bookseller was his capital as a publisher. This set a pattern that was to persist well into the 1800s; most publishers of the 1790s got their start by importing books. This stock was the ballast of their business, the basis of their credit and the collateral for the money they borrowed. Thus, they continued to be general wholesale and retail booksellers even as they became publishers on a large scale. The great British bibliographer Graham Pollard defined a publisher as a firm that confines itself to wholesaling its own publications.8 T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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By this definition, there were no publishers in America before 1840, nor for a considerable period thereafter. Dobson and his like usually called themselves booksellers, but even that broad term elides the fact that they often were also printers and bookbinders, and sometimes owners in whole or in part of paper mills or type foundries. When they are called publishers here, it is merely a way of foregrounding one aspect of their complicated businesses. Like Bell, Dobson published reprints of recent popular English books. His inaugural venture was the first American edition of Smith’s Wealth of Nations (three volumes) in 1788. Of course, the very texts from which Dobson’s printers set their type had come from Elliot, who unwittingly provided his clerk with the path to independence. Dobson discerned the profits to be made from publishing his own editions and wholesaling them to other American booksellers. Wealth of Nations was first issued as a quarto in London in 1776, but by 1788 British and Irish reprints were available in octavo, so Dobson reprinted in the smaller and cheaper duodecimo. He also had to convince other American booksellers and merchants to buy from him rather than to import. For this purpose, he could offer lower wholesale prices as well as more reliable supplies. In 1789 Dobson embarked on a publication project several times larger than any yet undertaken in America. Elliot was one of the partners in the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which began to appear in weekly parts in Edinburgh in 1787. Naturally he sent a few copies of each part to Dobson as it came off the press. In 1789 Dobson began to publish his own American edition of the Britannica also in parts, right in step with the original, in the same quarto format for only twenty-five cents for each forty-page part or five dollars a volume. When completed in 1798, it totaled eighteen volumes with more than four hundred engraved plates. A Supplement in three volumes was published by 1803. The very size of the undertaking strained the capacity of the paper industry and monopolized all the engravers in the region for nearly a decade. Publication in parts made it more affordable to readers and also allowed Dobson to finance each part from the sale of the preceding one. He distributed it like a magazine with more than two thousand subscribers and agents to serve them in all the seaboard towns from Boston to Charleston. All this gave Dobson’s edition an advantage, but to make it even more attractive, he hired Jedidiah Morse and others to rewrite all the American entries from the perspective of an independent United States, and in his advertising he constantly stressed that this was a patriotic book both in its contents and in its manufacture.9 The British source of Dobson’s capital remained a secret until recently and consequently his extraordinary success was something of a mystery. Now that his secret is out, other similar cases are coming to light. In Dobson’s letters to 80

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Elliot, there are hints that the bookseller Samuel Campbell of New York was bankrolled by his former master, the Edinburgh publisher John Bell; Campbell’s younger brother Robert, who immigrated to Philadelphia in 1789, possibly had backing from their father or from Bell. The Campbells were not as successful as Dobson, but then they sent more of their profits back to Scotland.10 Another immigrant publisher, William Young of Philadelphia, established his business with the help of family and friends in the Glasgow book trade; within a few years he was one of the main publishers of Webster’s spellers.11 All these men started as booksellers, more specifically as book importers, but instead of investing their profits in more imported books, by the early 1790s they were publishing their own. Isaiah Thomas took another path to publishing, not through book selling but through printing. At the end of the war, Thomas was the youngest of the Patriot printers of the Revolution, and thanks to his move inland to Worcester, one of the least affected by the war. His business was still much like a colonial printer’s, and he was proud of his craft. During the war, he had been forced to print his newspaper on wretched paper with worn and battered type, for which he repeatedly apologized. He was never to endure such deprivation again. In 1784 and 1785 he imported $9,000 worth of new type from Caslon and others on credit extended to him through the Salisburys, the wealthiest merchants in Worcester. This extravagant investment was later termed by his partner Ebenezer Andrews a “type frensy.” The type was Thomas’s real capital. He also had a bookstore, but his rural location kept it small. His intention instead was to use his type to print original books by American authors. Unfortunately, the commissions from booksellers did not materialize, so he resorted to publishing reprints. With little capital besides his type, Thomas opted to print children’s books, the smallest books there were, which he sold to the many peddlers and country storekeepers passing through town, as well as in the regular trade. For several years, he made them his specialty.12 The children’s books Thomas published were only about three inches high, usually bound in paper wrappers, containing from 32 to 104 pages of text liberally adorned with woodcuts. In the wholesale trade, they were known as “toys” and were sold by the dozen or the gross, “assorted” but without titles being specified. The price was determined by the number of pages, ranging from four cents for 32 pages (a half sheet in 32mo) to twenty cents for 104 pages (twoand-a-half sheets in 24mo). They were the first American reprints of the little books published in London by John Newbery and others, and their titles are still famous: Cock Robin, The House That Jack Built, Beauty and the Monster, Mother Goose’s Melody, Goody Two Shoes. Thomas profited handsomely from T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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them, printing 119 editions in the 1780s. With children’s books retailing at eight cents a sheet, twice the rate for regular titles, the sales would have easily paid off most of his $9,000 debt for type.13 By 1789 Thomas felt firm ground under his feet, and he switched from these trifles to the largest and most serious book of all, the Bible. This was also the most problematic book he could have undertaken. Although it was the book most in demand, it was also the book that was easiest to import and available at a low price, thanks to the huge editions produced under the protection of the Bible patent in England and Scotland. Not only every bookseller but also every dry goods merchant kept a large supply. There was even some doubt that Americans would trust a Bible not published “by authority.” Under these circumstances, no printer or bookseller wanted to risk an American Bible on his own. One alternative was to combine forces and seek official protection analogous to the British Bible patent. On 10 January 1789 Hugh Gaine and four other New York printers issued a circular letter calling on all the trade to join together and petition Congress to charter and aid an American Bible printing company. It was “a Matter of sincere Regret to every Well-wisher to American Manufactures,” they wrote, “that now being an independent Nation, we must have Recourse to another Country for that very Book (viz. the Holy Bible) the printing and publishing of which, dignifies every Christian Country where it is manufactured; and even the wisest Legislatures have given Sanction and Encouragement to particular Bodies, to have correct Editions of the same, neatly printed.”14 This was the first proposal for national cooperation in the book trade, but it had precisely the opposite effect. The letter touched off a chain reaction of competing Bible proposals. One printer after another set to work on his own edition, each in a distinctive version or format. The Irish émigré printer Mathew Carey announced an edition of the Douai Catholic Bible in quarto; Gaine himself arranged to import the type for a duodecimo Bible already composed; the booksellers who had cosigned his circular letter advertised folio and quarto Bibles. Isaiah Thomas joined in the fray. He committed to the production of the King James Bibles in folio and quarto, the former illustrated with fifty engraved plates, and then plunged even deeper into the Bible business by following Gaine’s example and ordering from England a duodecimo already composed at the hefty cost of £1,444.15 Where there had been none for many years, now suddenly there were nine Bibles in press. No ambitious figure in the book trade seemingly wanted to be left out of a potentially lucrative market. Yet many of these entrepreneurs hedged their bets by securing advance subscriptions before setting a word in type. That is how Carey sold his entire edition of fewer than five hundred 82

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Catholic Bibles. (He may have printed extra copies, but these were lost to the malice of anti-Catholic binders who, he complained, deliberately bound signatures out of order in many copies, rendering them a complete loss.)16 Trenton’s Isaac Collins issued as many as five thousand Bibles in a small quarto edition, four-fifths of which went to an assured market among the Society of Friends.17 The variety of Bible formats and versions was itself a protective strategy and a way of stimulating demand. Each Bible size had its own market niche: duodecimo for schools and private reading, quarto for reading aloud in families, folio for the pulpit. Thomas chose to print in large quarto so as not to compete too directly with Collins’s small quarto. Thomas’s folio had only a few marginal notes, but the New York folio edition included extensive commentary by the English dissenter John Brown, a feature that appealed to Presbyterians and Methodists. The English patent holders did not publish Bibles with commentary, leaving that to provincial printers, who were not as effective in distributing their wares overseas. Thus, Brown’s Bible was hard to get in America, almost as hard as the Catholic Bible, and so each occupied its own niche in the market. The New York edition of Brown’s Bible was sold in parts by subscription, like a magazine, at twenty-five cents a part. It was specifically targeted at working families, and its list of subscribers included the profession of each buyer. The large number of artisans testified to the effectiveness of that marketing ploy (fig. 2.1).18 Perhaps as a result of these marketing strategies, no one was ruined by this unprecedented wave of Bible ventures. Because the sheer number of American Bibles discouraged British exporters, there was no countervailing flood of cheap Bibles from abroad of the sort that had nearly ruined Robert Aitken a decade before. Judging by how few new editions of the Bible appeared for the rest of the decade, it was many years before they were exhausted, but slow sales were better than no sales. The experiment also proved that replacing imports with domestic reprints could actually work. The Bible trade that emerged suddenly in 1790–91 became the basis for a thriving business of reprinting other types of books that had previously been imported from England, Scotland, and Ireland. With so many participants in the reprint trade, a system of exchange quickly grew up to manage the competition. Each book publisher would reprint one or two standard, steady-selling books and then all would agree to sell each other’s editions rather than import those titles. Rather than buying from each other, they would exchange books without any money changing hands. The basis of exchange was retail value, dollar for dollar, though the usual practice was to trade books of a similar price and format, so that in general forty fifty-cent books could not be exchanged for one twenty-dollar book. Printers thereby could produce the larger editions that they needed for their immediate sales, which in turn lowered the price per copy. A T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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FIGURE 2.1. This allegorical frontispiece to the first Bible printed in New York exemplifies the use of republican ideology to market American books. America (with the feathered headdress) holds the Constitution in her hand and rests her elbow on a plinth bearing the names of thirteen generals and statesmen, while a kneeling woman presents her with a copy of this folio Bible. The figure of Liberty presides over the presentation, which takes place before a classical building with a pediment reading “Sacred to Liberty, Justice, and Peace.” [William] Dunlap, frontispiece to The SelfInterpreting Bible (New York: Printed by Hodge and Campbell, 1792). American Antiquarian Society.

publisher by exchange with many other publishers could transmute an edition of one thousand copies of a given book into twenty-five copies each of forty different books, at the same cost as if he had printed them all himself. Thus, each bookseller would have a complete assortment, and the edition would reach a wider market.19 Mathew Carey did as much as any one man to promote this reprint trade, having followed his own distinctive path from printing to book selling to publishing. He had entered the book trade as the printer of a radical Dublin newspaper, only to be forced into exile under the threat of a prosecution for sedition in 1784. His newspaper had advocated economic nationalism, for Ireland particularly; the protection of native manufactures; internal improvements; and 84

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import replacement. Carey took this agenda to America and applied it to his trade. With the patronage of Franklin and Lafayette, whom he knew from a sojourn in France while evading an earlier sedition charge, and with Robert Bell’s old press and type bought at his estate sale, he became a printer and editor. He first published a newspaper and then two highly successful Federalist magazines, the American Museum and the Columbian Magazine. His first large book-publishing venture was the Catholic Bible of 1790, but that was issued by advance subscriptions under the patronage of Archbishop John Carroll and his clergy. For all these efforts, he still had accumulated no capital to speak of or any prospects of loans from the new banks opening up in Philadelphia. Carey did have one resource—the support of wealthy Federalist patrons, whose letters of reference he used to secure credit from British booksellers.20 With endorsements from Federalists such as Robert Morris, Tory booksellers like James Rivington, and rich Catholic merchants like George Meade, Carey opened accounts in 1792 with three large British book-selling firms (as well as with a couple of old Dublin cronies) and imported thousands of pounds worth of books. He opened a grand bookstore not far from Franklin’s old stand in Market Street, and he also sent consignments to be sold in three Maryland and Virginia towns by the local postmasters, links in the Federalist patronage network that had distributed his magazine. From the beginning, the bookstore was a success. Then in 1794, much like Dobson, he stopped making payments on his British debts. The money he made by selling imported books was by then going into publishing. In withholding payments to British suppliers, Carey was taking a political stand, not stabbing friends in the back. (He paid his Irish debts.) His old hatred of the British coupled with his more recent opposition to the Federalist rapprochement with England combined to make him feel less beholden to his English sources of supply. At the same time, with trade relations with England worsening and credit to American importers being curtailed, Carey realized these sources might well disappear. In 1795 Jay’s Treaty would repair trade relations, but by then Carey had burned his bridges with British booksellers and postponed payment on his debts indefinitely. He now had the capital necessary to enter into publishing as a major force.21 In 1794 and 1795 Carey reprinted two extraordinarily large and expensive books. The first was William Guthrie’s New System of Modern Geography, two quarto volumes with forty-five engraved maps, priced at $12, later raised to $16, even more expensive per volume than Dobson’s Encyclopedia. The second was a four-volume octavo reprint of Oliver Goldsmith’s History of the Earth and Animated Nature, illustrated with fifty-five plates and selling for $8. The steep price for Guthrie reflected Carey’s investment of more than $5,000 in the enT H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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graving of maps, which were later gathered into a separate folio volume as the first American atlas. Carey also incurred substantial costs by recruiting Jedidiah Morse to rewrite completely Guthrie’s articles on the United States. Such “Americanizing” of the content of British books served in the 1790s as import replacement on the textual level, weaning publishers, authors, and readers alike from dependence on the authority of the mother country. Full of enthusiasm for these ventures, Carey gathered more than twelve hundred subscribers in advance for Guthrie, then threw caution to the winds and printed twenty-five hundred copies. He hardly even tried to get subscribers for Goldsmith, hiring just one agent who ran off with the subscription paper.22 Halfway through the printing of Guthrie, Carey decided he could not be simultaneously a printer, a bookseller, and a publisher, so he kept the capital parts of the business and spun off the labor. He let go a dozen journeymen and sold his presses and type; from then on independent contractors did the printing for Carey’s wholesale and retail book business. This shift from printer to publisher signaled his rise in status from artisan to merchant, and now for the first time he gained access to bank credit.23 With the abandonment of printing Carey also gained the freedom to focus on distribution and marketing, the basic concerns of a publisher. Books did not sell themselves. In 1796 Carey’s warehouse was jammed with much of the Guthrie edition and all of Goldsmith, and he had tens of thousands of dollars in payments due. Worse, he had already exhausted the customary channels of distribution—a subscription campaign and wholesale sales to fellow booksellers in Philadelphia as well as in New York and New England. As for marketing these expensive titles, he had done no more than place a few ads in the newspapers, a technique hardly changed since the colonial period. In contrast to London publishers, American booksellers spent little on advertising; typically, they paid for short notices of new books in the press, with perhaps a quotation from a London review or an endorsement by a prominent figure. Carey, in any event, had no gift for sales. The answer to Carey’s dilemma was to recruit a traveling salesman, and the man he found, the Reverend Mason Locke Weems, turned out to be the greatest book marketer in the early republic. Weems, also famous as the author of the Life of Washington and the inventor of the cherry tree myth, was an ordained Anglican minister who had adopted the Methodist itinerant model and purveyed good books, some printed at his expense, as he made his rounds through the valleys of the Potomac and the James.24 His methods, evident in his surviving correspondence with Carey, strongly resemble the salesmanship of that earlier master of the trade, Robert Bell.25 Assigned the daunting task of clearing all those copies of Goldsmith out of Carey’s warehouse, the parson devised an 86

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advertising campaign, promising potential subscribers that “ ‘Worlds on Worlds . . . were to burst upon their senses,’ if they w[oul]d but seize the precious moment to subscribe for this marvellous book.”26 Like Bell, Weems was a spellbinding speaker who could fire the imaginations of his listeners with a desire to read and to spend money on books. He also fired Carey’s imagination with visions of a rich harvest in the Chesapeake. “This country is large, and numerous are its inhabitants. . . . I am verily assured that under proper culture, every dollar that you shall scatter on the field of this experiment will yield you 30, 60, and 100 fold.”27 Weems’s plan was to canvass this region for subscribers (a strategy typically employed before a book was printed) and then return to deliver the books. With a dispersed population and hardly any bookstores, the Chesapeake stood at the outer limit of the Philadelphia trading area, which was determined by the relationship between the cost of shipping produce to market and the price it would bring. Through Weems, Carey advanced into this periphery. In three months Weems enlisted a thousand subscribers, and a delighted Carey expanded their campaign to include Guthrie and twenty-four other titles, which he had obtained from various New England publishers in exchange for surplus copies of Goldsmith. In addition, Weems was to place assortments of less expensive books with storekeepers in town and country on a consignment basis, whereby the storekeeper got a 121⁄2 percent commission on sales and unsold books were returnable. On these terms, Carey shipped altogether almost $20,000 worth of books to Weems.28 The arrangement with Carey transformed Weems from an ordinary itinerant peddler of cheap books into a one-man peripatetic distribution system for the most expensive works published in America. In each town he made the rounds of the taverns, the courts, horse races, and fairs, pitching his books, showing off neatly bound sample copies and signing subscribers. Then he appointed one or more “adjutants,” as he called the local worthies such as judges, generals, and fellow clergymen, who gathered more names in his absence. On his next visit he collected the subscription papers and wrote to Carey instructing him to send the right number of books to that town or to the nearest port. On a third visit he unpacked the boxes, delivered the books, and collected as much money as he could, leaving the adjutant to get the rest, which on a fourth visit he received and forwarded to Carey. The adjutants were in effect the resident booksellers, and they received a free book for every five or six they sold, a cost that had to be added on to Weems’s own commission and the considerable expenses of his travels over deeply rutted roads and unbridged streams.29 Carey called Weems’s methods “forced trade,” as opposed to the regular unforced trade of selling books over the counter to shoppers at normal bookT H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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stores.30 It has sometimes been assumed that this cumbersome chain of command was necessary because Weems was creating a book distribution network where none had existed before.31 It would be more precise to say that Weems was creating a second book distribution network in parallel—or rather in perpendicular—with the one that already existed. Books were available from many general merchants in the Chesapeake long before Weems arrived as Carey’s agent, and planters were well accustomed to ordering books from their English trading partners.32 These gentlemen, located in the port towns and county seats of the region, could afford Carey’s expensive books. The challenge for Weems was to shift their trade from Britain towards Philadelphia. Forced trade was expensive as well as cumbersome. Competition from imports placed a ceiling on the retail prices of American books. Guthrie and Goldsmith had to be priced at no more than twice the cost of production, leaving a quarter for Carey and a quarter to be divided by Weems and his adjutants. Thanks to his genius for sales, Weems disposed of Carey’s entire surplus stock. Unfortunately, his expenses ate up not only his share but Carey’s as well, leaving Weems hopelessly in debt to his employer. Making matters worse were those twenty-four titles that Carey had obtained on exchange from New England and with astonishing insensitivity expected Weems to sell in the South: Hutchinson’s History of Massachusetts, Paine’s Age of Reason, Edwards on the religious affections, and the Virginia dissenter St. George Tucker on the evils of slavery— books that Weems told Carey were “as unsaleable in this State as Fiddles at a Conventicle.” The final blow was the utter failure of the consignment stores; after a year most of the books were returned unsold but shopworn. Further shaken and stained by a second voyage, they were unsalable.33 Although the whole enterprise proved a financial disaster, its long-term effects were profound. Many of Weems’s adjutants in the port towns eventually began dealing directly with Carey and became regular retail booksellers. By the turn of the century most of the Philadelphia publishers had branch stores or agents in the Chesapeake—five in Richmond alone—while the New York publishers had bypassed the inland trade routes and set up branches in Charleston and Savannah. Weems succeeded in initiating a gradual reorientation of the southern book trade, though in a way that rendered his own kind of forced trade obsolete. He also helped perpetuate the region’s old colonial dependence on outsiders for print, with books imported from northern cities to some extent supplanting books imported directly from London. While Carey and other Philadelphia publishers were securing their dominance of the southern and western book trade, Boston continued to control the trade in what Philadelphians called “the East.” Isaiah Thomas was the chief publisher in New England, and the foundation of his reprint trade was the 88

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Bible. Though he retained his printing office in Worcester, he established a branch office in Boston in order to improve access to that urban market and to the port from which goods were distributed by the coastal trade to the entire eastern seaboard. This office began in 1788 as a partnership with a former apprentice, Ebenezer Turrell Andrews, and it was formally known as Thomas and Andrews. Thomas supplied the press, type, book stock, and capital needed to get the business going, and Andrews oversaw production, sales, and shipping, with profits split evenly between them.34 (This arrangement was modeled on the contracts Benjamin Franklin had made with David Hall and his other partners. Thomas must have seen those documents when he paid a visit to Franklin in Philadelphia in 1788 shortly before he made his contract with Andrews.) Andrews enjoyed a remarkably free rein, and almost as soon as the Boston office was established, books were published over the imprint of Thomas and Andrews that were actually initiated by Andrews independently. When viewed as a publisher in his own right, Andrews appears to be as important as Dobson, Thomas, or Carey. While Andrews never published anything as monumental as Thomas’s quarto and folio Bibles, in every year from 1790 until 1802, when Thomas retired, the Boston firm published more books than the Worcester parent. In the middle 1790s, when both firms were at their peak, Andrews published two to three times as many books annually as did his financial backer. At some point around 1800 the net worth of the Boston firm surpassed the parent’s, even after deducting half the assets of the Boston firm that belonged to Thomas.35 In another way, Andrews stands apart not only from Thomas but from all the other publishers of the day. Notwithstanding their frequent appeals to patriotism, the other publishers confined themselves as much as possible to reprinting popular British books. The few American books appearing in the 1790s were issued chiefly at the expense of their authors, by subscription, or at the hand of Ebenezer Andrews. He was the only publisher who regularly brought forth American writers at his own expense and risk. He set the pattern in 1789, his first full year of business, by publishing the first American novel, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, and the first Massachusetts edition of Webster’s speller. He published novels and poems by Enos Hitchcock, Mercy Otis Warren, and Sarah Wentworth Morton; most of Morse’s schoolbooks; and most of Jeremy Belknap’s works. In every single year of his career, from 1789 to his retirement in 1821, Andrews published more American writers than foreign ones, a record no one else in the book trade could even approach. Thomas’s wider geographic market area covered all of New England, just as Philadelphia’s extended into the Chesapeake and west to the Allegheny Mountains. He tapped that market not by the use of traveling salesmen but by means T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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of bookstores tied to him by partnership agreements, modeled on the one he made with Andrews. His partners were usually former employees in the Worcester printing office, whom he established in business in various distant places. Thomas’s partners and affiliates (and those of his son Isaiah Jr.) created a network encompassing almost every major town in northern New England—in Worcester, Springfield, Newburyport, and Brookfield, Massachusetts; Walpole, New Hampshire; Windsor and Rutland, Vermont; and Portland, Maine. In addition, Andrews’s own partners in Albany, Troy, and Baltimore made an end run around his competitors in New York and Philadelphia.36 Taken together, this was by far the largest book enterprise in the nation and was probably larger than most in Britain. Though the book publishers of the 1790s differed in the path they followed into the trade and in the organization of their businesses, they were all pursuing a common goal, the replacement of imported books with American imprints. By the turn of the century, they began to perceive the first signs of success. As one commentator wrote in 1810, “For many years after the peace of 1783, books could be imported into the United States and sold cheaper than they could be printed here and indeed until 1793 nothing like a competition with English printers and booksellers could be maintained. The war then raging in Europe and added duty on paper made some difference but it was not until the union of Ireland and England [in 1801] that a decided advantage was ascertained to exist.”37 The “decided advantage” was due to a combination of factors, including cheaper American books and fewer British exports. The union of Ireland and England put an end to the Irish reprint trade, one of the main sources of cheap reprints up to that point.38 Other factors played a role, such as expropriated British capital and the ability of publishers to tap new markets. But the whole enterprise would have failed if the book trade had not united behind it. By 1805 all the wholesale booksellers were also publishers of American editions who imported only books they did not reprint or could not get from another publisher or wholesaler. Anyone who imported books extensively found himself cut off from the wholesale distribution network. In 1799 Ebenezer Andrews called on the dry goods merchants of Boston, who were major importers of staple books such as Bibles and schoolbooks, and offered them below-wholesale prices on American publications in order to get them to switch their business.39 Conversations like that must have taken place all over the country. Imported books, once the staple of any bookstore however unpretentious, were now on the way to becoming luxuries, to be found mostly in urban retail stores along with fancy stationery and fine bindings, or else in the professional bookstores that were beginning to appear, specializing in law, medicine, or theology. But how did this ethic of cooperation in the book trade work in a competitive open market? 90

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Cooperation and Competition in the Early Nineteenth-Century Book Trade As a few printers and booksellers began to take control of the nation’s book trade in the 1790s, the challenge posed by competition from British imports began to fade, but the risk from competition with each other grew much greater. The nationalist spirit that drove the effort to replace imports became the basis of cooperation in the book trade. Publishers tried various modes of cooperation and self-regulation on both a local and a national level. The simplest form was an agreement to join together in a publication on an ad hoc basis rather than producing two competing editions. More complex agreements to distribute each other’s work soon followed. When publishers from different regions cooperated, each could promise to be the sole agent in a given region, and stay out of the other’s territory. Whenever two publishers agreed to cooperate, however, they placed themselves in competition with others who were not party to the agreement. The more publishers invited into the cartel, the less effective it was. In Philadelphia, a Booksellers’ Company was formed in 1791 to publish joint editions. Practically every bookseller in town joined; but the only books they could agree to issue together were a few unprofitable secondary school textbooks, and the company soon dissolved. Despite a shared ethic of cooperation and widespread efforts to limit risk, the book trade that was emerging was essentially an open market.40 The first formal cooperation among this emerging cohort of publishers on the national level took the form of a series of book fairs beginning in 1801. The instigator was Carey and the occasion was another flurry of Bible publishing. Carey’s break with the Federalists in the mid-1790s made him some powerful enemies, and in 1798 the threat of a prosecution under the Alien and Sedition Acts combined with his still-precarious indebtedness nearly ruined him. By 1800 he had extricated himself from the worst of his debts and, hoping that Jefferson would be elected president, he began to feel expansive again. That summer Weems talked him into undertaking an edition of the quarto family Bible, the first one in America since the three that had appeared in 1792. When Weems went to New York to gather subscribers, however, he reported, “Your Bible proposition has knock’d up just such a dust here among the Printers as wou[l]d a stone if thrown smack into the centre of a Hornet’s nest. The whole swarm is out.” Now fearful, Carey delayed going to press and explored buying into one of the New York editions in order to supply the subscribers Weems had already signed. For weeks he kept everyone in suspense, apparently awaiting the resolution of the tied election in Congress. Seven days after Jefferson was finally elected on 17 February 1801, Carey wrote to Weems, “I shall print the Bible.”41 T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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Carey wrote letters to every postmaster in the country in March, asking them to be his agents for the Bible, which entailed gathering subscriptions and forwarding payment. Most of them agreed to help. This was a far more efficient system than Weems had ever imagined, and a far more national one. It neutralized competition from the two quarto editions published at the same time in New York. Then, as Carey’s Bible was coming off the press, he bought Hugh Gaine’s old standing types for the duodecimo Bible for almost $7,000 and persuaded Ebenezer Andrews not to sell his duodecimo edition in Carey’s territory.42 Thus, he eliminated competitors in the two most popular Bible formats in both New York and New England. In due course, Carey’s Jeffersonian friends got him a seat on the board of the Bank of Pennsylvania, which gave him unlimited credit, and this combined with a near monopoly on the American Bible made him a rich man at last.43 So paradoxical were relations among publishers in this period that the more competitive Carey became, the more he sought to promote cooperation in the book trade. In that same eventful fall of 1801 he issued a call for a national literary fair on the model of the German trade fairs, which would bring wholesale booksellers and publishers together from all over the country to exchange or sell their books to each other in quantity. The fairs were based on the premise that the book trade was regional at best, and that the weakness of transportation, communication, and financial links between regions made it difficult for Philadelphians to sell books in Boston and even harder for them to reach each others’ hinterlands. Carey wanted to dismantle these regional barriers, and he wanted everyone to help him sell his Bibles. The fairs convened semiannually from 1802 to 1806, alternating between Philadelphia and New York. They had the trappings of a typical trade fair, with dinners and toasts and medals for excellence in printing; but the real business of the fairs was publishers selling books to other publishers. Normally they offered a discount of about 10 to 16 percent to retailers and about 20 to 30 percent to wholesalers, depending in each case on how many copies they bought, whether they paid cash, or the length of credit given. At the fairs, books were routinely sold unbound in quantities of more than one hundred with six months’ credit at discounts of 33 percent or even more. Those who bought a considerable fraction of an edition could get as much as 50 percent off and become a joint publisher. Just as important as these wholesale purchases were exchanges of books, bound or in sheets, calculated at retail equivalent, so that one could get books of other publishers at essentially the cost of production.44 Another important activity at the fairs was the circulation and endorsement of promissory notes. These notes and bills of exchange had become the most important way of raising publishing capital within the trade, and they were all 92

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the more important as the importation of books was declining, at least among the publishers, whereas access to bank capital was still problematic. Thus, a publisher could buy paper with a note due in six months, which would give him enough time to print a book and begin to see a return. He might also sell his books to others for notes due in ninety days, which would help his sales but delay payment of the cash he needed to pay the papermaker. He might need to let his notes run on past the due date, and to do this he had to have another person endorse them, that is promise to pay the money due if the primary borrower could not. The collateral for these notes and endorsements was the bookseller’s stock, usually his only capital. All the booksellers had to endorse each other’s notes in order to do business. They were all each other’s debtors and all each other’s creditors, and because of the universal exchange of books promoted by the fairs, they all sold each other’s books. Competition and cooperation were intertwined in a precariously balanced system.45 Another product of the fair was the first formal American trade bibliography, Catalogue of all the Books printed in the United States (Boston, 1804). It listed some 1,105 editions, most of which had been published within the past four years, but some of which were considerably older. New England was the leading region for publishing, though some local bias was likely in the compilation of the catalog. But small-town imprints constituted almost half the output in New England, so that Philadelphia emerges as the leading printing city, followed by Boston and New York, with the South hardly showing (table 2.1). What is remarkable is the sheer number of imprints and the rate of growth in publishing it signals. A similar list compiled informally in 1792 counted just seventy-one editions.46 Those who attended constituted themselves as the American Company of Booksellers. By 1803 they had sixty-four members. Only six bothered to travel from New England, two of them from Boston, perhaps an expression of that region’s increasing isolation from the mainstream of the book trade. The South had eight members; four were from Baltimore. Their presence marked ambitions to establish book publishing in the city as well as the region. The lion’s share of the members came from New York (23) and Philadelphia (20). The fairs represented a peak in the book trade that was not to be topped until about 1820. After 1806 the fairs ceased because small publishers began bringing “large editions of popular books with half-worn types on inferior paper, with which, by means of exchanges, they deluged the country,” as Carey later wrote.47 By opening up an unregulated national exchange of books, the fairs exacerbated the inherent tendency of exchange to cheapen books and encourage overproduction. The problem was a glut of books. Exchanges were not sales, but they created a dangerous illusion of sales. At the fairs whole editions T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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TABLE 2.1. Imprints from 1804 booksellers’ catalog

New England Boston, Mass. Worcester, Mass. Newburyport, Mass. Walpole, N.H. Exeter, N.H. Hartford, Conn. Other Total New York New York City Albany Other Total Philadelphia and vicinity Philadelphia Vicinity Total South Baltimore Other Total No imprint

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Total

Number

Percentage

270 59 25 17 26 21 86 504

24 5 2 2 2 2 8 45

180 22 22 224

16 2 2 20

299 18 317

27 2 29

23 13 36 24

2 1 3 2

1,105

99

Source: Catalogue of all the Books printed in the United States: with the Prices, and Places where Published, Annexed (Printed at Boston, for the Booksellers, Jan. 1804).

could be seemingly dispensed with by exchange in a few hours. Editions were increased in order to have more to exchange. Each printer imagined he was printing for a national market, so the total number of books printed grew much faster than the number that was actually sold to readers. In 1808 Carey estimated the value of his stock on hand at $80,000. Only a few years before, this sum would have seemed a solid capital foundation; now it appeared to be a dead weight that was dragging him down. Once again he turned to Weems. Their second grand campaign in the South was entirely different from the first one of 1796. The object was not to sell new books but old ones, and the territory this time reached further south to Georgia and the backcountry of South Carolina, rich cotton country that was far more destitute of books and 94

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booksellers than the Chesapeake had been twelve years earlier. After borrowing $20,000 from banks for the purchase of new books that leavened the $40,000 worth of old stock, Carey sent the books to Weems in Augusta, Georgia. Weems in turn parceled them out to forty consignment stores. Their sales barely repaid the bank loans. After a year Carey had Weems return all the books to Augusta, where more than half were destroyed in a warehouse fire in January 1811. Finally Carey gave Weems permission to sell the rest at auction, thus allowing them to sink to their actual value, a fraction of their nominal retail price.48 Carey was not alone in his overestimation of the value of his stock. In 1804 Ebenezer Andrews did his annual accounting, which showed he was worth more than $200,000 (including real estate and securities), an increase of $16,000 from the year before; Thomas in retirement reckoned his net worth at about the same amount, counting his half shares in his various partnerships. A large part of the capital with which they had set up each of their partners was book stock that had failed to sell in the city but that might find a new market in the backcountry. The partners were indebted to Thomas for the full value of the titles, so they could not sell at less than full price, and Thomas refused to allow them to be depreciated. In his annual accounting of assets, he did not begin depreciating book stock until 1813, and then only by 10 percent, by which time some of the stock was twenty years old.49 Thomas’s accounting preserved the illusion of the value of his stock, and it also fostered an illusion of profit. He never calculated his annual expenditures and receipts to show a balance of profit or loss. Instead, each year he subtracted the previous year’s net worth from this year’s and termed the difference, “the profits of the business.” For years this annual increase was viewed as a cause for celebration, and as an incentive to print yet more books. The more unsold books he had, the greater his profit. His partners kept their books the same way, and each year he reckoned his half of their so-called profits as assets, which further swelled his own grand total. The more everyone printed and the less everyone sold, the greater everyone’s profits appeared to be. When Thomas opened his Walpole branch in 1793, the village was enjoying a burst of cultural vitality. His partnership published the Farmer’s Museum, a newspaper with a national circulation edited by Joseph Dennie, one of the ablest men of letters in the country.50 However, by 1799, when Dennie left for the brighter literary lights of Philadelphia, the town was declining. One of the towns that was eclipsing Walpole was Windsor, Vermont, and in 1807 a new Walpole partner opened a branch of his own there, to which he sent “the poorest and most useless part of our stock, which will neither sell nor exchange.”51 At this point the rural book business consisted largely of moving worthless books further and further into the backcountry. By 1811 the book stock of the T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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Walpole store had risen in value to more than $18,000, but annual sales averaged only about $900. The Walpole branch was still printing law, medicine, and theology, but the books sold at the store consisted almost entirely of schoolbooks and chapbooks—the reading material of the backcountry. A quarter of the sales were not books at all but stationery, cigars, patent medicines, spectacles, watch chains, and paint boxes. The stock lists and the imprints of the partners fostered the idea of a vital local print culture, an illusion that is dispelled by the sales records.52 Like many publishers, Thomas and Andrews frequently had books produced by country printers because they worked for lower wages than their urban brothers. These presses would otherwise stand idle much of the time, because most of them produced little besides a weekly newspaper. This practice had the effect of pressing down the wages of the urban printers, but in the long run the country printers were the more exploited. The Walpole printers were virtually forced to take this work in order to pay off their debts to Thomas and Andrews. They worked at journeymen’s wages, a great bargain for the publishers because most urban master printers charged publishers two or three times what they paid their journeymen in wages for a printing job. It was an even greater bargain because the struggling Walpole partners often took payment for printing in books valued at retail price, a practice that saddled the printers with yet more books to sell. Several times the Walpole partners published large books at their own risk in order to have a chance at making a real profit, but because they could not expect to sell many locally and did not have access to a distribution network of their own, they ended up selling most of the titles through Thomas or Andrews. And again they were paid partly in still more books. The capital that financed these publications came ultimately from Thomas or Andrews and the books returned to them for sale. All the country printers supplied was cheap labor.53 Unable to sell their books, the partners tried to exchange them for others more salable, but failing that they simply bartered them to pay their debts to papermakers, bookbinders, and general storekeepers. These petty traders in turn offered them for sale, but they were not obliged to sell at full retail price.54 There were so many books around that they became a kind of currency, and in the process of endless exchange, by a kind of Gresham’s law, the worthless titles drove the valuable ones out of the market. Exchange insidiously effected the devaluation that Thomas so strongly resisted. In 1817 Thomas finally closed the accounts on all three stores, sustaining a loss he estimated at $90,000. Whatever capital he could realize from selling off his book stock was reinvested more profitably in real estate, banks, and turnpikes. Some of his books simply could not be sold, nor would they go away—as late as 1825 he had books worth $39,000 left over from the branch stores in his 96

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Worcester warehouse. Andrews’s partnerships in Albany and Baltimore fared no better. In 1802, after six years of “doleful” business, the Albany partner gave up, owing $3,600. In 1810 he was still trying to get Andrews to take back part of the stock, some of which was by then fourteen years old. The Baltimore store showed large profits on paper, but its debts were far larger; as Andrews wrote to Thomas, “We never received a dollar for all our part of the profits at Baltimore.”55 This glut affecting all the large publishers in the years after 1805 was compounded by the depression and waves of bankruptcy that afflicted the whole economy from the embargo through the end of the War of 1812. Because of the practice of endorsing each other’s notes, publishers were especially vulnerable. In 1805 William P. Blake, the other Boston bookseller besides Andrews at the 1803 fair, went bankrupt. He owed Andrews $5,000, but the damage was actually much worse. Andrews had endorsed $8,000 more of Blake’s notes; Blake in turn had endorsed some notes of an upholsterer. Blake’s bankruptcy was actually caused by the failure of the upholsterer, and Andrews became liable for the debts of both. In March 1810 Samuel Etheridge of Charlestown was confined for debt.56 Andrews was first endorser on only $1,300 of Etheridge’s notes, but he was a second endorser on $22,000 more for which the first endorsers had failed as well.57 The onset of the War of 1812 set off a wave of such bankruptcies. John Conrad, one of the three largest publishers in Philadelphia, was on the verge of failure, and his largest creditors and endorsers were the two other publishers, Carey and Samuel F. Bradford. Unable to satisfy them both, Conrad secretly assigned all his assets to Bradford and left Carey to twist in the wind. Carey was barely able to meet the demands of Conrad’s creditors, and other weaker firms were dragged down into ruin. Despite the preferential treatment he received, Bradford failed two years later.58 Isaac Riley, the largest publisher in New York, with a stock worth at least $400,000, went bankrupt in 1812.59 By 1815, only thirteen of the sixty-four publishers who had gone to the book fair in 1803 were still active. Carey survived the crisis better than some others did because of his Bible publishing. After reprinting his quarto Bible from freshly set type three or four times, he began leaving part of the type standing after each edition and buying new type for the next, until by 1807 he had the whole text standing.60 He still was using the standing type for the school Bible bought from Hugh Gaine in 1801, and in 1811 he bought a standing New Testament from Philadelphia printer Francis Bailey, who had been using it since about 1788. With all these texts standing, he never had to pay for composition or for proofreading—a big charge with the Bible where the reputation for an accurate text was essential. T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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This saving allowed him to undersell not only the importers but every other American publisher. Instead of competing with him, the whole trade bought from him. Standing type also allowed him to reprint sheets one by one as the stock became low and send them to the binder in small batches as sales required, so that he did not have his capital tied up in dead stock. Building on this ability to print short runs, he began to offer both the duodecimo and quarto Bibles on a variety of different paper grades, ranging from coarse to superfine, priced accordingly. He offered the quarto in a variety of bindings as well, from plain calf to red morocco gilt, and with a variety of contents, with and without plates, maps, Apocrypha, and concordance. These were offered in more than thirty different combinations identified by number to make it easier for booksellers to order an assortment, and they ranged in retail price from $3.50 to $12.50. No Bible, in fact, no book of any kind had ever been offered in such a variety of formats, and the innovation was extremely popular with consumers. Carey’s investment in standing type cost tens of thousands of dollars and filled his house, forcing him to buy another one; but it was the most productive capital investment he had ever made. It purchased him a de facto copyright nearly as effective as the British Bible patent (fig. 2.2).61 Where Carey gained a virtual monopoly over the Bible by means of capital investment in standing type, Ebenezer Andrews, Isaiah Thomas’s unsung partner, weathered the crisis by publishing “valuable books.” These were works in which some investment had been made so as to create a de facto copyright. An atlas with original illustrations was a valuable book because the cost of engraving the plates was so high that it was not economical for others to reprint it. Adding engraved plates to any book made it valuable, because plates could not be copied as easily as text. The publishers of such books kept up their value by making them a little scarce in the trade. They were never exchanged for ordinary books and often were not exchanged at all, only sold for money, and sometimes not even on credit but for cash only. Because they were never a drag on the market, they were the best investment a publisher could make in a time of glut. Copyrighted books were also valuable books by definition, because the investment a publisher made in copyright purchased an absolute legal monopoly. When Thomas and Andrews began buying copyrights in the 1790s, their value was not widely understood, but after 1805 they gradually began to consider books in copyright as equal to other valuable books. When one of Andrews’s partners wrote to Carey in 1809 proposing an exchange of a copyrighted book, he offered only a few copies “because we do not mean to have this work a glut in the market. The Copy Right cost us too dear, to make the work very common.”62 As other parts of his business deteriorated in the early nineteenth century, 98

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FIGURE 2.2. Mathew Carey’s plan and terms of supplying the booksellers throughout the Union, with school and quarto Bibles (Philadelphia: Printed by Mathew Carey, 1807). This catalog shows how Carey issued Bibles with various combinations of textual supplements (Apochrypha, Concordances, etc.), illustrations, paper grades, and binding styles. Library Company of Philadelphia.

Andrews confined himself more and more to selling valuable books and copyright books.63 For the next decade he published and sold nothing but his own copyrights and three other valuable books: the school Bible, which he had standing; the laws of Massachusetts, for which he had a state privilege; and an atlas, for which he owned the engraved plates. Andrews was the first American publisher to restrict himself so drastically. For the preceding twenty years being a publisher in America had meant reprinting British books, exchanging, building up a large stock of assorted books of all publishers, and being a complete wholesale and retail bookseller. What Andrews did resulted in a radical contraction of his business in response to a crisis; but almost accidentally he had discovered a new way of being a publisher.

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Copyright and American Writers The first state copyright laws of the 1780s and the national law of 1790 that superseded them vested exclusive ownership of literary property in the author for a term of years, provided the author was a resident of the United States. The laws made no mention of publishers; ostensibly their function was to enable an author to have a work printed and enjoy the revenue from it, without having to worry about another printer pirating it and stealing the profit. But almost immediately most American authors and publishers interpreted the laws in the same way that the English had done since the passage of their similar copyright act in 1710. They assumed that the point of having this property right was to be able to sell it or assign it to a publisher, who would take on all the expense and labor of putting to press and marketing the book. By this interpretation, copyright gave the author something to sell and the printer something to buy. It made the author’s work a commodity and gave it a value in the marketplace. The first author to use the new laws in this fashion was the man who did the most to get them passed, Noah Webster. He published the first editions of his speller, grammar, and reader at his own expense, and when these were successful, he was able to sell the copyrights for subsequent editions. Because there were only state copyright laws when he embarked on this enterprise in the 1780s, Webster registered his books in every state he could and assigned exclusive rights to one printer in each. In 1790, when the federal copyright law was passed, several of his licenses still had years to run. Instead of shifting to the national monopoly the law envisaged, Webster continued to rely on a crazy quilt of licenses to various printers for specified geographic areas, sometimes for only a year or two, or for a stated number of copies, sometimes for lump sums, later for a penny or so per copy printed. The licensees routinely poached on each other’s territories and tried to undersell each other, just as if the book had not been copyrighted at all.64 However, if he had tried to limit it to one printer, the speller would not have been so popular, because of the formidable obstacles to interregional book distribution, and because its price would have had to be increased to cover the cost of long-distance transport. In its earliest days, national copyright legislation actually discouraged wide distribution. Jedidiah Morse’s geographies were the first American schoolbooks to be widely exchanged between regions in part because they were much more expensive and could bear the cost of transport. Accordingly, he sold his copyrights to just one publisher, Ebenezer Andrews, who kept all his books consistently in print and available in all parts of the Union and in addition paid him to revise them periodically. Morse did not come close to Webster in the number of books sold, but he did rival him in revenue. Webster and Morse were among 100

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the first writers to benefit from copyright in the early 1790s, and among the very few who made a living from what they thought of as literary labor. From such books, publishers learned the worth of copyright. Rather than representing an unwelcome extra expense, copyright came to be valued as a capital investment that could be depreciated over its fourteen-year term and sometimes paid a gratifying dividend. For all his impractical accounting, Isaiah Thomas began reckoning his copyrights as assets and not as expenses as early as 1794.65 Copyright established a legal and contractual basis for author-publisher relations; but if it gave value to a title, it did not settle the question of what that value was. Many copyrights had none, so authors still had to publish their own books. Alternatively, they might publish on their own to establish the value of their work; having proved the point, they would then offer the edition and future rights to interested publishers. In still other cases, authors engaged in self-publishing not because the copyright was worthless but because the rights were considered too valuable to yield to a publisher. Authors calculated that they stood to make the most money when they shared profits the least. As one author wrote to Carey, “I can hardly believe that any offer will be made to me sufficiently advantageous to induce me to part with my copyright.”66 Most often authors and publishers found some way of negotiating the value of a copyright that suited their differing interests and perceptions. These arrangements can be divided into four general classes. Most commonly, the author gathered subscriptions in advance and used the list as an additional inducement to the publisher to buy the copyright. Second, the author agreed to take payment for copyright in books, which had to be sold in order to make a profit; this involved the author in the labor of sale. Third, the author shared part of the risk by agreeing to buy a certain number of books if after a year or so the sale of the edition had not covered the printer’s expenses. In any of these cases, authors could sell the copyright for the full term or for just one edition, assuming that the book would be revised and a new copyright would be secured for any future edition. Yet another option, used when the value of the copyright was in doubt, was the shared profits system. Authors and publishers formed a temporary partnership, sharing the expenses and the proceeds equally. This seemed fair but it was fraught with peril, for if the book did not sell well enough to cover expenses, the author usually had to pay.67 The commission system, where the publisher took about 20 percent of the proceeds after expenses were paid, was a variation on this practice.68 From the middle 1790s until the embargo of 1808, the value of copyrights to publishers began to rise slowly, and the terms successful authors were able to negotiate improved. Jeremy Belknap paid outright for the printing of his History of New Hampshire in 1784; seven years later he sold the copyright of The T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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Foresters to Thomas and Andrews, but he had to guarantee to help pay the costs if the edition failed; and in 1793 he sold outright the copyright for one edition of his biographical dictionary.69 Hannah Adams got nothing for An Alphabetical Compendium of the Religious Sects in 1784; shared profits on the second edition; and sold the copyright of the third in 1801 for $500. By the turn of the century, sales of copyright were commonplace. In 1801 Morse received $1,500 for two of his geographies for eight years. In 1805 Benjamin Rush received $1,000 for the copyright of his medical works. In 1804 Joseph Story received at least $200 for the copyright of a single poem, The Power of Solitude.70 In the middle 1790s, publishers began to discover that they could copyright many kinds of books that were not entirely written by Americans but contained some American content. Often a substantial fee was paid to the editor or translator, an analogue to a copyright payment. Morse’s “Americanization” of Guthrie for Carey was an early example, although Carey did not think to get copyright on it. About the same time, two copyright editions of Buchan’s Domestic Medicine were published in Philadelphia, each with notes on American conditions by a local doctor. Later the freewheeling Isaac Riley of New York copyrighted many standard British law books with notes by American lawyers and even an abridgment of an English dictionary.71 This sort of hack work provided income for novelists as well. In 1806 Riley paid Washington Irving and two friends to translate De Pons’s Voyage to the Eastern Part of Terra Firma (1806), Irving’s first book.

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Publishers and American Fiction Before the War of 1812, novels played a very small role in American publishing. In 1798 only twenty-five novels of more than one hundred duodecimo pages were published in America, a little more than 1 percent of that year’s imprints. Ten of those were more than fifteen years old (works by Fielding, Richardson, Goethe, Defoe) leaving just fifteen new novels, six of them by Americans. By contrast, in that same year ninety-two short fictional works were published (including children’s books and chapbooks), 134 verse imprints, and fifteen plays. Nor did the number of novels steadily increase in the succeeding years. In 1804 there were only nine new novels, four by Americans. Altogether only twenty American novels of more than one hundred pages appeared in the 1790s, twenty-five in the next decade. Most novels that Americans read were borrowed from circulating libraries, such as Hocquet Caritat’s gargantuan collection in New York, and most of those volumes were imported.72 The most successful “American” novel of this period was Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth, but in fact it was not a native production, be102

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cause it was first written and published in London and hence was ineligible for copyright in the United States. Mathew Carey brought out the first American edition in 1794, just after Rowson immigrated to Philadelphia with the New Chestnut Street Theatre Company, and he issued two more over the next three years. Initially, Charlotte appeared no more popular than reprints of Rowson’s other preemigration novels, The Fille de Chambre (1795), which went into four editions, and The Inquisitor (1793), issued twice. Nor did the novels by Rowson first published and copyrighted in the United States gain many readers; Reuben and Rachel (1798) and Trials of the Human Heart (1795) were never reprinted. Charlotte did not actually become a long-term, steady seller until the book fairs of 1801 to 1803 spread knowledge of the work to other regions. In those three years the novel appeared in twelve editions, only two of which were printed for Carey. Scholars have argued about what made it so attractive to American readers, but what made it so attractive to American publishers was the combination of three factors: it was set in America, it was short and cheap, and it was in the public domain.73 Although Charlotte could not claim copyright protection, Carey may have kept others from reprinting the novel before 1801 by asserting an informal publisher’s right. Shortly after he issued his first edition, he sent Mrs. Rowson a check for twenty dollars and twenty free copies of the book “as a small acknowledgement for the copy right of Charlotte.” This payment, small as it was, is comparable to what some English publishers paid unknown writers at the time.74 Once other publishers began issuing rival editions after 1801, Carey tried a different gambit. He asserted another kind of right, the “courtesy of the trade,” by which publishers refrained from “interfering” with or “printing upon” each other’s publications. In 1802 he rebuked the publishers of a proposed fifty-cent chapbook edition of Charlotte for their “departure from the practice among all the respectable Booksellers of the Union.” “Having never willfully interfered with any publication, I hoped to meet with few interferences from others.” As the upstart publishers saw it, their cut-price eighteenmo version occupied a different market niche from Carey’s leather-bound duodecimo edition and so would not compete with it. Carey thought otherwise: the cheapness only compounded the offense. “From the time you publish Charlotte as a chap book,” he thundered, “it will be regarded as open to every printer or Bookseller in America, to publish in the same form. What then becomes of my three quarter dollar edition?” The chapbook publishers agreed to sell their printed sheets to Carey at cost, a typical remedy in such cases, but he could not bring himself to destroy them. He had at least some copies bound in calf and sold them at sixtytwo and a half cents in an ultimately fruitless attempt to prop up the price of what he still viewed as his literary property.75 T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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It has long been assumed that publishers preferred foreign novelists to American because the former were unprotected by copyright and could be freely reprinted without payment. Under this competitive disadvantage, American authors supposedly found it necessary to resort to self-publishing.76 In fact, it is surprising to find how many early American novels were published by booksellers. Charles Brockden Brown offers one example. After Alcuin (1790), which was financed by his friend Elihu Hubbard Smith, Brown never lacked a publisher willing to take a risk on him. He sold copyrights to Wieland, Ormond, and Arthur Mervyn; Edgar Huntley actually went into a second American edition, and his New York publisher Caritat arranged for five of his novels to be reprinted in England.77 From a publisher’s point of view, the difference between reprinting a British book and bringing out an original American one was not simply the copyright payment. The British title enjoyed the advantage of having already been markettested both at home and usually through sales of imported copies in America. By contrast, an original American book was untried. If an author was famous and well established, then a favorable reception was at least likely; but hardly any American writers fell into that category. Generally, in Britain as well as in America, original titles by unknown authors at best failed to yield a return on the investment and frequently were outright losers. No American publisher was yet prosperous enough to absorb that sort of loss on a routine basis. Still, many printers issued an American book once in a while. Many of these printers were not prominent in the reprint trade, and in fact many ran newspapers in small towns near the homes of the aspiring authors. Often it is hard to tell whether a book was published at the author’s expense, but we cannot assume that this was the rule. William Charvat portrayed Washington Irving as a prime example of an author who paid to have his books published.78 Actually, the opposite was the case. The amazingly popular Salmagundi (1807–8), conducted as a periodical by Irving, his brother, and James Kirke Paulding, was copyrighted and published by the New York theatrical bookseller David Longworth. He paid the authors $300 for the work and offered them $40 an issue to keep it going when they decided to wind it down, a sum Longworth believed was equal to his profit.79 In 1809 Irving’s A History of New York was published in two volumes in an edition of two thousand copies at the rather stiff price of $3 by Bradford and Inskeep of Philadelphia. According to a memorandum of agreement between the publishers and Irving, “B & I publish the book for W I at their own risk. If there is a loss on the publication in consequence of want of sale B & I are to bear the loss. B & I are to be allowed 20 per ct commission on the amt. sold.” As it happened, there was no loss and Irving made $2,100 on the edition.80 A second edition came out apparently on 104

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similar terms before the bankruptcy of the firm; Moses Thomas of Philadelphia brought out a third edition in 1819. The profits on this book enabled Irving to live comfortably in England while trying to save his family’s failing merchant business. Thomas was all set to publish Irving’s new work, The Sketch Book, when the publisher nearly went bankrupt in the Panic of 1819. Irving asked his New York literary friend Henry Brevoort for help, and together they hit on the plan of issuing the book in parts, like Salmagundi; paying for the printing themselves; and selling the edition to four booksellers in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore. This arrangement was very unusual, but even more unusual was the format Brevoort chose. Because he was paying for the printing, he had it done to his own taste, which was that of the fashionable London booksellers. Each part was printed in octavo on a large creamy paper with generous margins on all sides in twelve-point type on an eighteen-point body—that is, with half a line of space between each line of type. No fictional work, whether native or reprinted, had ever been produced in such large type on such large paper. Even in England novels were almost always in duodecimo. The Sketch Book was the first American work of fiction that looked like an original, not a reprint. Still more unusual was the price Brevoort set on the parts, which varied from $.50 to $.871⁄2 each, with the total for the seven parts amounting to $5.371⁄2, two or three times the usual price for a reprint of a British novel. Irving wrote to Brevoort, “You observe that the public complains of the price of my work— this is the disadvantage of coming into competition with republished British works for which the booksellers have not to pay any thing to the authors. If the American public wish to have literature of their own they must consent to pay for the support of authors.”81 The American public rose to the occasion, buying an estimated five thousand copies, which yielded Irving $9,000, more than any British writer had ever gotten for a work of fiction except for Sir Walter Scott.82 Shortly thereafter John Murray, the leading London literary publisher, offered Irving one thousand guineas for his next book. Not surprisingly Irving published his next few books in the United States the same way, paying for the printing and directing the printer to act as his agent in selling the edition in the trade. This was not classic self-publishing, because he took no real risk, but simply a way to share as little of the profit with the book trade as possible. He sold his copyrights outright for the full term to publishers only in London, usually timing English publication before American so he could secure copyright in both countries.83 The Sketch Book generated unprecedented excitement in the book trade as well as in the reading public. In the preceding twenty years very little had been published by American authors that withstood even superficial comparison T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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with what the new generation of British writers was producing. The Reverend Sydney Smith’s famous gibe—“In the four quarters of the globe who reads an American book?”—struck home. Now here was a book written by an American that answered Smith and redeemed the national honor, for it was equally successful in Britain and America with both critics and readers. No longer would publishers be content only to manufacture American versions of British books. The very definition of an American book was beginning to change: in the book trade it increasingly meant a book written by an American author on an American theme. At the height of the popularity of The Sketch Book, James Fenimore Cooper published his novel The Spy. Imitating Irving, he had the edition printed and sold in the trade. When the distributor of The Spy, Charles Wiley, offered an early copy to the Carey firm, Mathew Carey’s son and successor Henry Charles Carey replied, “Send your book without delay.” Neither the elder nor the younger Carey had ever been a notable publisher of new American books. The few that the firm had published were taken over from their authors after they had already proved successful.84 Carey must have read The Spy overnight because the day after he received it he dashed off an order to Wiley. Because Cooper was calling the shots, Wiley could offer only a one-third discount off the two-dollar retail price, normal for small orders but less than the usual rate for orders of one hundred copies or more. Nevertheless Carey wrote, “We will take 100 Spy on the terms proposed in order to do what we can to encourage American literature.”85 It is hard to imagine this kind of enthusiasm for an untried book from Carey or indeed from any other publisher before The Sketch Book. The tremendous success of The Spy prompted Wiley to offer Cooper $2,500 for his third novel, The Pioneers (1823), but the author turned down this lavish offer and, with Irving’s help, secured English publication with Murray.86 For his fourth novel, Lionel Lincoln (1825), Cooper finally accepted Wiley’s offer of $5,000 for the copyright for one year or ten thousand copies.87 As it turned out, Wiley sold only forty-five hundred copies and barely made enough to pay Cooper, not to mention the cost of printing. After that Wiley was warier, and his 1825 contract for The Last of the Mohicans proclaimed that he would publish the book “solely for the benefit & at the risk of ” the author. The edition was to be only five thousand copies, and after the expense of printing, paper, and binding had been covered, Wiley was to get a modest 5 percent commission on wholesale sales.88 Wiley died before the contract could be fulfilled, and Cooper switched to Carey & Lea. Perhaps not knowing how poorly Wiley had fared with Lionel Lincoln, the Philadelphia firm published Last of the Mohicans at its own risk and expense and paid $5,000 for the copyright, the same amount 106

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Wiley had paid and regretted. This novel was a hit, and $5,000 remained the price of a Cooper novel for the rest of the decade. Thus, Cooper and Irving managed to bid up the price of their works, both in the United States and in England, to a level matched only by the most highly paid British authors. No longer was American literature to be sold at a discount. The way Henry Carey managed to pay such huge sums for copyright without charging more than novels usually cost was to apply all the profits from the first edition to cover the full cost of the copyright; only on subsequent editions would he begin to make money. Once Carey started thinking in terms of future editions, his relationship with the author changed in an important way. Shortly after Last of the Mohicans was published, Cooper sold Carey the copyrights of his five previous novels for their remaining terms as well as the right to his next novel, The Prairie, for a total of $7,500. With money borrowed from his father, Carey had all these works stereotyped, depreciating the cost of the plates and the copyright over subsequent editions.89 As he wrote to Cooper when the deal was being negotiated, “You will then have the pleasure of knowing that all your works are stereotyped, which has not happened to any living author of works of fancy.”90 The next year he did the same with Irving, buying copyrights of four books for seven years for $600 per year, giving him a steady income no matter what he wrote in the future.91 Owning both copyrights and plates allowed the publisher to keep his author’s entire work constantly in print, as individual publications or in multivolume sets of collected works, and it gave him the margin to produce cheaper reprint editions, which would push the works into new markets. These were things the author, always concerned with his next book, was not likely to do. While Irving and Cooper proved that an American could support themselves in the fashion of gentlemen, it was Carey who kept them constantly in print and helped make them American literary classics. Sir Walter Scott was the best-selling novelist by far in America. Scott’s poems were extraordinarily popular in the early years of the century, and Byron achieved equal success, but these poetical enthusiasms paled in comparison with the unprecedented sales of Scott’s novels, as did the large sales enjoyed by Cooper and Irving. The first Waverley novel was reprinted in America three times in 1815, twice in New York and once in Boston, and the next seven in the series enjoyed comparable success. In 1820 an avalanche of Scott began with four editions each of Ivanhoe and The Monastery and new editions of five of his previous eight novels. In 1821 Kenilworth appeared in six editions and Rob Roy in four, and in addition every single previous novel was reprinted for a total of at least thirty-one editions. These unprecedented sales were due at least in part to Scott’s literary novelty, his marriage of the historical novel with the romance, and his elimination of seduction and overt eroticism. Both of these departures T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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made him and his fiction respectable. Scott fundamentally changed the perception of novel reading as a less than respectable and morally risky enterprise. Widely known as “the American Scott,” Cooper also played an important role in this revaluation of fiction.92 The standard histories of the Harper and Carey firms relate the intense competition between them to be the first in the field with each of Scott’s novels. Both houses tried to assert the old practice of “courtesy of the trade,” transplanted to America with the migration of much of the Dublin trade after the Act of Union with England in 1801. By this custom, the first printer to announce a book (usually by a newspaper advertisement) had the right to it and no other publisher could “print upon” him. This was an informal version of the English practice of registering titles at Stationers’ Hall. In the absence of legal copyright, it provided a de facto copyright or, at any rate, a means of self-regulation within the trade. Mathew Carey did more than anyone to inculcate this principle, as we saw him doing with the publishers of a chapbook edition of Charlotte Temple in 1802. In America, with its regional publishing centers and with a fairly brisk trade between them after 1800, courtesy of the trade dictated that publishers wait after announcing a book to see if newspapers from other cities brought other announcements. If they did, one of the competitors would have to back down, or they would combine forces for a joint edition. Until the third decade of the nineteenth century, courtesy of the trade worked well as one of the many ways in which publishers cooperated with one another. There were so many books to reprint that there seemed to be enough business for everyone. Only rarely did competing editions of the same book appear at the same time. Some staple books were in such universal demand that it was efficient for one publisher in each region to keep them in print; to avoid direct competition the publishers would promise not to send any copies of their editions into one another’s territory. With universal exchange such agreements were hard to honor, but such conflicts as did arise were usually settled amicably. Scott’s popularity overwhelmed this mechanism. Beginning with The Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805, his works were regularly reprinted like staple books, one edition in each region, though sometimes a year or two would pass between editions. (The same was true of Byron’s poems.)93 With Waverley the pace quickened and the stakes increased. By 1820 the demand for each new novel in the subsequent series was so great that once a publisher got his hands on a copy of the Edinburgh edition, he could not wait even a day for newspapers to arrive from other cities. If copies of a competing edition arrived from another city, booksellers could not hold off selling them even an hour. The reason to be first in the field was simply to satisfy this urgent demand, something 108

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no other author’s works had so consistently enjoyed. Thus, Carey and Harpers and others—for they were by no means the only players—raced to get the first copies off the boats or advance sheets bought or stolen from the printers, for which they paid prices as high as $500. They divided the copy among several printers and binders so that an edition of three thousand could be manufactured in as little as twenty-four hours. The first edition in the stores sold out in as little as an hour, not only to retail customers but also to circulating libraries and to booksellers all over the country, which had placed orders to send the first edition available.94 Once the first demand was met and the libraries had a title, sales could be sluggish. This suicidal competition was halted temporarily in 1826 when Harpers agreed to buy half of Carey’s edition of each future Scott novel at cost and issue it with its own title page. This was a classic courtesy of the trade solution, cooperation replacing competition—at least to a degree. Traditionally, publishers would also agree not to send any books into each other’s markets, but in this case there was no such restraint. The Harpers edition of Chronicles of the Canongate was issued with title pages listing seven copublishers in New York, two in Boston, and four in Philadelphia, including the Careys themselves. The names of these publishers in imprints meant they each purchased a sizable part of the edition in sheets, anywhere from a hundred to several thousand copies, which were bound and sold wholesale as well as retail however they pleased. This sort of collaboration between publishers in different cities was fairly common even in the 1790s and was not unknown in the colonial period. Copublishers were often named in the imprints, as well. The difference is that previously the number of copublishers was seldom more than three or four, one in each of the major cities. In the 1820s, however, copublishing was pursued more extensively than ever before, so extensively that some books were almost literally published jointly by the entire trade. These collaborative editions were of course much larger than the earlier competitive ones had been; Carey printed 9,000 copies of Woodstock (1826) and 8,250 of Chronicles of the Canongate (1827). The unit production cost for the latter title was about thirty-two cents. Harpers bought its share at thirty-six cents unbound; boarding cost about ten cents. Others who bought quantities as small as 300 paid fifty cents in sheets. The price to other booksellers for smaller quantities was one dollar and the retail price was two dollars. This price structure allowed plenty of margin for profits, discounts to middlemen, and transport to distant places, thus overcoming one of the principal obstacles to wider distribution. No books, except perhaps for Webster’s spellers, had ever circulated so widely. T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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The Reconfiguration of the Book Trade in the 1820s The competition between Carey and Harpers in the 1820s has been seen as a battle for the supremacy in the trade between New York and Philadelphia, but that is hindsight. At the time, the two cities were about equal in population, commerce, and the size of their book trades.95 They were rivals, but the idea that one of them would become the national publishing center and the other would fade away would have seemed preposterous. New York’s most rapid growth came on the heels of the Scott epoch. In the late 1820s and 1830s, the growth of the city was stimulated by its better harbor, the completion of the Erie Canal, and the relative advantage derived from the closing of the Philadelphia-based Bank of the United States. By 1840 New York definitely had taken the lead over Philadelphia, but a single publishing center was still a long way in the future. The issue between Harpers and Carey was rather how the balance would be struck between competition and cooperation, between free trade and selfregulation. The book fairs had shown the negative effects of a perfectly free market, and Mathew Carey had been in favor of regulation ever since, as both a publisher and an economist. Since the 1790s, most trade regulation had been based on the notion of protected territories, itself a remnant of the colonial period. The spoiler in such territorial agreements was New York, a sort of free trade zone between Philadelphia and Boston. Its trade was based not on a protected hinterland but rather on competition for markets with its neighbors and on trade between the regions it straddled. New York was the point where regional barriers were at their weakest. In a city of free traders, Harpers was freer than all the others. In becoming publishers, the brothers Harper distinguished themselves from Dobson, Carey, or Andrews. As publishers like Carey got out of printing, others in the trade specialized in working for them and eventually became dependent upon them. A new class distinction clearly separated artisans from capitalists. Some journeymen printers tried initiating books and publishing them by subscription in the 1790s, in effect moving directly to publishing without going through the book-selling stage, but without a book stock they could not sustain the role of publisher.96 The Harper brothers began in 1817 as printers to the book trade. They were dependable and very fast; indeed, they were so fast that they sometimes proposed books to publishers rather than waiting for them to offer work. Their practice was to write to booksellers all over the country, saying they intended to print a certain work and asking “How many copies will you take at the cost of paper and print?” They sold the entire edition in the trade before it went to press and printed only as many copies as were ordered. Their customers got their two hundred or three hundred copies as cheaply as if they 110

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had published the whole edition, but the difference was all their competitors got the same terms. The Harpers sold only to publishers and did not care where their books were resold or for how much or how they were bound. They paid no attention to regional monopolies and sold on the same terms to all comers.97 This way of doing business made the Harper brothers rich, but it destabilized the trade by arousing the sort of competition described previously. Some new mechanism of national trade cooperation and regulation was needed, some substitute for the book fairs of the previous generation. The changes taking place in the book trade were fundamental. Capital was now more often secured from banks, competition with imports was no longer a serious constraint, exchanges were no longer as common among publishers, and trade in general was more open and less protected. Whatever regulating mechanism arose would have to be compatible with this new reality. A venue for such trade regulation emerged almost by accident in 1824 in the first of what came to be called trade sales. Public auction sales of books were common, as many as ten a week in Philadelphia, and this in itself was a cause for concern because auctions tended to drive prices down and made it difficult to maintain standard retail prices. To establish a clear distinction between wholesale and retail price levels, and to preserve the very real benefits of auction sales to booksellers, Henry Charles Carey had the idea of holding a sale exclusively for the trade, selling only multiple copies of books in sheets. Such sales were common in London but had never been tried in America, not even at the book fairs. His first trade sale was held in August 1824 with Moses Thomas as the auctioneer. The first trade sale in New York was held the following June. The first trade catalog to survive was for the Philadelphia sale of September 1825, which lists consignments from ten other Philadelphia firms and one each from New York and Boston. By the mid-1830s sales were held twice a year in both cities and annually in Boston and Cincinnati after 1838. At each sale, as many as 150 booksellers consigned from twenty to two hundred titles (now almost all ready bound) in quantities ranging from a dozen to several hundred. At the Philadelphia sale in the spring of 1838, more than 300,000 volumes changed hands. Printed catalogs, mailed well in advance to all bona fide booksellers, usually stated a special trade sale price for each book, which was presumably the price at which bidding commenced, but there were no reserves. In the first round, the top bidder took as many copies as he wanted at the price he offered, and others could also be supplied at the same price, but if the consignment was not exhausted, the remainder was auctioned again in larger lots until none was left. The terms were cash for all purchases below $100 and a discount of 2 percent for cash over $500; those who purchased $100 or more from any single consignor were eligible for credit from four to six months. Thus, another benefit of the T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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auction was providing credit to purchasers, which allowed them time to realize money from the sale of the books. In some cases, the auctioneer himself would extend the credit for a commission and pay the consignors in cash or short-term notes. He became banker to the trade.98 Trade sales were better than the book fairs, with their endless exchanges and endorsements, for several reasons. Trade sales were actual sales for money, whereas exchanges just left the seller with more books to sell. Exchanges were based solely on the retail price set perhaps arbitrarily by the publisher, whereas trade sales established a wholesale price that reflected a book’s real value to the trade. Over time this reinforced a trend toward standard wholesale discounts and uniform retail prices. Trade sales also encouraged the separation of retail and wholesale book selling from publishing. Before 1820 virtually all booksellers were publishers or were on the road to becoming full-fledged publishers, producing a book or two a year precisely so they could exchange them with other publishers. Exchange was, or at least seemed, a way of getting books on better terms than by discount. The trade sales provided a venue for selling books in large quantities at or below the normal wholesale prices to jobbers, who could then afford to offer discounts to retailers that allowed for the cost of transport even to distant places. Thus emerged a new type of bookseller specializing in distribution, which in turn fostered dedicated retail bookstores well stocked with eastern books in towns all over the country. The trade sales thus provided a way for large quantities of books to be sold fairly, openly, quickly, and in a wide geographic area. They offered protection not by confining this trade geographically but rather by confining it to a certain self-defined and self-regulating group. Gradually during the 1830s and 1840s, trade sales transformed the book trade.

Technology and the Cost of Books The reconfiguration of the book trade in the 1820s was mostly a matter of organization, but technological changes also played a role. New technology sometimes involved machinery; more often it consisted simply of changes in the division of labor and the materials used. In the 1820s and 1830s, the most important technological innovations were in the realms of plate making, papermaking, and binding. In later periods, improved technology may have reduced the cost of making books, but that does not seem to have been the case before 1840. Considering the fact that consumer prices were halved between 1814 and 1840 while (as we shall see) the costs of paper and binding and the wages of printers declined at a much lower rate, the real cost of book production may have actually risen.99 Meanwhile, retail book prices fell only slightly. Only in the 1830s did publishers begin to experiment with lowering prices to spur sales. As always, 112

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their greatest concern was to sell an edition quickly and get back the money they invested. In reality, it often took years for an edition to sell out, so that even if the publisher did not lose money, his annual capital return would fall below the rate of interest he paid to the bank. Thus, in the early nineteenth century publishers were motivated not to make their books cheaper but rather to maintain prices and keep unsold stock from losing value. The way to achieve rapid turnover without lowering prices was to print small editions, and in the wake of the book glut of the second decade of the century, that is what publishers increasingly did. In 1813 Mathew Carey wrote, “If a shoemaker or a hatter were to manufacture shoes or hats enough to answer the demand for three or four or five years hence, merely because each hat or pair of shoes would now cost a quarter or half a dollar less, than the time when they were likely to be sold, he would be regarded as insane.”100 Of course, the drawback to small editions was the high cost per copy for typesetting, but there were ways to offset that, by using new technology and creative accounting. Consider the production costs per copy for three typical two-volume novels published by Carey & Lea in the mid-1820s bound in boards retailing for $2.00: Thomas Lister’s Herbert Lacy (1828), Scott’s Tales of the Crusaders (1825), and Cooper’s The Prairie, the first edition of 1827 and the second of 1828.101 These examples illustrate how and why publishers made certain decisions (table 2.2). Lister was a typical reprint produced in a small edition for a modest profit. For Scott, Carey chose a large edition size, which was reasonable considering how quickly

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TABLE 2.2. Production costs (in dollars) per copy for three novels, each retailing for $2.00, 1820s

Edition size Costs Typesetting Printing Paper Binding Copyright or advance copy Total Wholesale price Profit

Lister

Scott

Cooper, 1st ed.

Cooper, 2nd ed.

625

3,500

5,000

[?]

.28 .08 .22 .12 .00 .70 1.00 .30

.09 .10 .26 .10 .14 .69 1.00 .31

.09 .07 .20 .10 1.00 1.46 1.50 .04

[.00] [.07] [.20] [.10] [.00] [.37] [1.50] [1.13]

Source: David Kaser, ed., The Cost Book of Lea & Carey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), entries 12, 71, 116, and 749. The figures for the Cooper second edition are hypothetical; there are no cost book entries for them.

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the edition was likely to sell, but also to keep down the per copy cost of typesetting in order to offset the £100 ($488) he had to pay the London publisher Constable for advance sheets. The final cost was about the same as Lister’s. Looking only at manufacturing costs, Cooper was cheapest of all, largely because of the lower grade of paper used. However, the enormous sum paid for the copyright, $5,000.00, placed it in a category of its own. The wholesale price for Scott and Lister was $1.00, half the retail price, but even at that steep discount, Carey & Lea made $.30 to $.31 a copy. The wholesale price of Cooper was $1.50, which was less attractive to retailers, but even at that small discount, Carey & Lea made only $.04 a copy. How did the publisher justify such a paltry profit? The first edition was a loss leader, meant to pay off the cost of the copyright, and the real profit would be made on subsequent editions. To maximize the profit on future editions, Carey & Lea had the type for The Prairie cast in stereotype plates. This technology had been introduced from England in 1813, and by 1825 it had been perfected to the point that casting plates from set type cost very little more than regular typesetting when spread over such a large edition.102 And once the plates were made, future editions could be printed without any charge for typesetting or proofreading. With both typesetting and copyright already paid for, future editions of The Prairie would cost only about $.37 a copy to produce, no matter what the size of the edition, and would yield a satisfying $1.13 per copy. That Carey & Lea viewed the costs of copyright and stereotyping as a capital investment that would pay off only in subsequent editions is demonstrated by the note in the cost book for the first edition of The Prairie, “Copyright & plates free of cost.” The cost of stereotype dictated a large first edition, but future editions could be any size the publisher desired, small or large according to his sales. Stereotyping solved the problem posed by Carey of how to print small editions economically. The second most expensive element in production was paper, and here again the effect of technology is hard to assess. The cylinder papermaking machine was introduced in America in 1817, but only in the 1830s did papermaking machinery become common enough to drive down the price of paper.103 Even then, hand mills could remain competitive by using cheaper grades of rags whitened by bleaching, then a relatively new process. How did this affect the cost of books? Paper had always been available in different grades and prices, ranging from $3.00 to $6.50 per ream in the 1820s. In the examples given previously, Lister’s Herbert Lacy was printed on paper costing $4.25, the coarser paper for Scott’s Crusaders was $3.75, and the paper for Cooper’s The Prairie was in between at $3.90. By 1835, as machine-made paper became cheaper, a medium grade of paper cost less than $3.00 per ream, yet the average price Carey & Lea paid for paper for all its book printing dropped only slightly, from $4.21 in 1825 114

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to $3.49 in 1835, rising again to $4.16 in 1838. In other words, Carey & Lea was taking advantage of falling paper prices to use higher grades of paper. It was also vital that paper be available at the right moment in sufficient quantity in a uniform color, weight, and size, and machine mills were more dependable in this regard. These factors as much as cost determined the publisher’s decision about what paper to use. Binding was the next most costly element in book production costs, and it was by far the most problematic part of the manufacturing process. From the 1790s on, books were almost always retailed bound and often wholesaled that way as well.104 For inexpensive books expected to sell quickly, the publisher usually commissioned a binding for the whole edition, but in the case of more expensive or slower-selling books, it was rare, at least before the 1820s, for an entire edition to be bound by the publisher at the time of publication. Instead the publisher would have just as many copies bound as were needed for immediate sales, often by a number of different binders, and the rest were warehoused in sheets or shipped that way to wholesale purchasers, who employed their own binders. With this strategy, the publisher avoided tying up capital in binding unnecessarily, and thus an edition could have many different types of binding and many different binders. Unfortunately, every one of these binding transactions was another opportunity for problems to arise: plates or even whole sheets omitted or transposed, mismatched binding on sets, shortages of leather, endless misunderstandings at the critical moment before publication when the printed sheets were being made into books. Publishers might have preferred to have their whole editions bound uniformly under their control at the time of publication, but as the examples show, the per copy cost of binding was about the same for an edition of 5,000 copies as for 625. As long as there were no economies of scale, the publisher had to choose between the obvious economic advantages of binding only as sales were made and the quality control advantage of having the whole edition bound under close supervision. Before the mid-1820s this dilemma was sometimes solved by having the whole edition bound not in leather but in a cheap temporary binding of papercovered boards. This protected the books as they made their way through the trade from wholesaler to retailer, and it gave publishers more control over the timing of publication and the final appearance of the book. However, boards were flimsy and unattractive. Publishers attempted to make them more attractive by covering them with decorated or printed paper, and they also used sturdier materials. Boarded books were often rebound in a more permanent fashion after a few readings, but just as often owners did not feel they merited the additional investment, to judge from the large number of books that survive in the original publisher’s boards. T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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Colored muslin cloth began to be used in place of paper or leather over boards in the mid-1820s.105 Coarse brown burlap had been used as a binding material for schoolbooks when sheepskin was in short supply as far back as the Revolutionary War era, and paper boards with cloth backs appeared before 1820. But finer types of cloth could not be used over all the board surface because they could not be stuck down smoothly enough and the glue seeped through. The breakthrough was the discovery that the cloth could be kept smooth and clean by impregnating it with paste. To make it more attractive, the cloth was soon available in a variety of colors, with dozens of different machine-applied grains, and with free-form decorative designs in stamped blind or gilt. The variety and permutation of design elements suddenly was almost infinite. None of this changed the basic fact that books had to be bound one at a time by hand. The other technological innovation of the 1820s introduced economies of scale into bookbinding for the first time. Traditionally the folded sheets were sewn onto cords, the cords were attached to the boards, and then the covering material was pasted over the whole. The “new technology” involved gluing the boards and spine piece onto the covering material and then pasting this case (as it was called) onto the block of sewn sheets. The difference was simply that the cases could be prefabricated in assembly-line fashion, while folding and sewing were done by another team, and the actual assembly by still another. No new machinery was used, just a new organization of the workflow that allowed the employment of lower-waged workers in some operations. Examples of books in paper-covered boards that were cased as opposed to bound can be found as early as the 1790s, which suggests that casing had long been an option occasionally used in shops where large numbers of the same book were being bound all at once. When binders began to experiment with cloth, they may have found that casing worked better with cloth than binding. Perhaps the wet paste-impregnated cloth was so difficult to put over boards that it was preferable to prefabricate cases and give them a chance to dry before attaching them to the books.106 On the other hand, as more and more publishers ordered whole editions bound at once, whether in cloth or paper boards, a reorganization of binderies along factory production lines was inevitable. Whatever the reason, case binding and cloth were closely associated, and together these innovations transformed the outward appearance of books and also the way they were sold, read, and preserved. Since the beginning of the Christian era, most books had been bound in plain leather of one sort or another, and only the rich could afford the luxury of deep-dyed skins and goldstamped ornamentation. Suddenly books were appearing in stores in every conceivable color with decorations stamped by machine in gold and blind. These cloth bindings cost nothing extra, and some were even offered in a variety of dif116

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ferent colors and styles. In the past, bookstores had looked much like libraries, with books arranged on the shelves in drab rows in whatever order suited the owner, who stood behind his counter and fetched what the customer requested. These new bindings lent themselves to seductive, eye-catching display on bookstore counters and in ample bow-front shop windows, which were appearing in fashionable shopping streets in large cities and even in small towns. This was the greatest innovation in book marketing since the colonial period. Once purchased, the handsome cloth-bound books were sufficiently durable to feel permanent and to survive repeated reading. Cloth casing was the perfect compromise between cheapness and permanence, functionality and beauty. Cloth made it economical to bind a whole edition uniformly, which allowed publishers to advertise and adhere to a standard retail price, which helped them keep their prices up in the face of discounters. Nonetheless, books were not necessarily less expensive. Cloth casing actually cost a penny or two more than boarding for Carey & Lea in the 1820s.107 Cloth case binding did not totally replace boarding, nor did it eliminate leather binding—quite the contrary. The new organization of labor was applied to leather edition binding as well. The machine stamping of whole covers with a single tool, rather than building a design with many hand tools, completely changed the appearance of leather bindings. These stamps recalled the old styles but were more unified and intricate in design. The finer morocco leathers were elaborately stamped in gold or occasionally embossed with intaglio dies in blind. Including such touches as gilt edges and decorated paper endsheets, these high-end bindings cost the publisher as much as sixty cents a copy, five times the price of an ordinary cloth binding, and the added cost was reflected in the retail price.108 These leather “extra” bindings were often put on books intended as gifts at Christmas, New Year’s, or other occasions. Some books, such as the poems of Felicia Hemans or Robert Pollok’s Course of Time, seem to have existed primarily as gift books and were almost always sold in such bindings. In the 1820s annual anthologies of verse and short prose with engraved illustrations and fancy edition bindings began to appear as gift books at the Christmas season. This genre originated in France and Germany and was quickly imitated in England; the first American example was The Atlantic Souvenir, published by Carey & Lea from 1825 on. About one thousand such annuals were published before the fashion began to fade away in the 1850s. The Andrus brothers in Hartford and Charles Wells in New York specialized in fine leather bindings, and by a logical extension they both became major publishers of the genre. Gift books were almost always inscribed by the giver, and although the givers included both men and women, the overwhelming majority of the recipients T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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were female: wives, sisters, sweethearts, mothers, aunts, daughters, and friends. They were among the first mass-produced luxury commodities available to consumers.109 The least expensive part of the bookmaking process was printing, and it was also the least problematic. Printing was charged per sheet no matter how many sheets were printed, how long it took to print them, how large the book was, or how large the edition. The charge was expressed as so much per token, or 125 sheets printed on both sides. This charge hardly varied. From the 1790s to 1815, Mathew Carey usually paid fifty cents per token. From 1825 to 1838 Carey & Lea usually paid about thirty-seven and a half cents, as in the preceding example. Composition was likewise charged by the length of the text, measured in ems (the width of the letter m in any typeface) and expressed as so much per thousand ems. The two rates were usually the same for normal book work, so in the 1790s Carey paid fifty cents per thousand ems for composition, and Carey & Lea paid around forty cents.110 Because typesetting technology had not changed, it seems likely that the decline in both costs had nothing to do with technology but rather was the result of a general decline of wages. The first workable American power printing press was built in Boston in 1821 by Daniel Treadwell. He had been to London to see the steam-powered presses used at the Times since 1814. These presses used a cylindrical platen on a flat bed, which was speedy and efficient but did not make a clean enough impression for bookwork. Either because he hoped to build a press book printers would use or because he did not think Boston machinists had the tools needed to turn a large enough cylinder, Treadwell’s press used a flat platen. Because a steam engine was not available to him, his prototype was powered by a horse. In the following decade, he sold about fifty presses, eventually all powered by steam, but most publishers continued to prefer the neater work hand presses produced. Carey & Lea had just three books printed on power presses before 1838. Then in 1836 Isaac Adams patented an improved version of the Treadwell press that solved many of its technical problems, and within a year Harpers had replaced all its hand presses with Adams presses. It was the preferred press for bookwork for the next fifty years, while cylinder presses were used mostly for newspapers and other high-speed work.111 If it is hard to say what effect new technology had on the cost of book production from 1790 to 1840, it is even harder to say what effect it had on the prices paid by consumers. Very few bound books had advertised retail prices before the 1840s, and actual retail prices varied widely. First of all, the price depended on the binding, and those who paid in cash or bought several books at a time demanded a discount of at least 5 percent. In the country, retailers often marked up their books to pay for the cost of transport from the publisher, but as we saw 118

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in the case of Isaiah Thomas, there was also a large secondary market for books in the country, which tended to drive prices down. In the cities, cheap bookstores dealing in remainders and used or damaged books appeared in the 1820s, and several public book auctions took place every weekday. At the trade sales, even wholesale prices were variable. In the face of this instability and despite growing competition in the book trade, publishers did everything they could to keep their retail prices up; in the 1830s, however, that began to change. In 1830 Harpers began to reprint the Family Library series begun in England by John Murray the year before, with books priced at fifty cents a volume. This low price was achieved by using small format and cheap paper; and because the texts were stereotyped at the outset and marketed as a series, inexpensive reimpressions of old titles helped pay for new ones. Analogous to the series were stereotyped collected works of standard authors, and the fall in prices on sets of that sort began in 1832 with Harpers’ edition of the works of Maria Edgeworth at seventy-five cents a volume, half the previous price. The idea that lower prices would increase sales began to catch on. In the 1820s competing reprints of new English novels were usually in two volumes at a dollar per volume, but in 1836 both Harpers and Carey & Hart produced editions of Bulwer Lytton’s Rienzi crammed into one volume priced at fifty cents. Harpers wrote to Bulwer that “nothing was made by publishing it.” This sort of price cutting was possible in the boom economy of the early 1830s, but the Panic of 1837 brought it at least temporarily to a halt.112

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Geographic Expansion of the Book Trade in the 1830s At least until 1840 the American book trade continued to have three principal centers, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, each seeking a national market though still operating most efficiently on a regional level. But as the country expanded, the very boundaries of the regions changed. The Erie Canal not only opened an easy path to the upper part of the West from New York but helped make the land through which it passed one of the most active book markets in the nation. Albany was the place where the westward trade from both New York and New England met, while Rochester, Buffalo, Ithaca, Cooperstown, Utica, and even villages such as Canandaigua became important book trade towns way out of proportion to their population, both as distribution points for books published in the East and soon as publishing centers. Before 1840 the region along the Ohio, the Mississippi, and their tributaries was still for the moment more accessible to Philadelphia than to New York. Towns as seemingly remote as Tuscumbia, Alabama, on the Tennessee River, became part of the trading area of Philadelphia firms like McCarty and Davis in T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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the 1820s. Baltimore’s easier access to the Susquehanna made it a new gateway to the West. From either city the path was over the Alleghenies to Pittsburgh (or Wheeling, where McCarty and Davis briefly had a branch office) and then downriver to Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis. The produce of those towns was sent downriver to New Orleans and thence by ocean back to the East, a great circular route that persisted even after steamboats partly reversed the flow of trade on the rivers. After the railroads crossed the mountains in the 1840s, this was the shorter route to the West.113 In 1838 Cincinnati became the fourth city to hold trade sales, and in the 1840 census it ranked third, ahead of Boston (even when combined with Cambridge, Massachusetts), in the number of men employed in the printing and binding trades, though it ranked behind Boston in the number of publishers (see table 2.3).114 The development of the book trade in Cincinnati recapitulated the stages that many eastern towns passed through in the colonial period, beginning with a newspaper printer in 1793, who also produced laws, almanacs, and sermons and imported whatever else was required from publishers to the east at great expense by riverboat via Pittsburgh. Sometimes the very books recalled colonial reading: the first large book published in Cincinnati was Pilgrim’s Progress (1813). Before it became a publishing center, however, it began to specialize in type founding and papermaking, serving the many newspapers starting up along the rivers all the way to the Gulf. Getting these heavy goods over the mountains was so expensive that the local manufactures had an economic edge.115 Local production of books in the Ohio Valley was a different matter because of the copyright law, and this helped foster a distinctive local book culture.

TABLE 2.3. Statistics for printing and binding trades and for publishers in seven cities

New York Philadelphia Cincinnati Boston/Cambridge New Orleans Baltimore Washington, D.C.

Printing offices 113 47 32 38 18 19 12

Binderies

Newspapers and periodicals

Men employed

Capital in $1,000s

Publishers

43 13 13 40 5 10 10

96 58 37 48 17 24 17

2,029 925 665 553 348 279 276

1,285 263.6 266 290.2 162.2 119.9 150.7

32 24 11 24 2 7 1

Source: Statistics of the United States . . . Sixth Census (Washington, D.C., 1841). Census statistics refer only to printers and binders. For sources for the numbers of publishers, see n. 114.

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Unable to publish most of the standard American schoolbooks, the printers of Cincinnati produced their own versions: a grammar compiled by Samuel Kirkham, recently arrived from the East, and arithmetics, spellers, and primers by Martin Ruter, the local colporteur for the Methodist Book Concern. They also republished the standard reader by Lindley Murray, but that was English and therefore not protected by copyright. Webster licensed his speller in Cincinnati as early as 1821, but that did not prevent the local licensee Nathan Guilford from copyrighting his own “revised and improved” version in 1831. This was issued with three different title pages running the gamut of plagiarism, one with Webster’s title and name, another with his name but a new title, The Western Spelling Book, and a third under that title but with Guilford as author. McGuffey’s readers were the first copyrighted schoolbooks in the West to be successful in the East, despite the fact that they were thinly disguised versions of eastern spellers. (In 1838 Joseph Worcester, author of a popular New England reading series, sued McGuffey for plagiarism and won a settlement.) Selfsufficiency made sense economically, and it was supported by boosterism. Once a body of local copyrights took shape, Cincinnati took off as a publishing center, with more than a dozen booksellers describing themselves in 1838 as publishers. Truman and Smith, publishers of the “Eclectic Series” that included McGuffey’s readers, claimed in the early 1840s to have sold 650,000 copies of their six leading textbooks in six years.116 To reach this new western market, most eastern publishers collaborated with the booksellers of Cincinnati. Books with eastern imprints naming a western copublisher testify to one approach. But most eastern publishers also had standing arrangements with at least one western bookseller for the distribution of their whole list. Often they sent their books on consignment, which meant just what it meant in the 1790s: the western agent did not own the books and paid only for those he sold; unsold books were returnable and the agent took a 10 to 15 percent commission on sales. The Cincinnati trade sales opened the region to what had become the normal eastern trade, with booksellers buying from all publishers as their sales dictated. Publishing did not play a large role in the literary culture of the South. Before the Revolution southerners imported their books from England, and now they imported most of them from the North. Established writers published in the North and in many cases migrated there. The fifth largest book trade center in the 1840 census (in terms of the number of men employed in the printing and binding trades) was New Orleans, but most of its book printing was legal or official; only two books were published there in 1840, a directory of the city and a bilingual dictionary.117 Baltimore, in sixth place, was a southern city with close ties to the North. Washington, D.C.’s seventh position in the census was T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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largely due to the enormous volume of government printing there. Charleston in ninth position was much like New Orleans. Its presses served its educated and civic-minded inhabitants by printing sermons, orations, pamphlets, poems, and plays in great numbers, but little else. Many of the books nominally published there were actually printed in the North with a Charleston bookseller as one of several joint publishers. The scope of the Charleston press was almost purely local. In the North, many of the older secondary book publishing centers never resumed their positions after the War of 1812; examples are Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Trenton, New Jersey; Salem and Newburyport, Massachusetts; and Walpole, New Hampshire. Book publishers continued to be found in such larger towns as Worcester, Portland, and Providence, but their imprints are mainly found on schoolbooks and children’s books or else in joint imprints with big city publishers. In Albany, Hartford, and Baltimore, a few publishers continued to export books beyond their regions, taking advantage of their gateway positions in between and far enough away from the three major centers. Other new publishing centers emerged because of a single successful business, often a specialized one. In Massachusetts, Flagg and Gould in Andover and J. S. and C. Adams in Amherst were national leaders in religious publishing in the 1830s. In Exeter, New Hampshire, a succession of publishers produced moderately priced editions of gift books and steady sellers in extraordinarily elegant leather bindings. In some small towns the printing plant was, Lowell-style, more of a factory than the typical urban printing office. John Holbrook took advantage of cheap labor and water power to make Brattleboro, Vermont, one of the largest producers of Bibles after 1815. There, the paper mill, printing plant, and bindery were all under one roof. Elihu Phinney and his sons in Cooperstown published Bibles in a similar plant with fifty employees. In 1849 they introduced labor-saving steam power presses and fired some workers who retaliated by burning the place down.118 The spread of the newspaper press in the West, however, made it possible for books to be published occasionally in almost every town. This was much like publishing in colonial times. Often the publisher was not the printer but rather a local government body, a philanthropic organization, or a church. Local authors who decided to publish their own works often preferred to use a local printer. Joseph Smith had his Book of Mormon printed in Palmyra, New York, in 1830. During the anti-Masonic movement that emanated from upstate New York in the late 1820s, printers such as William Williams of Utica found that their pamphlets about local events were in national demand. Some country printers still manufactured books for city publishers, as in the days of Isaiah Thomas. Carey & Lea once had a book printed in Cincinnati by a printer who owed them 122

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money, and the Merriams of Brookfield made a good part of their living this way until they became publishers of Webster’s dictionary in the 1840s.119

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Urban Publishers in the 1830s In a sense, the American book trade was changed forever by Sir Walter Scott. His novels created a thirst for new books that stimulated the reading public and the book trade alike. In the 1790s all the most popular new books published in London were reprinted in America within a year or two. The choice of what was to be reprinted was driven by demand; except for a very few books whose advance notice made immediate reprinting imperative, booksellers imported the new books and waited to see which ones sold well. By the 1830s every popular new British book was immediately reprinted without waiting to see how it was received in America. The question among publishers now was how to divide them up. Once again Carey and Harpers leapt into the fray, but this time it was more clearly a battle between two giants. When the battle over Scott began in 1820, there were half a dozen combatants, and at first Harpers was the least among them. By the 1830s, the two firms towered over all their competitors. Harpers was no longer a printer to the trade; it was Harper and Brothers, a full-fledged publisher as well as book manufacturer, though it still did not have a retail operation. Carey & Lea had recently spun off retailing to Henry Carey’s younger brother Edward, trading as Carey & Hart, thus making itself more like Harpers. Carey & Hart soon became a publisher too, and the two firms as publishers were practically one. Thus, Careys and Harpers were squared off as equals and essentially they were the only contestants. No other house had the capital to take the risks that this kind of competition entailed. David Kaser and Eugene Exman, historians of the two houses, show how almost every book was contested between them. Courtesy of the trade was invoked but, according to George Palmer Putnam, it was “not yet settled” whether the right to print went to the house that first “announced” a work or to the one that got the first copy, or whether having printed an author’s other work in the past gave rights to his or her work in the future. There were barely enough celebrity authors to go around: Marryat, Bulwer, Maria Edgeworth, and, at the end of the decade, Dickens. Both firms had agents in London who negotiated advance sheets with the publishers or authors in return for substantial payments. When these agents were in competition, the race became even more complicated and the stakes even higher. As Putnam wrote in 1836, “Bulwer seems to be identified with Harper; Marryatt [sic], with Carey and Hart. But the Rubicon was passed. Harper printed Stories of the Sea [by Marryat]—Carey printed Rienzi T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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[by Bulwer]—and so on.” Competition was taken to a new level when, in 1836, Harpers retaliated against Carey’s Rienzi by printing an edition of their own at fifty cents and Carey & Hart lowered its price to match Harpers. The end of the decade saw the retirement of Henry Carey and the death of Edward, but their successors Lea and Blanchard carried on the battle well into the 1840s before finally yielding to Harpers. No longer struggling over territory or trade regulation, these publishers competed for supremacy.120 The contest spilled over into the publication of American authors. During the 1830s an astonishingly high proportion of new American books with literary ambition were published by Harpers or one of the Careys, with Harpers predominating among younger authors such as Longfellow, Bryant, Simms, and Sedgwick, while Carey stayed with Cooper and Irving and added Robert Montgomery Bird and John Pendleton Kennedy. Poe’s fiction was published both by Harpers and by Carey’s successors Lea & Blanchard. Carey & Hart was more concerned with the most popular writers, mostly British reprints; their main American author was Davy Crockett. Careys and Harpers were among the first publishers to cultivate authors, to treat with them as social equals. When Irving had wanted a gentleman to publish his Sketch Book in 1819, he had to ask a friend which publisher was in fact a gentleman; but by 1830 a few publishers like Carey and the Harpers had learned to act like gentlemen. The next generation of publishers would be even further removed from the artisan class. Although the Careys and the Harpers rose to the top of the trade by publishing new books quickly, the role of these books in the trade can easily be overstated. Standard books, both American and foreign, in the areas of religion, medicine, law, schoolbooks, children’s books, and books of local interest still made up the bulk of book production. The most frequently and widely printed books were still the Bible and endless editions of the standard elementary school books, just as in 1800. In 1834 the North American Review listed about 553 new publications, by which they meant books that had never appeared before in America, whether reprints of foreign books or original works. The American Imprints inventory for 1834 lists at least 1,000 other titles of more than one hundred pages published that year that were not new, including almost one hundred editions of the Bible and the Psalms (table 2.4).121 Perhaps the greatest single change in book publishing since the Revolution was the increasing importance of new books, and by the 1830s new books were by far the most dynamic sector of the trade. Let us focus on those which were published in 1834, on their publishers, and on their place of publication. Of those 553 new books in 1834, 99 (18 percent) were published by the two Careys (46) or Harpers (53). No other firm came close to them. Ten mediumsized firms publishing between 10 and 20 books each accounted for another 124

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TABLE 2.4. New books, by place of publication, 1834

Boston New York Philadelphia New England other than Boston (16 towns) West, including Cincinnati (3 towns) South, including Baltimore (5 towns) Other (7 towns) No publisher stated Total

Number

Percentage

190 129 120 60 9 9 9 27 553

34 23 22 10 2 2 2 5 100

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Source: North American Review (1834). Boston’s share was possibly exaggerated by the fact that the North American Review was published there; for example, the many books published jointly by firms in Boston and New York tend to be listed as Boston imprints.

167 books (30 percent). Seven of these were in Boston, where the business was divided among a greater number of publishers. The remaining 52 percent were distributed among 113 smaller firms. Most of those medium-sized and small firms were in Boston or in such smaller New England towns as Hartford, New Haven, Andover, and Cambridge, and together they accounted for almost as many of the new books as did the giants in New York and Philadelphia. William Charvat argued that New England was becoming increasingly marginal in the literary publishing world during the 1820s and 1830s, as most of the famous New England writers found a national audience through publishers in New York and Philadelphia. Nonetheless, the many medium-sized New England firms apparently still found plenty of new books to publish. Among the Boston imprints of 1834 are novels by Seba Smith, Lydia Maria Child, and Lucius M. Sargent, as well as books for young persons by Jacob Abbott, William A. Alcott, Samuel G. Goodrich, and Joseph E. Worcester, not to mention scholarly works such as George Bancroft’s History of the United States, the first volume of which appeared in 1834. Many of these books had a distinct New England flavor and may not have been as appealing in other parts of the country, but the large number of educated and book-buying readers in the region continued to sustain a lively and distinct literary culture. Another trend of the 1830s was the quickly rising proportion of books by American authors compared with reprints of European works. Samuel G. Goodrich guessed that American books rose from 30 percent in 1820 to 40 percent in 1830 to 55 percent in 1840. George Palmer Putnam estimated American books as a percentage of all new books rose from 43 percent in 1833 to 61 percent T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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just two years later.122 The North American Review figures for 1834 show American authors accounting for a whopping 71 percent of all new books. Obviously, the booster spirit of literary nationalism was skewing the statistics, but the general trend was clear. Putnam’s estimates appeared in a periodical he published anonymously and sporadically while he was still a clerk; his Booksellers’ Advertiser, and Monthly Register of New Publications was one of the earliest American book trade periodicals.123 In its final issue in March 1836, Putnam wrote about a recent trip to London, where a bookseller told him that almost a third of all books failed to break even and that less than a tenth required a second edition. In America Putnam claimed second editions were much more common. This was exactly why the reprint trade was so profitable, and why publishing untried books was riskier and more expensive. Putnam also noted a “great increase of novels,” which is confirmed by the North American Review listings: eighty-two new British and American novels (15 percent of the total number of new books) appeared in 1834, compared with nine in 1804. In another context concerning the unpopularity of pamphlets, he noted that “not 1 in 50 pays the expense of its publication.” Putnam noted a recent drop in the price of reprinted fiction from a dollar to fifty cents. He attributed it to competition between Harpers and Careys over Bulwer and Marryat and also to technological changes. “Verily in this age of ballooning and railroading—printing by steam—when the machinery of book-making is such, that it is only necessary to put your rags in the mill and they come out Bibles—all ready printed—there is no telling what human invention will accomplish next.” Technology and competition working together might not be disruptive but instead might lower book prices for good. The Panic of 1837 burst this optimistic bubble, but his vision of a book trade characterized by technological change, increasing output, and falling prices was so persistent in the popular imagination that some modern historians have made the mistake of thinking it was realized long before it was. It certainly does not describe the changes that took place from 1790 to 1840. The prices of books and the size of editions changed very little over those years. Technological changes, as we have seen, were more about new materials and more efficient organization of labor; books were still made by skilled hands. The number of firms engaged in book publishing expanded quickly between 1790 and 1804, but after that came a long period of stagnation and then a sluggish recovery. As for the number of books published and the number of publishing firms, the figures given previously for 1804 and 1834 are not strictly comparable, but they suggest orders of magnitude. Compare for example 1,250 books in print in 1804 with roughly 1,500 new books and reprints published in 1834, or the 64 publishers who came to the book fair in 1804 (when most of the New Englanders stayed home) with the 125 publishers of new books in 1834. In 1840 the number 126

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of publishers listed in directories for New York (32 firms) and Philadelphia (24 firms) was not appreciably larger than the number of booksellers who had attended the book fairs almost forty years before (23 from New York and 20 from Philadelphia). Meanwhile, the population of the United States had more than quadrupled. As the 1830s ended, the book trade was geographically more dispersed than ever before, but it was still concentrated in cities and especially in a few large firms in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Publishers in each of the three main centers attempted to sell their books all over the country, but they still functioned most effectively in their own regions, and tended to work through middlemen when they ventured out of them. There was no single publishing center nor was there a single national market, certainly nothing even approaching a “mass market.” The book trade was more than ever concerned with new books and with American authors, even though the majority of publications were reprints and standard works. The mechanization of book production had hardly begun, the railroad had yet to make an impact on the book trade, publishers were still for the most part trying to maintain their prices, literary publishing was the specialty of only a few houses, and the American renaissance was still a dream. Most of the changes usually associated with the “rise of modern publishing” had not yet happened. Nevertheless a real transformation in the book trade had taken place since 1790. A distribution system was in place that moved books between regions effectively and with diminishing effectiveness to the margins of those regions. The replacement of British imports with American editions had gone about as far as it could go. Cooperation and self-regulation within the trade were far from perfect but probably more highly developed than in any other sector of the economy. A variety of strategies for raising capital for publishing was available. Publishers had learned how to work with American authors to promote their writings and in at least some cases share the profits equitably. When Mathew Carey died in 1839, he might well have felt that everything he had hoped had been accomplished, but he would clearly have recognized the book world as not all that different from his own.

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PA R T 2

Case Study: Harper & Brothers

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Scott E. Casper . . . In January 1834, Booksellers’ Advertiser proclaimed, “Ten years ago, these brothers worked the presses with their own hands, and it is within that time that they have commenced publishing; now they are employing 200 persons, and diffusing knowledge to millions, while their names are familiar wherever the English language is spoken.”124 The brothers were the Harpers of New York: James, John, Wesley, and Fletcher. Between 1810, when James left his family’s home on Long Island to apprentice under a printer in the city, and 1840, when Harper & Brothers issued Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years before the Mast, the Harper name came to represent both publishing productivity and the diffusion of knowledge. No American firm issued more books in the 1830s, and none gained as wide a reputation. That reputation owed much to a strategy, borrowed from English publishers, that the Harpers pursued in the 1830s: the creation of “library” series of books, most famously Harper’s Family Library and the School District Library. Through their contents, material appearance, and skillful marketing, these series circulated both “useful knowledge” and the Harper name across the United States. The firm’s story began in 1817 when James and John Harper opened a printing establishment with their savings and their father’s financial assistance. As job printers, J. & J. Harper produced for organizations, schools, and other local concerns: the 1819 program for Columbia College’s commencement, for example, and the minutes of the 1820 Yearly Meeting of Women Friends. The first book they produced was an edition of two thousand copies of Seneca’s Morals for bookseller Evert Duyckinck in 1817. Printing the Prayer Book of the Protestant Episcopal Church (1818) showed the economic benefits of making stereotype plates. By the early 1820s, the Harpers had embarked on publishing and were competing with the Careys of Philadelphia to issue the first American editions of Walter Scott’s new novels. By 1825 they were publishers and printers, manufacturing books at their own risk as well as for established booksellerpublishers. Unlike other contemporary urban printer-publishers, they did not operate a retail bookstore. Theirs was a wholesale business, which did not compete with their primary customers, the local booksellers. In the mid-1820s, the Harpers hired agents to sign up subscribers around the country for the National 128

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Preacher, a monthly paperbound volume of sermons, which they founded in 1826 and continued until at least 1833. The Harpers’ two hundred agents included “established booksellers,” clergymen, and students on vacation, ranging over twenty-five states, the Arkansas territory, the Choctaw nation, and even Canada and South America. By 1830 the brothers had visions of national publishing, even if their output consisted primarily of English reprints.125 The publishing strategy of issuing books in multivolume series emerged across the Atlantic in the 1820s. The Edinburgh firm of Constable established its “Miscellany” in 1825, followed by Longman’s “Cabinet Cyclopedia,” Charles Knight’s “Library of Useful Knowledge,” and notably John Murray’s “Family Library.” Library series took a variety of individual titles, packaged them together, and advertised them under a single brand name; the quality of a series, once planted in readers’ minds, would encourage them to buy its subsequent volumes. Uniform binding (sometimes with numbered spines) gave a library series a distinct look. Above all, a library series was inexpensive—the books in Murray’s Family Library sold for five shillings, cheap enough for families of modest means to purchase them.126 The brothers Harper wasted little time in imitating the British publishing phenomenon. A year after Murray launched his Family Library in April 1829, the Harper’s Family Library commenced with Henry Hart Milman’s threevolume The History of the Jews. The “American Family Library” would comprise “all that is valuable in those branches of knowledge which most happily combine amusement with instruction,” the firm promised in an early advertisement. The publishers aimed “to present their fellow-citizens a work of unparalleled merit” suitable for “all classes of readers.” Harper’s borrowed more than Murray’s title: most of the early volumes in the Harper’s series were taken directly from Murray’s series. The rest had originated in other English library series, a fact that the Harpers unapologetically explained in the same 1830 advertisement: Hereafter, in addition to those works published in London, under the title of “The Family Library,” those also published under the titles of “The National Library,” and the “Edinburgh Cabinet Library,” will be incorporated in HARPER’S FAMILY LIBRARY; and . . . besides the preceding, such other works of peculiar interest and value as may appear in the various Libraries and Miscellanies now printing in Europe, which are not above specified. The Harpers also claimed to be commissioning several “works of an American character.”127 But in 1830 nearly all the series’ “authors of eminence” were British. T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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FIGURE 2.3. The initial binding style of Harper’s Family Library had covers printed on cloth or boards, using the back cover to emphasize each book’s numerical place in the series. American Antiquarian Society.

The Harper’s Family Library grew quickly: 52 volumes by 1832, 100 by 1840, and finally 187 in all. Readers could purchase individual volumes for forty-five cents or the entire series for a specified sum (which rose as the series grew, to eighty dollars for the 187 volumes in 1847), complete with a cabinet to house it. At first, the volumes were bound in boards or in tan cloth over boards, with the series’ name and the work’s title printed on the boards or the cloth (fig. 2.3). By mid-decade, a second binding style was available: dark brown cloth over boards, blind-stamped on the front cover, series and title gold-stamped on the spine, within a decorative frame. Histories, biographies, and travel books dominated the Family Library, but the series also included works of natural science, natural history, and “mental and moral science.” (For distribution by genre, see table 2.5.) Most of the books were quite new, even those written originally for an English series. Readers could study lives and times ancient ( John Williams’s The Life and Actions of Alexander the Great) and modern (George Croly’s biography of the recently deceased King George IV), foreign places ranging from Poland to Palestine and India to Siberia, insects and elephants, demonology and witchcraft. Most works ran a single volume; several ran two or three; the longest, Alexander Fraser Tytler’s Universal History (nos. 86–91), ran six. In the mid130

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TABLE 2.5. Distribution of Harper’s Family Library (volumes 1–171) by genre

History Biography Voyages, travels, etc. Natural history Natural theology Miscellaneous Natural philosophy Biblical and ecclesiastical history Mental and moral science Natural science Poetry Unclassified Total

Volumes

Different works

67 56 18 9 8 7 5 5 3 3 3 6 190

38 34 12 8 5 6 4 2 3 3 2 6 123

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Source: Books published by Harper & Brothers, no. 82 Cliff-Street, New York . . . : The following catalogue will be found to contain a great number of works suitable for circulating, school, and district libraries; all of which may be had on the most reasonable terms (February 1844). Note: These genre designations are taken from the four-page Harper & Brothers catalog of February 1844, which listed nearly every Family Library volume at least twice: once as part of the series, but also under genre headings. Because a few works were listed under multiple genres, the total number is greater than the actual number of volumes (171) or the number of distinct works (113).

1830s the publishers (who became Harper & Brothers in 1835 when Fletcher, the youngest brother, became a full partner) fulfilled their early promise to add more American works to the series. Of the first seventy-four volumes, only B. B. Thatcher’s Indian Biography (nos. 45 and 46) had offered an American subject from the pen of an American writer. Starting with James Kirke Paulding’s A Life of Washington (nos. 75 and 76), American topics became more frequent: lives of Franklin, DeWitt Clinton, Commodore Perry, and others; histories of Connecticut, Michigan, and Louisiana; travel volumes including Dana’s Two Years before the Mast and Lewis and Clark’s Travels; William Cullen Bryant’s The Selections from American Poets (to accompany Fitz-Greene Halleck’s The Selections from British Poets). As the Harpers expanded their Family Library, they also launched a variety of other library series, most of which they advertised in the back pages of Family Library volumes. The Classical Library (thirty-six volumes), an addendum to the Family Library, took works of Xenophon, Tacitus, and others from the British publisher Valpy’s series of the same name. The Boy’s and Girl’s Library (thirty-two volumes) was designed for young people “between childhood and T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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the opening of maturity, when the trifles of the nursery and the simple lessons of the school-room have ceased to exercise their beneficial influence, but before the taste for a higher order of mental pleasure has established a fixed ascendancy in their stead.” Although the Harpers insisted that the Family Library would be filled with only useful genres and no novels, they advertised their Library of Select Novels within the series’ volumes. They assured readers that only “select” novels were chosen either for their insight into human character or for their composition by “authors of established character” (or, more likely, of proven popularity). In defending the publication of this series, they argued that “men will read novels; and therefore the utmost that wisdom and philanthropy can do is to cater prudently for the public appetite, and, as it is hopeless to attempt the exclusion of fictitious writings from the shelves of the library, to see that they are encumbered with the least possible number of such as have no other merit than that of novelty.”128 In fact, during the 1830s, fiction was Harper’s bread and butter, with the works of Bulwer and G. P. R. James among their biggest sellers. The School District Library was the most important of the Harpers’ other series, overshadowing even the Family Library by the early 1840s. As its name indicates, the series was designed for educational use, and its initial volume, Paulding’s Life of Washington (1836), was commissioned for that purpose. Paulding’s contract specified that he would “prepare the said work for the use of schools by dividing it into reading sections and by adding questions if required” and that he would receive differential royalties depending on the way the book was packaged (eight cents a copy for all copies in the “Family Library & School Library,” six cents for those published for classroom use). By 1838 the School District Library consisted of a complete “series” of fifty volumes. Half of these volumes had first appeared in the Family Library; others included two works by Harper’s popular novelist Catharine Sedgwick. Harper & Brothers bought stereotype plates from other publishers for the series, including Sedgwick’s Means and Ends, or Self-Training from Marsh, Capen, Lyon and Webb of Boston. Buoyed by demand from school districts—especially in New York, where the state legislature mandated that every school district establish a library— the School District Library soon outpaced the Family Library. Within a decade it reached 295 volumes, divided into six “series,” each available with its own bookcase. By the early 1840s, the School District Library drove the Family Library forward: additions to the older series had mostly been commissioned or procured for the School District Library.129 Library series, as a distinct publishing strategy, benefited the Harpers in at least four ways. First, they gave the firm multiple uses for the same stereotype plates. The books’ sheets virtually never identified them as part of the Family 132

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FIGURE 2.4. Four editions of John Abercrombie, The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings, illustrate the ways in which the Harpers packaged the same work for its different library series in the 1830s and 1840s. This title was included in Harper’s Family Library, Boys’ and Girls’ Library, School District Library, and The American School Library published under the direction of the American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Between the covers, the text of these books is identical—except for their title pages and some advertising material—likely the product of the same stereotype plates. From left, showing spines only: the 1838 American School Library edition published under the direction of the American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge; the 1848 Harper & Brothers School District Library edition, No. 40; and the 1837 Family Library edition, No. 58; and the front cover of the 1836 Harper’s Family Library, No. 58. American Antiquarian Society.

Library or the School District Library. Only the bindings and occasionally a title page placed the work within a particular Library. Thus, John Abercrombie’s Philosophy of the Moral Feelings was packaged as volume 40 of the School District Library, as volume 58 of the Family Library, and as a separate work in Harper’s general catalog (fig. 2.4). Second, library series provided a valuable site for the firm’s advertising. The advertisements inserted in the Family Library volumes—sometimes for Harper’s entire list, sometimes for other series— T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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encouraged readers to associate all the firm’s products, even its novels, with the “exalted character” of the inaugural series. Third, the books as material objects advertised the firm. Readers could tell a Family Library or School District Library book by its distinctive binding, even if the text inside could be anything from a biography to a book about “natural magic.” As Harpers purchased stereotype plates from other firms for use in the School District Library, the internal texts exhibited clear typographical variation. But the bindings covered those differences, figuratively as well as literally. Finally, the series received extensive press as series, thus making them widely familiar and encouraging continuing sale of later volumes. Harpers excerpted reviews from newspapers in advertising the Family Library saying the books “should be in the library of every family desirous of treasuring up useful knowledge” (Boston Statesman); “It is the duty of every person having a family to put this excellent Library into the hands of his children” (N.Y. Mercantile Advertiser). Library series were a critical way in which Harper & Brothers made itself nationally known, suggesting that all the firm’s works were “valuable standard literature.”130 The benefits of library series did not belong to the publisher alone. Surviving evidence suggests how the Harpers’ series at once served and helped shape readers’ objectives and desires in an era of proliferating print. Libraries across the United States—from the Public School Library in New Orleans, to the Ladies’ Library in Lebanon, Connecticut, to the Young Men’s Association of Milwaukee—owned the series (although it is sometimes difficult to tell which series they owned, because the titles overlapped). As school district libraries were established in New York, most took the Harper series. The reasons were obvious, at least for the Reverend William P. Page, “these being selected and prepared with great care and got up in a neat and uniform style, afforded at the cheapest possible price, and approved of and recommended by the superintendent of public schools.” Page went on to list the various genres embraced by the School District Library, in effect reproducing every feature in the Harpers’ own advertisements. The Harvard-trained minister and man of letters was hardly objective. His two-volume edition of The Life and Writings of Samuel Johnson (1840) constituted numbers 109 and 110 in the Harpers’ Family Library and numbers 122 and 123 in the School District Library.131 The extant circulation records of one library document the reception of Harper’s Family Library in the 1830s. The Worcester County Atheneum, started the same year as the series, acquired the first seventy-four volumes of the Family Library between 1830 and 1834. The shareholders of this Massachusetts library included many of the city’s wealthiest and most prominent citizens. Some of them borrowed extensively from the Family Library. Worcester lawyer Alfred D. Foster checked out eleven of the first fourteen Family Library volumes in the 134

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twenty-four days between 15 March and 8 April 1831. Given that those books’ subjects ranged from the history of insects to the life of Mohammed to exploration in the Polar Seas, it is likely that Foster borrowed them in an effort to read through the series. Having done so (when the series was still new and small), he never read another Family Library volume, even though new ones continued to enter the atheneum for three more years. Another lawyer, Rejoice Newton, one of the most active borrowers in the atheneum, took out thirty-seven different Family Library books between March 1831 and May 1835, several multiple times; he also borrowed volumes from the Family Library’s Dramatic Series (one of Harper’s additions) and the Family Classical Library. In some cases, the subject may have mattered as much as or more than the Family Library imprimatur. Isaiah Thomas, the pioneering American printer, checked out George Bush’s The Life of Mohammed the same day he checked out another book listed as “Mahomet.”132 The Worcester Atheneum records do more than reveal heavy borrowing of Harper’s Family Library in one small community of readers. They offer two additional insights. First, the librarian recorded Family Library borrowing by the books’ series number more often than by the title alone (“Fam. Lib. 29,” for instance), suggesting that the series’ identity was at least a convenient way to describe the books and possibly the way that this community understood them. Second, circulation of the Family Library volumes diminished precipitously after 1835. This decline may have owed something to the fact that the atheneum stopped buying new volumes at the very moment when the series turned to more American subjects. By then, too, the atheneum’s most active members had read the volumes they wanted and were not inclined to reread them. The Family Library may have catered to the emerging mode of dispensable or “extensive” reading: perusing a variety of its volumes would expose a reader to places across the globe, notable men and women in various eras, and miscellaneous scientific and philosophic knowledge. The books could broaden one’s mind and vicarious experience, but they did not offer the sort of mental food one needed to consume again. In other settings, the Harper series found their way into homes, streetcars, and new covers. Michael Floy, an evangelical young New Yorker who kept a diary from 1833 to 1837, read mostly religious works before 1836. But then he turned to secular fare, mostly from the Harpers series. He read the lives of Charlemagne and Napoleon, Paulding’s Life of Washington, and other volumes of history and biography. A discerning consumer, Floy grasped the economics of series publishing and disliked them: by splitting Paulding’s work into “two volumes of large type,” he grumbled, the publishers were able to earn a dollar rather than the accustomed fifty cents of previous (one-volume) entries in T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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the series—a difference he attributed to the fact that “Mr. Paulding has a copy right.” He also testified to the series’ recognizable look. Riding the railroad across town one day, he described “a poor looking man and forlorn wife; a baby was in her arms; he would gape at it with the most endearing looks, then read a book which upon examination I found to be one of Harper’s Family Library, the Life of Sir Isaac Newton.” If Michael Floy could tell a Harper’s Family Library book by its cover, a Worcester publisher named Zephaniah Baker made such recognition impossible when he gave Lizzie Wesby the two volumes of James Rennie’s The Natural History of Insects sometime around midcentury. Baker took these volumes (nos. 8 and 74 in the Family Library, 6 and 7 in the School District Library), to Lizzie’s father, the bookbinder Joseph S. Wesby, who bound them in identical green half-leather around the spine and on the corners, with marbled board covers. If any advertisements had once been in the volumes, they were now removed. So was all reference to the series in which the books had appeared: now the spines read simply “Natural History/I (or II)/ Insects.”133 Inside the uniform spines, the title pages of Lizzie Wesby’s books revealed the history of the Harpers’ firm itself over the decade. In Volume I, the title page read “Harper’s Stereotype Edition. New York: Printed by J. & J. Harper, 82 Cliff Street. Sold by Collins & Hannay, Collins & Co., G. & C. & H. Carvill, Wm. B. Gilley, E. Bliss, O. A. Roorbach, White, Gallagher, & White, C. S. Francis, Wm. Burgess, Jr., and N. B. Holmes; Philadelphia, Carey and Lea, E. L. Carey & A. Hart, John Grigg, and U. Hunt; Albany, O. Steele, and Weare C. Little, 1830.” This copy of History of Insects, volume I, had not been part of the Family Library. It belonged to J. &. J. Harper’s earlier identity as printers to the trade, who sold their wares to a limited consortium of bookseller-publishers in a few cities even as they moved decisively into publishing themselves. The title page in volume II read simply “New York: Published by Harper & Brothers, 82 Cliff Street, 1840.” Published a decade later, this book probably had belonged to the Family Library or School District Library. And now Harper & Brothers was itself the publisher of record and America’s dominant publishing house— thanks in large measure to the series whose identity Lizzie’s father obscured when he rebound these books.

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PA R T 3

Case Study: Urban Printing

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Karen Nipps . . . In 1808 a young printer’s wife in Philadelphia by the name of Lydia Bailey faced a crisis familiar to women in the early republic. At age twenty-nine, she was suddenly a widow, struggling with four children to support and saddled with a business heavily in debt. Rather than folding under these “embarrassed circumstances,” she, like generations of women printers before her, took the helm; as an obituary years later would report, “shaking off the incubus of sorrow, or holding it in abeyance,” Lydia Bailey “face[d] the world and became mistress of [her] situation.”134 Women in Bailey’s situation seldom stayed in printing for long; typically, they quickly remarried, turned over the business to a son, or simply shut up shop. Not Lydia Bailey: she succeeded in rescuing the family business and thrived as one of Philadelphia’s leading printers for more than five decades.135 The surviving evidence—a few of Bailey’s workbooks and business records, contemporary correspondence, her imprints—demonstrates that this achievement was due to a combination of circumstances, both social and personal, some of which had been in place for generations and some of more recent vintage.136 By the last quarter of the eighteenth century the American book trade consisted of pockets of craftsmen and entrepreneurs concentrated in the leading cities—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Baltimore—and serving surrounding regional communities.137 The trade of the early republic followed closely upon old models; it was driven by core groups of individuals, who, though tied together by the common thread of business exchange, were often independently responsible for many of the activities associated with the manufacture and distribution of books. Printing offices were fairly small businesses, run by families employing a handful of workers and apprentices, many of them blood relatives or acquaintances living on or near the premises. These businesses traditionally combined letterpress printing with the wholesale distribution of books. Such related activities as copperplate printing, papermaking, type founding, binding, newspaper publishing, retailing, and the selling of stationery and other dry goods were frequently incorporated. Not every printing firm carried on all aspects of production; often, close relatives specialized in variT H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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ous branches of the trade, coordinating their efforts with one another. Operations rarely exceeded more than a dozen workers and two or three presses.138 Lydia Bailey’s heritage was typical for a woman entering the trade, to whom the apprentice route was not available. She was born in 1779 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Her father, William Steele, a local prothonotary (clerk of courts), came from a dynasty of printers and papermakers.139 His brothers, John and James Steele, operated a busy paper mill on the Octoraro Creek outside of the town of Lancaster. Lydia Bailey’s mother, Elizabeth Steele, was herself born a Bailey, the sister of the successful revolutionary-era printers Jacob and Francis Bailey. The more famous of her two brothers, Francis Bailey, is now recognized as one of this country’s first type founders; he was also the publisher of a maverick newspaper, the Freeman’s Journal, and an official printer for Congress and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. With printing offices in both Philadelphia and Lancaster, Francis Bailey was deeply involved in the area’s book trade, counting as associates and customers most of the local bookmen and many prestigious civic leaders and institutions. Business associates extended from Boston south to Charleston, South Carolina. Bailey naturally used the Steeles as a major source for his paper.140 By the mid-1790s, Francis’s son Robert Bailey had come of age and taken control of his father’s flourishing Philadelphia shop. In 1799 the junior Bailey married his first cousin Lydia Steele. Throughout the nine years of the marriage, Lydia Bailey’s role was no doubt like many wives in the early republic, acting as housekeeper, mother, and assistant in her husband’s business, where she likely folded and stitched printed sheets herself.141 However, whatever assistance she may have tendered was not enough to keep the firm healthy. The affable Robert was a notoriously bad businessman who took the standard practice of extending long credit and made an art of it, draining both his own and his father’s resources. In excuse for his ineptitude, the young man confessed to a faulty memory and admitted the superiority of his wife’s. As he once wrote, Lydia’s “recollection appears to be more retentive than mine, and if you think mine essential, hers must be much more so.” By 1808 the partnership with his father, which had floundered off and on for years, had been dissolved, and so it was that Lydia Bailey found herself in sole possession of the business when her husband died. Initially, as required by law, Bailey began by paying off her husband’s sizable debts and proceeding with business at hand—completing unfinished transactions, printing the next numbers in a series of almanacs, and reprinting a title for which Robert held copyright.142 She continued a flourishing trade in the “finishing” of maps and globes. This specialty, which entailed such tasks as backing with linen, coloring, varnishing, and putting on rollers, was tradi138

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tionally a woman’s work, but Bailey turned it into a long-lived and lucrative industry, selling her maps to individuals, schools, booksellers, and the municipal government. It had been common in the eighteenth century for a printer’s wife to assist in the running of a small retail store, selling groceries and dry goods as a sideline to the printing office. In time, Lydia Bailey abandoned this part of the enterprise. Her business would concentrate on printing (though she continued throughout her career to operate a small front room to market her own imprints, other titles, and paper merchandise and to engage in the map and globe business). Her decision was a response to expanding demand for printed goods that, along with improvements in type and paper production, made it possible for more and more people to enter the trade. With rising output and accelerating competition, it became imperative for businesses to reconfigure their methods and increase their efficiency.143 One solution was to separate the roles of publisher and printer. Lydia Bailey saw the advantages in such differentiation, which was in progress by the turn of the century, and took a lead by specializing. Instead of remaining an allpurpose business, her printing office over time abandoned most pretensions of publishing and distributing books and concentrated on job printing for others. Bailey did do her share of book printing, but it was small publications that formed the bedrock of her business, as her account books demonstrate.144 For a variety of booksellers, she printed the vast majority of the city’s almanacs during the 1810s and 1820s. Ephemera—examination records, memorials, children’s chapbooks, tracts, song sheets, booksellers’ and publishers’ catalogs, proposals for printing—occupied her presses much of the time. By the mid-1820s until the end of her career, contract job printing—blank forms, cards, receipts, handbills, legal documents, bills of lading—made up a predominant portion of her business. This latter work distinguished her from both predecessors and contemporaries, who strove for success through competition in the commercial marketplace. Even as Bailey innovated by specializing, she took a conservative approach to business. At any given time she had a limited number of books in production. Diversity was her strategy. Let other entrepreneurs seek market niches by specializing in foreign-language printing or take extended risks by printing hard-to-distribute, expensive plate books. Lydia Bailey spread her risks by taking on a wide range of printing. She did not devote her office to the printing of a particular genre, such as medical, mathematical, or scientific textbooks, travel books, or academic printing. She never got into the often risky, highprofile, and controversial business of newspaper printing, no doubt partially because of her gender. Her publishing activities were confined chiefly to the T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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title whose copyright she inherited from her husband and a few others used for self-promotion; these she marketed aggressively only during the early years when she was establishing her business. Thanks to the expanding demands of an increasingly literate society, Lydia Bailey could avoid all these risks and still do well, focusing on job, contract, and small-book printing. Bailey’s calculated course of job printing made her a successful pioneer in the field. Within four years of Robert Bailey’s death, she was winning praise for her sagacity; according to William McCulloch, a contemporary chronicler of the book trades, she “carried on the printing business with success and reputation.”145 The surviving workbooks Bailey kept demonstrate that this success was achieved through a blend of adherence to traditional values and ties and a modern and flexible approach to business. These documents are windows onto a bustling nineteenth-century printing operation, from which can be learned the story of her initial success—and her eventual shortcomings.146 Though Lydia Bailey probably knew how to set type and pull a press from her days as a printer’s wife, once her husband died she took on the role of “master printer.” As the owner of a traditional printing office, she was a combination of director, manager, and parent. She was responsible for the daily activities of the press, the monthly balancing of the books, and the continual care of her employees. As master of a printing office, Bailey held a highly respectable position in the community and obviously felt bound to uphold her reputation. A few years before her death, the staunch Presbyterian was offered a handsome rent for one of her houses by a businessman eager to turn it into “a drinking-saloon.” “What!” she protested, “rent my property opposite my own church for a tavern! Not if you give me six thousand dollars a year!”147 The focus on job printing brought new calculations and demands. Unlike a book publisher, Bailey’s profits did not depend on her ability to turn over stock. Rather, her business resembled that of her counterparts in the newspaper trade. Bailey had no need to build inventory, nor did she cope with the pressures of marketing or storing it. There was no risk of capital or advance production. Job printing was custom work to order, conducted on a cash basis; it depended on an active, regular, and reliable client base, prompt payments, discounts, and donations. Frequent deadlines needed to be met. Prompt efficiency was tantamount. Bailey achieved this standard with a shrewd business sense— keeping close watch over her accounts, resources, and employees; paying debts promptly; transacting business in cash whenever possible; giving immediate discounts to customers who promised her more work; and donating work to potentially valuable customers. When she inherited Francis’s and Robert’s account books, she shifted from their old-fashioned single-entry style of bookkeeping to the more modern, efficient, and mathematically more complicated 140

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mode of double entry.148 These accounts she kept constantly balanced through daily upkeep and notes and reminders to herself and others. Perhaps partially as a result of observing her husband’s notoriously poor business practices and her father-in-law Francis Bailey’s eventual bankruptcy, Lydia Bailey observed strict business habits as a protective measure for herself as well as others. Her workbooks list both jobs executed and those farmed out; items for resale, such as stationery supplies and titles not printed by her; and the purchases of supplies for the pressroom, such as ink, paper, furniture, and type. Her sources for these materials included most of the manufacturers of printing supplies in Philadelphia. Binny and Ronaldson furnished type. Unfortunately, there is no specific record of the number or types of presses she employed. She would have inherited her husband’s presses; less than two years later she traded in two old presses (each valued at $50) for two new presses, valued at $130 apiece. The latter were the local handiwork of Adam Ramage, a Scottish joiner who had established a nationwide reputation as the innovative designer of inexpensive and well-constructed wooden presses. Given the twenty or so regular employees listed in her workbooks, she probably had between four and six presses in operation, making her printing office midsize for the time.149 Bailey kept strict boundaries between her employees and herself. Her one son William Robert Bailey grew into the position of foreman and assumed immediate supervision over the printing operations.150 Though she maintained her distance, Bailey appears to have been a caring but very strict employer, who required appropriate behavior from subordinates, such as regular attendance at church, and demanded respect. As part of the apprenticeship system, still very much the norm despite the increasing numbers of independent journeymen, Bailey was obligated to provide shelter, food, clothing, and basic education. And all of her employees expected good working conditions and adequate pay. By all accounts, she rigorously lived up to those terms. One eyewitness recalled that the “printing office was compactly accommodated in rooms back of the store and dwelling and kept scrupulously clean—the stairs being scrubbed once a week and swept every day. Full price was paid for all work there, and the wages were always ready on Saturday afternoon.” At her death, one newspaper celebrated her achievement of “instruct[ing] 42 boys into the mysteries of typography”—many of whom became leading Philadelphia bookmen in their own right.151 In Bailey’s mind, there was evidently little separation between the supervision of employees and the rest of her business. She had the habit of scribbling down personal reflections in her workbooks and commenting on the activities surrounding her. Employees, whose moral behavior she attempted to control T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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through the exercise of economic power, were a frequent object of attention. In 1810 she met with local journeymen printers to negotiate a schedule of minimum wages and held fast in the face of pressure, smugly noting that “the journeymen did not succeed in the above turnout.” And then there was the troublesome case of Robert P. King, who often “stayed out all night” and apparently engaged in “base” and “insulting” conduct with Bailey’s female servants. So offensive was King’s behavior that Bailey would not violate “delacasy” by “particularizing the facts,” which are “well known by every branch of my family.” The furious Bailey determined to withhold his wages, “which I trust . . . may be a solem warning to him.” But King was undaunted; he successfully sued Bailey for back pay, but lost on her appeal to Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court. The relationship between master and apprentice, the court ruled, was “if not strictly parental . . . at least pupillary.” In her position of authority, Bailey was responsible for “the preservation of his [an apprentice’s] morals,” and had she not taken disciplinary action against the insubordinate King, “she would, at the same moment, have ceased to be the mistress of her shop.”152 As organized and strong-willed as she was, Bailey relied heavily on those around her to achieve success. Patronage was traditionally essential to any successful printer’s operations, and familial influence often proved the most important source. So it was with Bailey. Through her own family and her husband’s, she was well connected to printers and politicians throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. Her uncle John Steele was a printer and paper manufacturer, a member of the Pennsylvania state legislature from 1801, and Speaker of the Senate in 1805.153 In 1808, President Jefferson appointed him collector of customs for the Port of Philadelphia, a federal post he held for more than two decades. Thanks to that fortuitous event, Bailey secured the contract to print hundreds of “blank forms” (i.e., legal documents, blank books, sales slips, deeds, certificates, bills of lading) for the port. Five years later, Steele was elected to the Philadelphia City Council. Bailey’s fortunes followed her uncle’s. Upon his election to the council, she was appointed city printer, a post she held until the mid-1850s. This position provided her the contacts needed to obtain work from a host of municipal bodies—the Sheriff ’s Office, the Registry of Wills, the Select and Common councils, the Gas Works, and the Watering Committee, and various aldermen and prothonotaries—at the very onset of her career. As official printer and political insider, she won further lucrative contracts with such high-profile institutions as the Philadelphia Athenaeum, the University of Pennsylvania, and innumerable railroads, canal companies, and banks. The political nature of much urban printing during the early republic is demonstrated clearly in a number of patronage-related incidents in Bailey’s life. One featured Philip Freneau, the “poet of the American Revolution” and close 142

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Republican associate of Francis Bailey. In 1809, less than a year after Robert’s death, Freneau agreed to the republication of his collected poems “for the benefit of, and to assist Mrs. Bailey.”154 He oversaw the editing and printing, soliciting subscriptions from President Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison. At the same time Bailey herself took the personal initiative of marketing the volumes, distributing hundreds of copies to local booksellers to sell, some on commission.155 Despite her gender, Bailey was deeply involved in party politics throughout all her years in trade. Through family and business associates such as Freneau, she had close ties to the Jeffersonian-Republican camp. Political patronage was essential to her survival as an urban job printer, as an incident from the 1820s made plain. Bailey’s family and associates lined up behind Andrew Jackson in his battle for power against John Quincy Adams. Unfortunately, her uncle John Steele died in 1827, as the jockeying for advantage in the next year’s presidential election was intensifying, and Adams replaced Steele with a supporter in the Philadelphia Customs House. Bailey promptly lost the lucrative contract she had long held for the Customs House printing. Almost overnight, her situation became a cause célèbre. Calling attention to the plight of Lydia Bailey as an “industrious parent” and “an unresisting woman—too humble in her sphere and her employment to give eclat to those who injured her,” the Jacksonian press denounced the Adams administration for waging “a war on women.” At that year’s Jacksonian Fourth of July celebration, the injured Bailey was invoked repeatedly. Angry voices roasted “the administration who took from the widow and orphan children the printing of the Custom House” and swore that “disgraced defeat is the result when the widow and the fatherless are sacrificed at the shrine of a parasite’s ambition.” (Actually, Bailey’s youngest child was about twenty years old, well on the way to independence.) Bailey herself said nothing during the controversy. The best course for a woman was to suffer in silence, unlike the many male printers who regularly engaged in public debate. That tactic was also smart politics. Bailey scribbled the toasts in one of her workbooks and bided her time. When Jackson rode into power in 1829, the Bailey firm got the Custom House printing back.156 Few urban printers employed their presses for clients beyond the metropolitan area. Like her predecessors in both North America and Europe, Bailey focused on local demand. Fortunately, Philadelphia was developing into a major center of publishing, whose leading firms, shipping books far and wide throughout the republic, created a steady demand for local printers. Seizing the opportunities, Bailey cultivated very profitable relationships with many prominent Philadelphia publishers, including Johnson & Warner (for whom she printed hundreds of chapbooks, hornbooks, pamphlets, and wrappers), Bradford & T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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Inskeep, the Conrads, Bennet & Walton, the Desilvers, and Kimber & Sharpless, but without question her most significant client was Mathew Carey, the leading publisher of the early republic. Bailey inherited this business relationship from Francis and Robert Bailey and built it up over the years. Carey contracted with many printers, and initially he relied on Bailey for small but copious jobs: finishing maps; printing almanacs, pamphlets, catalogs, prospectuses, forms, circulars, and wrappers; and stitching a variety of volumes. Such work continued a mainstay of their partnership, but it was not long before Bailey took on more and bigger projects, particularly books both published and written by Carey; the association eventually generated tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of business a year. While Bailey by no means monopolized and in fact shared many individual jobs with other printers in town (a typical practice of the time), it is clear that she was a principal source for his printing. The charitable Carey also looked out for the industrious widow by directing work to her from such benevolent organizations as the Female Hospitable Society, St. Mary’s Church, and the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, on all of whose governing boards he sat.157 While Bailey benefited from male patrons, she exercised her own initiative and tapped into a wide range of clients—book publishers, municipal and civic organizations, religious and philanthropic societies, educational institutions, would-be authors, and entrepreneurs from all walks of life. Her religious faith paid off in more ways than one. She did the printing for her own church, the Third Presbyterian (“Old Pine Street”) Church, and secured work with other denominations as well, enjoying regular contracts with Quaker, Catholic, and Jewish charities and scores of tract societies, benevolent organizations, and churches. Even the Swedenborgian church, which her late father-in-law Francis Bailey had helped to found, supplied considerable trade. The religious diversity and toleration for which Philadelphia was well known made for good business. In actual dollars, it is hard to know how much Bailey’s firm earned annually. Her incomplete account books make it difficult to track exact annual figures. However, her success can be gauged by certain indicators. For instance, by 1831 her map finishing business alone showed an annual profit of more than $2,000. And by the time of her death in 1869, Bailey owned numerous properties in Philadelphia, some land in Missouri, and a sizable amount of stock in various utilities and railroad companies.158 Clearly, her shrewdness paid off: Bailey took a traditional business, built on her knowledge and contacts, adapted to an expanding market for ephemera and job printing, and thrived in an overwhelmingly male trade. When Lydia Bailey’s son, the foreman of her office, died in 1861, the aging 144

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Bailey finally decided to retire at the formidable age of 82. By then, her shop was obsolete, with most of her presses probably more than fifty years old. Bailey never took the plunge into the new industry of steam printing. Her business was rooted in and thrived upon the simple, solid production processes of nonautomated machinery, a dependable, predictable workforce that had been put into place generations before her, and traditional political patronage. Consequently, she was a keen competitor when she started out, publishing occasionally, doing a wide range of book and job printing, and printing for a majority of the publishers in town. She took advantage of traditional patronage to develop multiple public and municipal contracts; these secured her plentiful work, minimizing her need to compete in the commercial marketplace. But having failed to modernize her printing office, clinging to predominantly apprentice-trained labor, and dependent on familial patronage for work, she watched her business steadily dwindle. By the end of her days as a master printer, Lydia Bailey was a remnant of earlier times.

PA R T 4

“Printing is something every village has in it”: Rural Printing and Publishing

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Jack Larkin . . . One story of rural printing and publishing in the early republic is a heroic tale. A country printer and editor arrives at the behest of the “wide awake” men of the rising village. His work brings books, news, and “intelligence” to the developing countryside, helping to knit communities and regions together and to elevate the local culture. Another story is more prosaic. A country printer arrives, having borrowed heavily for his building, his presses, and his type. He faces an uncertain prospect of success, with reluctant advertisers, defaulting subscribers, customers who wish to pay in bushels of corn, local politicians who want to dictate his editorials, and a hinterland often indifferent to books and ideas. Both narratives were true.159 American printing began in seaport cities and colonial seats of government. Few inland communities had enough wealth, population density, and level of demand to sustain the production of books, pamphlets, and newspapers. Printing initially moved out into the countryside during the Revolution under the T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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stress of events—most famously instanced in the career of Isaiah Thomas, who moved his presses and the newspaper, Massachusetts Spy, from besieged Boston to the relative safety of the inland community of Worcester.160 Thomas remained in Worcester after the Revolution, and rural printing both endured and expanded. Printing offices became a characteristic feature of the commercial villages emerging in the American countryside, and printers moved westward alongside farmers, merchants, and other artisans. This process can be tracked for a sample of states—Thomas’s Massachusetts, Vermont, New York, and North Carolina. At the end of the Revolution in 1783, these jurisdictions could show only six towns (Boston, Worcester, Bennington, New York City, Albany, and New Bern) where newspapers were printed. By 1790, that number rose to fifteen; by 1800 it had tripled to forty-six, and by 1820 there were ninety-nine (table 2.6). Rural printers were in the countryside but not entirely of it. They dealt not only with ink and type but with a sense of cultural dislocation and ceaseless economic strain. Artisan-businessmen trying to make a living, they were important participants in vast and expanding new networks of information circulation and book distribution. A good deal of what they printed and sold—sermons, almanacs, primers, devotional works, other “useful books”—would have been familiar in the eighteenth century, as would the payments they received in the form of firewood, cheese, and grain. Their situation was not so much paradoxical as transitional. Country printers were always the bringers of news and producers of print and sometimes the presenters of change, but their work was profoundly shaped by the rural communities in which they lived and worked. Between 1790 and 1840, the area of the United States doubled, its population quadrupled, cities multiplied, and the output of American presses expanded even more dramatically. But the book trades, rural and urban alike, kept ahead of the demographic trends. Decade by decade, the number of recorded imprints outpaced the increase of population, while the size of editions and print runs grew.161 The census of 1840 counted 1,573 printing offices employing 11,622 workers and issuing 1,303 newspapers. Two-thirds of all those printing offices, three-fourths of all weekly newspapers, and half of all printers were located in places smaller than America’s fifty most populous counties—that is, in rural villages.162 City-dwelling Americans surely had easier access to print and on average probably read more. But most book purchasers and readers, and most newspaper subscribers lived in villages and on farms. Some aspects of printing and publishing in the new republic remained concentrated in the largest cities. “There are more books printed at New York and Philadelphia, than in all the rest of the Republic,” Samuel Goodrich’s System of Universal Geography claimed in 1832; those two cities alone accounted for more 146

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TABLE 2.6. Communities with printing offices, by state, 1790–1840 State Vermont Massachusetts New York North Carolina Total Illinois

1790

1800

1810

1820

1830

1840

2 6 4 3 15

7 13 20 6 46

10 12 31 6 59

12 14 62 11 99 4

18 30 74 16 138 8

23 28 94 20 165 27

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Sources: For Massachusetts and New York, data was compiled by the author from Clarence S. Brigham, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers 1690–1820 (Worcester, Mass.: AAS, 1947), 2 vols.; Winifred Gregory, ed., American Newspapers, 1821–1936 (New York, 1937). For Vermont, North Carolina, and Illinois, data were obtained from William S. Gilmore-Lehne, “The Rural Print Center 1790– 1840” (unpublished paper on file at American Antiquarian Society), appendix: table 2, “Vermont Print Center Development”; table 3, “North Carolina Print Center Development”; and table 4, “Illinois Print Center Development.”

than one-quarter of all workers and invested capital in the printing trades in 1840. Adding the next three largest printing centers—Boston, Cincinnati, and Baltimore—would have brought the large-city share to nearly 40 percent.163 A relief map representing not topography but the density of newspapers and printing offices would show great peaks in New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston; sizable ones in Cincinnati, Baltimore, New Orleans, and a few dozen smaller cities; then a rural landscape of many small hills, densest in the states of the Northeast and thinning gradually to the west. To the south, the hills would be farther apart, with wider stretches of emptiness. In the New England states, there was one printing office for every seven thousand people; in the coastal and gulf South, one for every eighteen thousand. Rural printing, like its urban counterpart, enjoyed an era of expansion in the early nineteenth century. Country newspapers grew steadily in number with the spread of settlement and functioned as important political, economic, and cultural institutions in their communities. In 1840 there were 157 towns publishing newspapers in the states of Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, and North Carolina—a tenfold increase since 1790—and the number of newspaper towns in Illinois had swelled sevenfold since statehood in 1818. Although probably smaller as a proportion of the nation’s total print production, the output of books and pamphlets from rural presses was considerably greater in 1840 than it had been in 1790—as the sheer number of country printing offices multiplied.164 Although more complex in their cultural meanings as crystallized thought and information, books resembled textiles and shoes as products of an econT H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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omy enjoying a new material abundance. Newspapers too were both commodities—sheets to be sold—and, through the extensive advertising and the prices current they carried, important instruments of commerce. All were produced in bulk, manufactured in villages as well as cities, and brought to consumers through a wide variety of links leading down to retail trade in country neighborhoods. Country printers were booksellers as well as editors and local publishers. Their bookstores were critical distribution points, intermediaries between rural purchasers and country stores and the larger-scale flows of the book trade. As producers and distributors, country printers helped create the early republic’s new world of print.

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The Printing Office The setting of the rural printing office was the commercial village, a small outpost of urban life. Even in the far-flung American countryside, printers were almost never found out among the scattered farms and rarely in tiny hamlets with only a store, tavern, and blacksmith stand. Like other more specialized craftsmen and merchants, they worked in central places devoted to commerce and the professions, villages that dominated local trade and communications, structured rural social and religious life, and most often served as seats of local government, with courthouse and jail.165 Printers in the early nineteenth century experienced major changes in the technology of their craft. But innovation was largely confined to the cities. Despite their urban ethos, country printers remained small-scale and technologically conservative, for the most part tied to hand presses and small, multipurpose printing offices. The capital costs of new equipment clearly held them back. Many rural offices used elderly wooden Ramage presses well into the 1820s. Eager to find affordable equipment, country printers sometimes bought secondhand presses their city cousins spurned as obsolete. In New England and New York, “improved” iron presses were in widespread rural use by 1830. A few country printers, such as the Merriams of Brookfield, Massachusetts, who produced books on a large scale, invested in stereotype plates to print editions of schoolbooks by the early 1830s. By 1840 the most ambitious country printers were purchasing used hand-operated rotary presses and a little later powering them with small steam engines.166 The country printing office was also a theater of cultural and economic interaction. In most country offices, exchange newspapers carried on the mail stage came weekly delivering political news and business intelligence into the hands of their printer-editors. They pulled news copy together from the exchange papers, penned editorials, chose excerpts in prose or verse, selected items 148

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of local interest, and organized the advertisements, legal notices, and reports of current agricultural prices in city markets. Every week village subscribers walked in to pick up their newspapers. Post riders came in for their bundles of papers to deliver to places deeper in the countryside. Local merchants and artisans, patent medicine manufacturers, and itinerant dancing masters, acting troupes, and lecturers walked in with advertisements. Officials brought legal notices from the county courthouse. Others came into the office with requests for job printing—business and legal forms, announcements, invitations, and political or advertising broadsides. Clergymen and lawyers arrived to arrange the pamphlet publication of sermons and orations, churches’ rules of discipline, and statements of faith. Customers of all sorts browsed the variety of books on sale, both those imprints issued by the printer and those issued “for the country trade” by city publishers: almanacs, toy books for children, schoolbooks, Bibles, dictionaries, works of history, travel, fiction, advice, and religious devotion.167 Country printing offices, like potteries and blacksmith’s shops, stores and taverns, had their own rhythms of work, partially responding to the overall pattern of agriculture in their communities. The dominant one for most offices was the weekly frenzy of assembling, writing, composing, printing, and delivering the newspaper. Longer cycles were superimposed—the need to get schoolbooks printed or shipped from other publishers by school’s beginning in the late fall and the necessity of having almanacs ready for purchasers in December and January. In their retail trade, country bookstores, at least in the North, followed seasonal patterns similar to those of country stores—limited business in the dead of winter, brisk activity in the spring, a deep trough in the summer months of hoeing, haying, and harvesting, and a peak of trade in the post-harvest months of October, November, and December.168

Printer and Community Country people saw printers as different from the other merchants and craftsmen with whom they lived and traded. In its complexity and its association with learning, the printing trade was somehow alien and linked to the city. Printing was an urban art, not a rural craft. Lyman Whiting of Brookfield, Massachusetts, recalled his boyhood in the early 1820s and “the curious awe felt as we walked by the long, low and unpainted ‘Printing House.’ . . . How precious a single capital P was esteemed which a lad had brought from the ‘house.’ The spirit of knowledge seemed to lurk in the dull lead.”169 The intricacy of the printer’s trade made it “sort of a mystery,” thought William Dean Howells, whose father operated printing offices in rural Ohio during the 1830s and 1840s, and its comT H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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paratively meager financial rewards were equally puzzling: the “fellow-citizens” of the printer “see him following his strange calling among them, but to neither wealth nor worship, and they cannot understand why he does not take up something else.”170 If printing appeared exotic, it also offered attraction and fascination. Some country printing offices were “the centre of civic and social interest . . . frequented by visitors at all times.” Howells looked back on his father’s rural Ohio office as the place where “the village wits . . . dropped in. There were several of these who were readers, and they liked to stand with their backs to our stove, and challenge opinion concerning Holmes and Poe, Irving and Macaulay, Pope and Byron, Dickens and Shakespeare.” Newspaper offices, with their weekly supply of information, were particularly likely to attract visitors eager for the latest news.171 By contrast, the specialized shop run by the Merriams of central Massachusetts held limited appeal. It was a scene of unremitting work, and though it, too, sold Shakespeare, Pope, and Scott, young men went elsewhere to talk about books and ideas.172 “Our wish is to establish a press among us,” announced the hopeful new printers of the Elizabeth City (N.C.) Intelligencer and Nag’s Head Advocate in 1840, “and to supply the people of this District with a paper mainly devoted to their peculiar and local interests.” Usually, the most sharply defined of those interests were local political allegiances, and the Elizabeth City editors made it clear that they were strong Whigs, confident that the community “will gladly sustain us in our efforts.” Only a few country newspapers were founded or directly subsidized by party organizations, but virtually all were in significant part instruments of political advocacy, taking partisan positions on state and national issues and candidates. With few exceptions, country printers found their editorial role constrained by the views of their backers and the prevailing opinion in their communities. In the six months or so before national elections, most country papers substantially increased their focus on politics and raised the political temperature of their own editorials.173 Focused on making a living, most country printers either shared their compatriots’ views wholeheartedly or were pragmatic about aligning their political expression with the community. Some, however, found compromise more difficult. Hamilton, Ohio, also had a Whig-leaning Intelligencer in 1840, and its printer’s son remembered that it was “edited to the confusion of the Locofocos, and in the especial interest of Henry Clay.” Editor William Cooper Howells soon gave the paper up because community sentiment in Hamilton, close to the Kentucky line, would not allow him to express his increasing opposition to slavery. He went on more happily to edit newspapers in Ashtabula and Jefferson in northeastern Ohio, where Free-Soilers were in the majority.174 150

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A Chancy Business Who most rural printers were and how far and how often they traveled in the countryside are not known with any certainty. We have little in the way of collective biography, but some examples mark out the range of their experience. Certainly, there was a great deal of mobility and discontinuity for proprietors and workers alike. Ebenezer Merriam was truly exceptional in his longevity and stability. In 1798, just out of his apprenticeship, he established an office in Brookfield, Massachusetts, and never left, retiring after fifty years of printing, in 1848. At the other end of the range there was Edwin Fobes, who apprenticed in a Massachusetts office, found journeyman’s work “tiring on the eyes,” abandoned the trade within a year, and became a piano tuner.175 Country-trained printers from New England and New York were described as sober and hardworking men who hoped “somehow to get hold of a country paper and become editors and publishers.” Certainly a relative handful of longsurviving rural offices in the Northeast trained many printers of that generation. Between 1798 and 1848, the Merriam printing office produced sixty-two fully trained journeymen who “went through a regular apprenticeship” in addition to others who came and went. William Williams’s printing office in the village of Utica, New York, trained at least fifty. His wife sometimes had to feed and clothe eight apprentices at once, and late in his career Williams noted in a letter that “several of my former apprentices have been very successful in Ohio.”176 Some northern-trained printers moved south, but they do not appear to have been in the majority. Of eighteen “practical printers” who were identified as editors for North Carolina newspapers between 1790 and 1850, three were New Englanders, nine native North Carolinians, and five from elsewhere in the South.177 In significant but uncertain numbers printers migrated in both directions between city and country. Horace Greeley’s autobiography portrays him as a Vermont country printer whose skills, hard work, and integrity enabled him to conquer “the commercial emporium” of New York City. Conversely, some city-trained journeymen coming into the country were pictured as true vagabonds, given to the disorderly ways of traditional urban craftsmen—wayward, intemperate, and indifferent to upward mobility. Many a one, thought Howells, “was too apt to be sober only when he had not the means to be otherwise, and who arrived out of the unknown with nothing in his pocket, and departed into it with only money enough to carry him to the next printing office.”178 Whether scapegraces or paragons, virtually all rural journeymen were birds of passage. Given the small scale and uneven flow of work in country offices, they seem to have journeyed more often and farther than other American artisans. Even in the Merriam office, where long-term relationships were prized, T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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all but one of the seven journeymen who worked there between 1819 and 1833 stayed no more than a year and a half. Thurlow Weed apprenticed in Utica, New York, and spent eight years as a journeyman printing books and newspapers. He worked in twenty different offices until he achieved proprietorship as a country publisher in 1821.179 Weed was one of rural printing’s great successes—a man who rose from a country apprentice to become a prominent editor in Albany and eventually a major political figure in his own right. Most of the journeymen who started off with him faced not only years of virtual itinerancy but very uncertain chances of permanence. Many young men—just what proportion they were of all country journeymen is unclear—aspired to independent proprietorship as a printer and publisher. But it was always a risky venture. A printing office needed to be housed in a substantial building. Capital costs—for press, type, and other printing equipment—were substantially higher than for other artisans. Paper was indispensable and expensive. One path toward independent ownership was to become a junior partner, supplying the printing skills and effort while others provided office, equipment, and working capital. Between 1793 and 1817, the great Massachusetts printer Isaiah Thomas put four different young printers in business as working junior partners in the office he owned in Walpole, New Hampshire. Only one worked out successfully, whether due to incompetence, ill luck, or Thomas’s well-known irascibility.180 Occasionally, party organizations sponsored a young printer-editor to ensure that he would come into a new community and strike in on the right side; stringent political strings came attached. Most commonly, young printers went into debt for the equipment and often the building, just as country merchants customarily did—borrowing from family, local supporters, or private lenders. They then faced a continuing struggle to repay their debts while continuing operations.181 Country editors’ addresses to their readers reflected this chronic economic strain. “We retain the old-fashioned custom of eating yet,” the publishers of the Brookfield (Mass.) Moral and Political Telegraphe reminded their slow-paying subscribers in 1795.182 They were in a chancy business, and the rate of failure was high. The economic perils of rural publishing were well known to those in the trade. In September of 1830, the editor of the Worcester Massachusetts Spy discussed the evanescence of country newspapers—noting the recent failures of the Groton (Mass.) Herald and the Middlebury Vermont American. “Nothing, perhaps, is more deceptive and delusive than the prospects held out for the establishment of new newspapers,” he argued. He was right. Between 1790 and 1840, thirty newspapers were begun in the rural towns of Worcester County in central Massachusetts, the home region of the Spy. In 1840 five remained in 152

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publication. Their mean life-span had been just under three years. These figures are strikingly consistent with more broad-gauged findings—for Vermont, North Carolina, and Illinois—that more than half of all country printing offices established between 1790 and 1840 had disappeared within three years. This short tenure was not for lack of trying. Many rural journeymen—likely the majority—aspired unsuccessfully to independent proprietorships. They consequently continued as journeymen in the country, went to the city, or left the trade altogether. They would never own the printer’s means of production— office, press, and type.183 All told, country printers produced millions of newspaper pages, printed thousands of books and innumerable pamphlets, and distributed many more. Yet their rewards, other than the satisfactions of work well done, were often relatively slight. William Williams printed for more than thirty years in the village of Utica, New York, until his affairs became overextended and his creditors took the business in 1834. Ebenezer Merriam of Massachusetts sustained an office for fifty years, yet his memoirs are suffused with a sense of constant strain and struggle. The most dramatic scene describes a midnight raid by the office’s creditors in 1815, seizing property to secure the payment of overdue notes, which were financing a large edition of the Bible. In summing up the economic balance sheet of his printing life, he admitted that “my losses have been heavy, besides smaller debts in abundance.” He had begun printing “without pecuniary means, and shall probably leave the world in the same.” His reflections were echoed by William Dean Howells’s conclusions about his father, that the country printer was “a man who is willing to wear his life out in a vocation which keeps him poor and dependent.”184

Printing and the Rural Economy Country printers had to embed themselves in the economic fabric of their communities to succeed. “Payment was made in kind rather than in coin,” it was recalled of rural Ohio, “and every sort of farm produce was legal tender at the printing-office.” Newspaper subscriptions, books, stationery, printing jobs, most advertisements: all were paid for within the system of rural exchange—a system that ran on account book debit and credit and the imputation of monetary value to all kinds of produce, labor, and services. “We have many subscribers in this County, who have contracted to pay us in wood and other articles,” proclaimed the printers of the Springfield (Ill.) Sangamo Journal, and “we must have the articles as they become due.” Printers needed to find, often through painful experimentation, ways to turn a flow of rural produce, goods, and labor services into a livelihood.185 T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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The smallest element in every printing office’s economic network was a web of kinship, co-residence, and employment. Wives, as well as sons and daughters, sometimes took on the less physically demanding work of the office. Printers’ children might set type, standing on a stool before the case, before they reached their teens. Apprentices had to be fed and clothed, and means of payment found for journeymen. The next stage was a larger web of local exchange with farm families and craftsmen, for newspaper subscriptions, bookstore purchases, and job printing. Each office kept accounts with families in its trading network; periodically they came in to settle up—with beef, butter, cheese, wool, cotton, or tobacco, with blacksmithing or carpentry work, or with the loan of horses, wagons, and plows. In the South, likely enough, a printer’s account might be settled from time to time with the rented labor of a slave. A third network was a commercial and governmental one, which included exchanges for newspaper advertising with merchants and rural manufacturers; these might be settled with store goods and promissory notes, so that a journeyman would be paid his wages with an order on a country store. Perhaps most highly valued, because usually paid in cash, were patent medicine advertising and the printing of legal advertising from the courts and county governments.186 For offices that concentrated solely or primarily on newspaper publishing, the economic problem was difficult but not highly complex. They simply needed to maximize their earnings from subscriptions and advertisements; the year-end appeals to delinquent subscribers that appear in virtually all newspapers are testimony that this was a never-ending struggle. Those offices that also printed books and ran country bookstores operated within a larger and more complex world: the distribution networks of the American book trade. Books took many paths into the American countryside. Book peddlers carried city publishers’ works directly into rural neighborhoods. For religious works, the city-based agents of the American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, and the American Sunday-School Union, among others, canvassed extensively in the countryside. Lecturers and agents for the American AntiSlavery Society brought the Liberator and the Anti-Slavery Almanac into the rural North. Country storekeepers might order arithmetic books and spellers on their buying trips into the city.187 But country printers and booksellers played an enduringly important and in many places dominant role in book distribution. Newspaper offices that also published books were able to advertise their wares extensively in their hinterlands. Other printer-publishers created new ways to bring the bookstore’s wares into the countryside and developed their own wholesaling networks of country stores.188 Selling books in the countryside involved finding not only purchasers but means of payment. Book publishers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cin154

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cinnati, and Baltimore needed to sell in rural markets but surely preferred not to deal with large quantities of rural exchange in return. One solution was provided by rural book publishers, who could distribute books in the countryside if they could pay for them with their own publications. Homer Merriam explained how the system worked, at least for rural New England and New York: “The country printer would order from the city publishers his publications as needed, he to take ours as payment. He would therefore push the sales of the books published by the country printers.”189 Country bookstores were then able to stock a salable mix of city publishers’ books along with their own locally published ones. But retail book selling in a village store was by itself not an adequate vehicle of distribution. For greater reach into the countryside, successful printer-booksellers became wholesalers of books to rural storekeepers, creating “assortments for the country trade.” Nearer at hand and able to take rural exchange in payment, they made it easier for country merchants to stock schoolbooks and almanacs for purchasers who rarely came to the county seat and might never enter a bookstore. In return, rural printers put in long hours making the exchange system work. They hauled almanacs and schoolbooks into rural neighborhoods and then, as Homer Merriam recalled, returned to collect payment—“often going out for a day, with a horse and wagon, visiting a circuit of perhaps three or four towns, and perhaps ten merchants in those towns, gathering up goods . . . calico for a dress . . . handkerchiefs, gloves of cotton cloth, cloth for coats or pantaloons for the apprentices . . . family stores, groceries.”190 Ebenezer Merriam and his brother Dan began as country newspaper publishers but gave up the paper in 1802 after five years of declining returns; he and his partner then turned their full attention to “book-work.” They produced a steady stream of imprints, including Bibles, Testaments, dictionaries, pocket encyclopedias, works of religious instruction and devotion, and school readers. They sold some of this output directly through their bookstore and rural networks but used most for exchange with city publishers. Only once did the Merriams attempt to publish a novel, taking a chance in 1819 on an edition of Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth. Half of the copies went to city bookstores, but the remainder sold so poorly in the conservative countryside—virtually the only purchasers were the office’s own apprentices—that they never repeated the experiment. From their location in the central Massachusetts countryside, the Merriams had book distribution relationships with some twenty printer-publishers in the Northeast between 1819 and 1833. They traded most extensively with firms in Worcester, Hartford, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Albany, but their network extended from Pittsburgh to Portland, Maine.191 T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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In Cooperstown, New York, Henry and Elihu Phinney Jr., also established a long-enduring enterprise devoted to rural book publishing. Their path was easier than the Merriams’, however; their father, Elihu Phinney Sr., had been the village’s first printer and publisher, an economically successful community leader who was first an ally and then an adversary of the village’s founder, Judge William Cooper. The younger Phinneys began book printing in 1807–8 and gave up newspaper publishing in 1821 to concentrate on bookwork. They printed almanacs, children’s books ranging from thirty-page “toys” to illustrated versions of The Tale of Bluebeard and Aesop’s Fables, singing instruction books, maternal advice books, large quantities of readers and spellers, and Bibles and Bible paraphrases. The Phinneys also produced Cooperstown imprints for works by the community’s most famous son, James Fenimore Cooper—testimony that the younger generation had resolved their fathers’ painful quarrel. Like the Merriams, the Phinneys traded extensively with city publishers and wholesaled to country stores; at the peak of their success in 1838, they were printing and distributing some sixty thousand books a year.192 Through such arrangements, many country-published works found their way into the main arteries of the book trade and were bought and read far away. This pattern could persist so long as the circulatory system of the book trade, elaborating arrangements developed in the late colonial period, remained a twoway flow of printed matter. A country printer who did not or could not participate in book exchange with other publishers undoubtedly found the distribution of his publications limited. It is likely that cash was becoming a significant problem for most country printers by the 1830s. Papermakers, their most crucial suppliers, had earlier been satisfied to take a substantial portion of their payment in country exchange or books. Increasingly, as early as the mid-1820s in New England, they began to demand payment in cash. Printers then had to find real money in a countryside that was chronically short of it. The Merriams solved this problem by undertaking contract printing for large city publishers who could pay in bank notes and commercial bills. Undercutting urban wage rates by using apprentices and paying for work in rural exchange, they produced law books, dictionaries, and medical texts in Brookfield that would be issued with a New York, Philadelphia, or Boston imprint. The contract payments went to pay the paper bills, keeping the office afloat. The Merriam printing office’s accounts, by far the most extensive and detailed business records now available for any rural printer, reveal how they developed these innovative strategies for staying solvent, mediating between an increasingly centralized system of book production and distribution and the cash-short rural economy in which they lived. Yet this pattern of rural adaptation was not to endure. Homer Merriam, who went from Brookfield to 156

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run printing office bookstores in other rural communities in Massachusetts and New York, was a close observer of his trade. As he saw it, the world of successful rural book publishing ended around 1845. “A change was made,” he noted ruefully, so that the “balance of exchange accounts were to be paid in cash, and the city publisher, instead of ordering our books, accumulated cash balances against us.” Country publishers first lost the ability to pay for the paper they needed with books; twenty years later they lost the ability to pay for the other books they needed with their own titles. The structure of rural book production was fatally undermined, and it went into a sharp decline. Afterward, far fewer country publications would be included in the great national and regional streams of book distribution.193

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Rural Printers and Rural Readers: North and South Rural printers, North and South, worked in very different countrysides. Where levels of literacy were low, printers were few and far between. In northern states with near-universal literacy, as reported on the 1840 federal census, there was one printing office for every 8,000 people. By contrast, in slaveholding states of the South, adult illiteracy was more common, ranging from 11 percent to 28 percent of the white population, and printing offices were correspondingly sparse, with one for every 18,000 people. Indiana and Illinois, states where streams of migration converged from both North and South, were poised between, with adult illiteracy rates of 14 percent and one printing office for every 10,500 people.194 The constituencies and customer networks for southern printers were thus smaller than for those in Vermont or Ohio. Printing offices, newspapers, and bookstores necessarily focused on the planter elite and other slaveholders along with a scattering of village professionals and merchants and probably the best off among smaller farmers and artisans. Newspaper subscribers had privileged access to information, book purchasers were considerably fewer, and print was marginal to the conduct of life for many.195 In the North, the penetration of print depended on the fine scale of rural geography and the economic structure of rural communities. The most important commercial villages had printing offices, usually with associated bookstores. Smaller ones had country stores with more modest and utilitarian selections of books on their shelves. Thriving farm neighborhoods on good soil received newspapers by post rider and had decent roads to the villages. “Hardscrabble” settlements, on marginal land and farthest away, had the most limited access to newspapers and the highest proportion of households without books.196 With circulations that seem to have ranged from four hundred to twelve hundred or so, rural newspapers had a substantial but far from universal reach into the T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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countryside. The effective readership of a country newspaper was always somewhat larger than its business accounts would have suggested. Neighbors shared subscriptions and informally passed newspapers along; others read them in taverns and country stores. Still, the circulation records for the Northampton (Mass.) Hampshire Gazette for the 1820s provide evidence for the overall pattern. They indicate that about one-sixth of the households subscribed in Northampton itself, the county seat, and in the fast-growing manufacturing town of Ware; these communities contained the largest village populations. In smaller, chiefly agricultural towns, subscribers were fewer, approximately one household in twelve.197 Rural book ownership in the northern countryside has been studied using probate inventories for towns in the upper Connecticut valley of Vermont and in central Massachusetts, taken between 1790 and 1840. The patterns for both areas are similar and tell a complex, qualified story of change. Consistently over the decades, three groups of households stand out. Some 40 percent of the households had no books at all, not even a Bible, a proportion that changed little over time; 30 percent possessed small libraries, containing five books or fewer, a proportion that also remained constant, although the mean size of their libraries increased gradually over time. A final 30 percent of inventoried households had more substantial libraries, with significant increases in size each decade. Book holding roughly correlated with wealth, with the exceptions of impecunious professional men and prosperous but nonreading farmers.198 For the bookless households in both southern and northern New England, not too much can be said; as noted before, many of them may have had newspapers, almanacs, toy books, and pamphlets that were not listed for probate. The smaller libraries—heavy on scripture, traditional religious works, and a schoolbook or two—resembled the one that Henry Dana Ward saw in the house of his uncle Ithamar in Phillipston, Massachusetts, in 1823: “On the mantelpiece at his right hand, lay folded the newspapers of the day, Morse’s Geography, a treatise about infant baptism, and the Bible. His has been a farmer’s life.”199 The bookless and small-library inventories primarily belonged to farmers and craftsmen. The upper 30 percent of inventories identified families that were buying and reading books in significant and increasing numbers. Their book collections grew substantially over the years, doubling from six or seven in 1790–1800 to twelve or fourteen in 1830–40. These probated heads of households were to a large extent men of the village, not the farms—professionals, merchants, rural manufacturers—along with the wealthiest farmers. Their inventories included professional libraries and also works of history, travel, advice, poetry, and fiction. 158

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To the extent that we have specific evidence, book sales in the northern countryside between 1790 and 1840 reflect similar patterns. The titles distributed by country publisher-booksellers, both their own and those of other firms, combined the traditional, the utilitarian, and the modestly innovative. Almanacs and toy books for children were sold by the many thousands each year. Bibles and Testaments, hymnbooks, and religious works, ranging from seventeenth-century classics of Protestant devotion to new meldings of scripture and science, sold steadily as well. Not far behind were dictionaries, pocket encyclopedias, state registers, and elementary manuals of local government. A small fraction of booksellers’ stock consisted of imaginative and reflective works—novels, histories, works of travel, and natural history—sold to well-todo families and young men.200 Schoolbooks were the countryside’s true best sellers—a stream of primers, spellers, graded readers, arithmetics, geographies, and histories of the United States, whose sale was “inferior” only “to that of bread-stuffs and beef,” in the words of English traveler Francis Grund.201 In the Merriam book-selling accounts for the late 1820s and early 1830, schoolbooks made up nearly 60 percent of the total volume of sales. Both the Williams and Phinney brothers firms in rural New York devoted most of their production and sales to schoolbooks as well. Probably there were more schoolbooks in rural households than these inventories alone indicate. Households with school-age children were underrepresented, and texts may not have long survived use by multiple readers. Children’s readers and geographies might well have been considered as personal property, like their clothing, and hence excluded from the parent’s estate. The most powerful thrust of publishing and reading in the countryside was the transmission of elementary literacy, numeracy, and basic knowledge of the world to the younger generation. This story lacks the drama of a full-blown “reading revolution” in the northern countryside. Although there were many more rural readers in Vermont and Massachusetts than in North Carolina, most were sparing of time to read, did not invest a great deal in books, and read along traditionally religious and utilitarian lines. However, a significant minority in the villages and a few from the farms were buying and reading a greater variety of books and perhaps reading them differently. Young people were the great rural readers of the early nineteenth century. Silas Felton of Marlborough, Massachusetts, was age twenty-six in 1802 when he drew up a systematic list of more than one hundred books that he had read. As a bookbinding apprentice, Homer Merriam accumulated a shelf of some forty books before he was twenty years old. In a single year, he read through “more than ten thousand pages . . . mostly novels or the most exciting scenes of T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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history, as the French Revolution.” Theirs was a world that has been called the “Village enlightenment,” a network of academies, social libraries, and reading rooms, lyceums and debating clubs, public lectures and musical concerts, all sustaining a popular hunger for useful information and more extensive and adventurous reading. Yet even here there seems to have been some complexity of response. Silas Felton used his expansive reading to shape his adult identity and to create a position of leadership in his community. Homer Merriam came to regard his as a youthful indiscretion. It had overstimulated his imagination, he thought, and diminished his powers of concentration and memory—reducing his fitness for the work of a rural publisher and bookseller.202

PA R T 5

“Of the paper cap and inky apron”: Journeymen Printers

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William S. Pretzer . . . On 9 April 1840, twenty-six-year-old Thomas Chamberlain, an English-born journeyman printer traveling from job to job in New York State, decided to spend a day’s wages, $1.50, on a copy of Cornelius S. Van Winkle’s The Printers’ Guide, a manual on the practical art of printing.203 The volume was an adaptation of a London publication originally issued in 1808; first appearing in 1818 and containing an additional essay on grammar and punctuation in America, the New York edition gained an appreciative audience. The copy Chamberlain bought was probably the third and final edition, published in 1836. This American publication was one sign of the increasing economic maturity of the printing trade and testimony to the democratization of knowledge in the early republic. The Printers’ Guide took the secrets of the “art, trade, and mystery” of the craft and publicized them for interested readers. Containing guides to grammar, punctuation, foreign languages, unusual formats, lists of prices, and other business practices, such works were most useful to those already versed in the trade, notably, master printers, journeymen, proofreaders, and overseers. Unfortunately, by the time Chamberlain obtained his copy, it was nearly obsolete, because it gave no attention to recent innovations, including machine presses available in the United States.204 That was no problem for Chamberlain. Trained in the old ways, the young man found jobs in small 160

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offices where he could set type, impose pages, and operate a hand press. Van Winkle’s book may have been all he needed, but the trade itself was passing both of them by.205 In 1790 a boy embarking on an apprenticeship in printing was entering a traditional office little changed from the early eighteenth century. The type cases and two-pull wooden press would have been familiar to the new apprentice’s father or grandfather—and readily grasped by Gutenberg himself. As likely as not, nearly everything—press, type, paper, ink—was imported from England or Europe.206 The products of the press would have seemed equally familiar: a newspaper, the ephemeral forms known as job printing, almanacs, pamphlets, occasional books, and, of growing importance, government printing. Few offices counted more than the master printer, a journeyman or two, and a boy. Journeymen came and went as the work waxed and waned. Many stayed only for weeks or months, few for more than a year.207 Entering as an apprentice and encouraged by his parents, the boy would have cherished the prospect of progressing from bound apprentice to wage-earning journeyman and ultimately to master of his own shop. In the process, recalled Boston printer Joseph Buckingham, he would have been “thoroughly educated and skillful in both branches [composition and presswork] of the art.”208 Once established as master of his own shop, the early American printer could expect to stay put. To be sure, the vagaries of fortune, the vicissitudes of the economy, and the sudden intrusion of war or disease meant that no one was assured of success. Nonetheless, colonial circumstances contrasted favorably with those of eighteenth-century London printers; in the capital of the British Empire, no more than one out of every three apprentices attained even journeyman status, and fewer still rose to the rank of master.209 In the expansive decades after the Revolution, American journeymen moved more fluidly than before between the status of wage earner and master, often bouncing back and forth between the two. A growing trade offered work for many and entrepreneurial opportunity for some. According to one study, some six hundred journeymen participated in typographical societies before 1816, and nearly a quarter of them went on to operate a newspaper; however, a mere twenty-three hung onto the status of master for more than a decade. For some, entrepreneurialism was the result of desperation rather than ambition. Such journeymen set up shop as a last resort in hopes of avoiding the cost-cutting measures of employers, who were themselves increasingly dependent upon city publishers and booksellers. By the 1830s, as the mechanization of printing advanced, journeymen were bewailing a loss of status and dwindling opportunities for upward mobility. A decade later proprietorship was a distant dream, with no more than one out of every twenty journeymen ever achieving that goal.210 T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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The boy entering a printing office in the 1830s encountered a distinct physical and social environment. The office could be as small as a garret in a city tenement, such as “the attic story of an old building” in Providence, Rhode Island, where George Brown began his apprenticeship about 1815. Thirty-five years later, the office still was “a dusty old place” with a single hand press and no regular employees; Brown continued to do “all the routine work himself.” Had Brown started out at Dickinson Printers in Boston around 1840, he would have entered a large, modern establishment with eighty employees—men, women, and boys—working two Napier cylinder presses, several Adams bed-andplaten presses, and as many iron hand presses, all subject to “a regular system” distinguished by “order, and method, and neatness.”211 Whatever the size of the office, the boy might not receive much formal training. His “apprenticeship” consisted of doing simple chores around the office while picking up rudimentary skills along the way. Albert Angell, who started out in 1839, helped out the skilled workmen and absorbed their slang. As he recalled years later, “he learned about ‘strap oil,’ and ‘type lice,’ and ‘round squares,’ and how to ‘jeff.’ He washed rollers and built fires, and rolled for the hand-press, and boiled the glue and molasses to make rollers, and picked up type under the printers’ cases, when he swept out, and swept up pi, and made his share of it. Incidentally he learned a little about typesetting.”212 The pay for such efforts was as likely to be cash as the traditional provision of room, board, clothing, and instruction. In a large office, where the work was supervised by a foreman rather than the owner (whose time was occupied in running the business), the apprentice was assigned a “stint” of work and compensated for any “overwork” beyond that. He labored among journeymen not much more advanced in their skills, because many had never completed full apprenticeships. In real dollars their earnings were below their industry counterparts’ at the turn of the century. Strict lines now divided pressmen from compositors and even compositors adept in complex job work from those capable of basic “straight matter.” Typesetting itself became an isolated act, cut off from the larger process of bookmaking. Despite forceful protests by journeymen, foremen or men called “makers-up” or “stone hands” took over the responsibility of arranging type into pages.213 Continuing an eighteenth-century tradition, women were not uncommon in the printing trade, serving as typesetters in country offices and as unskilled feeders of steam presses in large urban establishments. Larger printing offices in the 1830s were as specialized as their employees. No longer did they welcome all sorts of work. Most concentrated on one or two lines of printing: newspapers, books, or job work. In carrying out these tasks, printers enjoyed a new abundance of materials. The lead type in the compositor’s case was now made in America, produced in greater quantities, and avail162

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able in a wide variety of sizes and fonts. Job printers had greater need for ornamental type in large sizes and diverse styles than did producers of newspapers or books. For book printing, the key innovation was the stereotype plates introduced in the 1820s. When David Bruce sailed to England in 1811 to learn about the stereotyping process—the technique of making metal plates of type forms for future printing—he was searching for a method of saving the expense of resetting type and of eliminating the even more burdensome cost of tying up capital and storage space by hanging onto cases of set type. For book publishers, reducing the cost of production was more urgent than speeding it up—the concern preoccupying city newspaper editors from the 1820s on. Bruce returned with an iron Stanhope press and sufficient knowledge of the stereotyping process to make real improvements to it and contribute to its general introduction in the United States. The invention proved a boon for publishers but a mixed blessing for compositors. Some speedy typesetters found new opportunities in printing offices dedicated to preparing stereotype plates. But for the common journeyman, the new technology meant less work and less pay. By 1833, New York City journeymen were complaining that “the business of stereotyping . . . or rather the motto of multum in parvo [a great deal in a small compass, or much in little] literally reduced to practice, rendered it every year more and more difficult for compositors to support themselves and their families.”214 The most impressive technological difference between 1790 and 1840 was found in the pressroom. Nearly twelve hundred Ramage-type wooden presses were produced over the period, but by the 1840s most had been relegated to a back corner for occasional use as a proof press.215 Iron hand presses with toggle mechanisms in place of the old screw had become common in the 1820s and nearly universal by the 1840s. Inking the type on the hand press was performed with composition rollers rather than the traditional pelt-covered balls. But such improvements could not satisfy for long master printers’ quest for economy and efficiency. By 1840, in any urban office larger than a garret shop, a machine press driven by a steam engine, almost surely of American manufacture, occupied the place of honor and had totally transformed presswork, reducing the need for hand labor. Compositors came to outnumber pressmen in printing offices by a factor of roughly four to one.216 To the printer-turned-politician Thurlow Weed, who learned the trade in the 1810s, these changes marked a declension from better days. “Machinery has robbed ‘the Art preservative of all Arts’ of much of its glory,” Weed wrote in 1847. “Rollers and Steam do the work which FRANKLIN performed. Printers now learn but half the duties which pertained to our craft in other days.”217 The first American changes to the English common press came about in 1807 T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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when Adam Ramage of Philadelphia began producing improved presses, which were soon universally copied in the United States. Ramage presses featured an enlarged diameter screw with decreased pitch, an iron bed, and a platen face lined with sheet copper. Changing the screw doubled the downward pressure exerted on the paper by a hand pressman’s pull on the bar, thereby improving the quality of the impression and easing the worker’s exertions. Although undoubtedly an exaggeration, colonial pressmen were said to walk with a crablike “sidewise” gait caused by overdeveloped right arms and feet. The Ramage press had a different effect on the pressman’s body. Horace Greeley recalled that his “hands were blistered and [his] back lamed” by working the improved machine. Considered the “ne plus ultra” of printing, Ramage’s ingenious invention became the benchmark against which later changes were measured.218 The modest improvements made by Ramage and others to the common wooden press paled in comparison to the innovations of the first quarter of the century. When the first all-iron press, with the patriotic name of “the Columbian,” was introduced, newspaper editors hailed its advantages. “Its superiority consists in its greater strength and consequent durability—the ease with which it is worked—the uniformity of its impression—and the advantage of having a platen large enough to cover a news form at one pull,” wrote William W. Seaton, editor of the National Intelligencer, in 1813. Still, Seaton, whose press was the second or third to be made, acknowledged one serious limitation. The Columbian required pressmen to change the way they worked. Instead of throwing their bodies into the action, they had to stand straight and pull with a steady arm. Even with this adjustment, pressmen could work the iron press no faster than a common wooden one.219 With the advent of the iron toggle press, the job of inking became even more laborious than pulling the impression. Inking rollers operable by boys were soon introduced to replace the pressman’s leather-covered inking balls. Initially, the new rollers did a less thorough job than did the old-fashioned balls, but they saved on labor and reduced costs, to the distress of journeymen. As early as 1816, journeymen in Albany, New York, held an “indignation meeting” to oppose the use of rollers on the grounds that they would “reduce the demand for labor, cut down on wages and lead to ruination generally.” But rollers were gradually accepted. Twenty years later, typographical societies encouraged the use of machine rollers as one way to forestall the introduction of machine presses. The other was for journeymen to hire their own roller boys.220 Other than the Columbian, the first generation of all-iron presses in the United States constituted little more than simple imports of British technology. Soon Americans were inventing their own versions of iron presses and experimenting with variations of mechanical actions. As early as 1821, in an article for 164

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the American Journal of Science and Arts, A. M. Fisher, professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Yale, deemed American-made presses worthy of comparison with their British counterparts.221 This was just the beginning, for American-developed iron presses came to dominate offices over the next decade—a source of national pride. The introduction of machine or power presses was another story. Like contemporary textile mill owners, the innovative printers who introduced these presses wanted to produce goods faster and cheaper. They relied on horse, water, or steam power to drive the machines and on unskilled women and boys to tend them. Pressmen became operatives rather than craftsmen. Not surprisingly, the initial reception of the new presses was hostile. When Daniel Treadwell first developed his mechanical bed-and-platen press in 1818, no master printer was willing to invest in it. So, Treadwell went into the printing business for himself in 1822 just to demonstrate the utility of his device. Unfortunately, his printing office was burned to the ground, ostensibly by hostile pressmen.222 But the mechanical genie was out of the bottle, and by 1835 some fifty Treadwell presses were in operation in printing offices from Boston to Washington. The Treadwell itself was soon overtaken in book publishing by its competitors. Otis Tufts claimed to have built sixty to seventy of his machine presses between 1836 and 1843, while about eighty Adams bed-and-platen presses were produced during the same period.223 These bed-and-platen presses became the foundation of the expanding book trade after 1840. They were at least twice as fast as an iron hand press, capable of printing large sheets of paper, and produced the fine quality work demanded by book authors, illustrators, and consumers. Newspapers required a different style of press, one where speed, durability, and ease of use mattered more than the quality of the impression. In 1825 two newspaper publishers in New York City collaborated in importing an English cylinder press. Ever since Gutenberg, printing had been conducted by compressing paper and inked type between two flat surfaces. The cylinder press worked on a different principle: a revolving cylinder carried the sheet of paper and pressed it against the inked type on the bed of the press. Despite its rejection of printing orthodoxy and its greater potential for errors—misaligned pages or smudged impressions—the cylinder press took off, and by 1835 the New York manufacturing firm of Robert Hoe and Company was producing its own version of the Napier machine and selling it through a traveling salesman to printers as far away as New Orleans and Havana, Cuba.224 The latest technology required a capital investment beyond the reach of the typical urban printer ambitious to set up his own shop. A Hoe single cylinder press alone cost $1,500 to $2,000 in 1834, eight to ten times as much as a T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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Washington hand press. Few printers enjoyed the wages and the regularity of employment sufficient for such an investment. Still, printers with steady jobs ranked among the best-paid wage earners of the era, unlike “tramp” printers who led precarious lives as they moved from town to town in search of shortterm “stints.” Mechanization of the pressroom altered the organization of their work. Machine presses required less physical exertion but more mechanical knowledge from pressmen, at the same time as they called forth a new corps of unskilled laborers—the boys and women who toiled as feeders and flies (the one inserting paper into the press, the other removing the printed sheets). In newspaper offices, where time was of the essence, machine presses eliminated work for compositors. With the new technology capable of turning out huge runs of newspapers at record speed, there was no longer any need to hire extra crews of compositors to set type for two or more hand presses in order to produce a daily edition. Pressmen, too, saw a loss of jobs from mechanization, because it was standard for one man to have charge of two or even three power presses at once. This was challenging work, demanding upgraded skills. Even so, journeymen resented the influx of boys into the pressroom who might acquire enough skill to become “two-thirders.”225 On the eve of the Civil War, one veteran printer recalled that “our friends of the paper cap and inky apron used to shut up their tympans and fly their friskets in decided disdain as soon as any diabolical intruder tried to advance a good word for ‘machine’ presses.” Still, those who did not “jump on the machine” were doomed to be crushed by it.226 He may well have been referring to men like Thomas Chamberlain. By the 1840s, an experienced power pressman commanded more regular work at higher wages than did a simple compositor. Washington printer John C. Rives testified before Congress in 1840, “We cannot discharge the hands on power-presses today and get them or others tomorrow, as on hand presses. There are but very few printers who know how to work on power-presses.”227 The gains of pressmen were losses for compositors, whose wages and jobs were undermined by employers’ increasing resort to apprentices, “two-thirders,” and women to provide a constant flow of copy for the voracious machines. As the ranks of compositors swelled with semiskilled hands, their status and security declined. Taken together, the machine presses, stereotyping, and expanded reliance on semiskilled workers drove down wages for both presswork and composition. Starting in the 1820s and cascading in the 1830s, the result was a fullscale labor crisis. For journeymen, the supply of labor was critical to their livelihood. Skilled workers in every trade asserted control over the training of newcomers, and journeymen printers were no different. Craft skills, in their view, constituted “a species of property,” which rightly belonged to men who had been trained 166

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in traditional apprenticeships; formed the “chapels” (or work groups) in printing offices; and made up the rank and file of journeymen’s societies and later trade unions. Proud of their skills and insisting on independence, journeymen were not content to follow the advice of printers’ manuals and go along with work rules according to “the general custom and usage of the trade.” Their typographical societies went further by codifying regulations regarding prices, overseers, apprentices, and the distribution of work in a “companionship.”228 Women were a small but visible element among the proprietors of colonial printing offices, and in the half century after 1790 they gained a greater presence in the work force. Wives, widows, and daughters labored alongside male relatives and employees as proprietors, clerks, paper folders, and compositors and, less frequently, at the press. With the advent of machine presses in the 1830s and 1840s, they gained new roles as unskilled press feeders, a position that remained open to them well into the twentieth century. Typesetting, which demanded language skills, close attention, and fine handwork, was promoted as appropriate for women, who apparently made up as much as 10 percent of compositors in some areas.229 The occasional African American, enslaved or free, who toiled in a printing office, was rare enough in the eighteenth century to merit special notice by observers of the trade. Practically nothing is known about the blacks who worked at the trade in the early republic. While the journeymen’s societies in the 1830s were alarmed by the idea of female compositors, they took no notice of African American printers until the 1850s, suggesting that few entered the trade at all— or even sought admission into their ranks. A few black printers, such as William Cooper Nell, were trained at abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator; others undoubtedly set type and pulled presses at the early African American newspapers Freedom’s Journal and the Colored American.230 Beginning in 1832, the influx of women and the occasional presence of blacks provoked strong resistance from journeymen—in Philadelphia and other cities—who had tolerated their employment in eighteenth-century printing offices. Why the difference? The harsh reaction was largely due to the disruption of the trade as a result of employers’ relentless bid to cut costs. The apprenticeship system, never as strong in colonial America as in Europe, collapsed in the new republic, owing to the impatience of adolescent boys with extended servitude and to the desire of master printers to overcome the persistent shortage of skilled labor by turning to underaged and hastily trained workers. A flood of “half-way jours”—young men with truncated apprenticeships—inundated the trade and overwhelmed customary practices. Employers seized upon the fresh supply of cheap labor as an opportunity to effect a greater division of labor within the shop. No longer were journeymen employed at both the case T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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and the press. Composition was sharply set off from presswork well before the introduction of machine presses. By the 1820s, a typesetter for a newspaper or book publisher needed stamina and speed more than technical ability, unlike his fellow worker in job printing, where artistic skill and judgment remained in demand. Even then, there was no job security; with the glut of compositors, master printers could hire and fire workers as needed.231 It would be a mistake to attribute simple economic motives to journeymen’s opposition to women, African Americans, apprentices, and “two-thirders.” To be sure, preserving jobs was never far from their minds. But racial and sexual prejudices were also at play. In a centuries-old tradition in the trade, journeymen printers held an idealized image of the printer as an artisan skilled in both manual and intellectual work. Printers took pride in their dignity and “manliness,” demanding respect from employers and from one another. Subjected to demeaning stereotypes, African Americans and women, along with boy apprentices and “two-thirders,” could not meet the requirements of this “craftsman’s ethical code.” It was thus not just wages journeymen sought to protect. It was the way work was accomplished in the shop and the standing of male workers in the wider community.232 In the face of these threats to their livelihood and their status, journeymen forged a new craft identity. Like other white workingmen in the wake of the American Revolution, printers saw themselves as the bone and sinew of the republic. “Next to liberty,” members of a Washington, D.C., typographical society asserted in 1834, “we value the profession we have adopted.”233 In this spirit, male journeymen idealized their trade as a “fraternity,” whose cohesiveness was jeopardized by one change after another—the ascent of “men of capital,” the abundance of semiskilled workers, the introduction of women, and the advance of mechanization. That image was inherited from the printers of early modern England and Europe, who bequeathed a visceral sense of the “moral community” of the “trade” and a set of cultural norms to govern “the fraternity.”234 Though weak in the small, family-run shops of colonial America, where work was irregular and status fluid, this “corporate” identity hung on, and in the early republic it gained enhanced importance as the basis for collective action by journeymen seeking to conserve their privileges at work and their status in the community.235 On the foundation of borrowed practices and new ideas, they constructed workplace rituals, a tramp system, and formal organizations. The collective identity of printers was no doubt facilitated by ethnic homogeneity. Whether native-born or immigrants from England, Scotland, or Ireland, printers in this era came overwhelmingly from British origins. Britishtrained mechanics carried with them Old World traditions of the trade, which 168

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were reinforced by the English manuals reprinted by the Van Winkles of New York and read by legions of workingmen like Thomas Chamberlain. Even after the influx of Irish and Germans in the 1840s, journeymen printers were less ethnically diverse than other skilled tradesmen. Not surprisingly, German immigrants staffed the offices of the German-language presses that flourished in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.236 The craft culture of printers developed in the workplace and extended far into the community.237 Many of its elements were aimed at establishing the journeymen’s control over the work process. The entire office organized into a “chapel” and elected a “father” or “chairman” as spokesman, a position that was incorporated into the formal union structure. Individual printers were understood to own their “sits” or situations and would offer to take voluntary days off in order to distribute work among irregularly employed compositors known as “subs.” The compositors in an office formed a “companionship,” who divided up work on a publication as they saw fit, limited output by insisting on a specific “stint,” and ensured that foremen and employers did not play favorites. A worker who refused to abide by the chapel rules or worked for less than established wages was ostracized and called a “rat,” a term first appearing in the United States in 1816. Its definition underscored the communal nature of the trade because, the tradition held, a “rat” undermines the trade by encouraging competition and lowering wages as surely as a rat undermines the foundations of a building. This craft-specific language contributed to craft solidarity and separated the “fraternity” from the uninitiated.238 Early typographical societies had embraced masters and journeymen alike, but as the lines sharpened in the workplace, employers and employees went separate and opposing ways. The annual printers’ festival or dinner, known as a “wayz-goose,” was initiated by master printers, but it was taken over by journeymen themselves, who made a public show of hosting their employers and inviting civic dignitaries. Parades featured journeymen, masters, and apprentices marching in distinct ranks. Beginning with the 1788 processions celebrating the Constitution, printers paraded with floats and banners in numerous civic events. They often rode on heavy wagons carrying hand presses, from which they printed appropriate broadsides, such as the Declaration of Independence, and handed them out to the assembled spectators. Journeymen were proud of their literacy, their role in disseminating knowledge, their combination of manual and mental labor, and their status within the trades. On 4 July 1824, the journeymen’s society of Washington, D.C., marched behind a cart over which was suspended a blue banner (symbolizing literacy) tipped with evergreen sprigs (representing steadfastness) emblazoned with “Let fire and water and the arts combine / And Printing spread o’er the earth the gifts divine.”239 T H E B O O K T R A D E S I N T H E N EW NAT I ON

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The patron saint of American printers was Benjamin Franklin. The workingman’s Franklin labored as a “devil” and a journeyman, conducted himself as a responsible employer, promoted the development of American manufactures, and supported independence and the Constitution. In the figure of Franklin, the practical printer was epitomized as the learned man and civic leader. In 1824 the journeymen of Washington, D.C., toasted “the memory of Franklin, the Patron of our Art: His mind was a fount that never ran out of sorts, every line of his life has been well justified by his country, his name forms the heading in the title-page of our Independence.”240 Franklin’s name and image, occasionally accompanied by the Goddess of Liberty, adorned iron printing presses, office signs, letterheads, and journeymen’s societies’ constitutions. His legend was a prominent chapter in the glorious story of printing told and retold in printers’ manuals, which started with Gutenberg the founding father, Faust the patron, and Schaeffer the father of type founding and culminated with printers’ contributions to the Revolution.241 Tramping served as an economic safety valve, a training system, a rite of passage, and a disseminator of the printer’s culture. Journeymen traveled from city to city and job to job, always treasuring conviviality and respectability. Robert Stevenson Coffin, the “Boston Bard,” nonchalantly recounted his travels between 1815 and 1824 as simply “stopping where I could obtain employment.”242 But this mobility, an inescapable fact of the artisan’s life, could threaten the well-being of all. As early as 1809, the New York Typographical Society complained that the introduction of “halfway journeymen” forced men to become “birds of passage.” To protect the trade against unfair competition, it urged the publication of a black list naming all migrant workers who accepted substandard wages. Such proposals gradually developed into a system for tramping, coordinated and regulated by journeymen’s societies in urban centers.243 In the first decades of the republic, masters and journeymen joined together in “mutual aid” societies that helped members out in the event of sickness or death and that tried, by publishing local lists of “prices,” to maintain “fair” and stable earnings for all. Most of these groups, which appeared in the leading northeastern cities and in New Orleans, were short-lived. In the 1830s a general revival of the labor movement spurred the creation of some two dozen typographical unions, extending from the major cities of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore to such far-flung places as Mobile, Tallahassee, Natchez, and Detroit. These were nearly classic trade unions, focusing on apprenticeship rules, price lists, and regulation of tramp printers. So concerned were typographical unions with controlling “traveling jours” that delegates from six cities gathered in Washington in 1836 to form the National Typographical Society. That hopeful step came to naught; the Panic of 1837 and ensuing depression 170

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killed the fledgling before it could get off the ground. Still, as the first national union of any trade, the society demonstrated the journeymen’s openness to innovations that promised to conserve their values and preserve their workplace privileges.244 In the early republic, master printers competed intensely with one another over the price, speed, and quality of the goods issuing from their presses. With a view to cutting costs and controlling the labor process, they increasingly employed two-thirders, subdivided tasks, and installed laborsaving technology. These measures ran athwart the journeymen’s understanding of how work should be organized in the craft, and they eroded the mutual respect and duty that supposedly bound masters and journeymen together for the benefit of all. Journeymen countered by fashioning an American work culture from AngloEuropean traditions and the national ideology of independence and republicanism. Although they could not stop the advance of the division of labor and of technological change, the journeymen’s measures yielded immediate benefits in relatively high wages for regularly employed journeymen, significant influence over work routines, and a new tradition of codifying craft practices in union regulations.

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A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

Section II

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Spreading the Word in Print

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A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

Introduction

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Mary Kelley . . . Thomas Jefferson hailed the newly independent United States as “the last, best hope of the world.” Although they were subject to interrogation and shot through with contradiction, three of the discourses that emerged in the decades after the Revolution disseminated values European Americans considered central to Jefferson’s claim. The discourses on republican government, Protestant Christianity, and the arts and sciences also registered the progress Americans believed they had achieved in the decades between 1790 and 1840. The essays on politics, evangelicalism, and learned culture demonstrate that America’s citizenry enlisted print as an indispensable vehicle in forwarding their objective. In an essay on the relationship between print and politics, John Brooke challenges two widely accepted premises—that the nation’s weekly newspapers, which constituted the largest body of print in the decades between 1790 and 1840, were rhetorically accessible to all literate individuals and reached nearly all of those who were newly enfranchised. Galvanized by increasingly heated battles between Federalists and Republicans, printers in New England and the Middle Atlantic founded hundreds of newspapers beginning in the 1790s. However, the increased exposure to print was sectional. Relative scarcity persisted in the South throughout the period. Accessibility, which was linked to particular rhetorical practices, also varied by region. Instead of appealing to all voters, southern editors continued to practice “republican” conventions, most notably the classical mode of rational deliberation and consensus rehearsed by members of the literate elite. Indeed, southerners took decades to adopt the more accessible vernacular style of the “partisan” press, which had emerged in the North in the years between passage of the Sedition Act and Jefferson’s election in 1800. Different practices meant different readerships with distinctive understandings of the meaning and purpose of republican government. Whatever the region and whatever the rhetoric, America’s newspapers were grounded in the early republic’s commercial markets. An editor’s survival depended on turning a profit, as Jeffrey Pasley’s John Norvell knew only too well. The tracts, periodicals, and Bibles circulated by evangelical reformers stood in an oppositional relationship to those markets and the profits they gener-

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ated. “Benevolent books,” David Nord shows, were given to readers. Although they tried to collect a small, if only token, payment, national voluntary associations and their local auxiliaries sought readers independent of the needs of commerce. Was the message unpopular? All the more reason to see that it found its way into the hands of readers. These same evangelicals yoked entrepreneurial means with anticommercial ends. They practiced the principles of centralization for economies of scale in production and localization in distribution. Simultaneously, they reversed a third fundamental principle, which linked supply to demand. Local auxiliaries of national organizations raised the moneys and paid the costs of printing tracts, periodicals, and Bibles. Then, instead of adapting supply to demand, the auxiliaries dispensed their print to everyone without the means or the inclination to purchase their wares. Determined to foil the market and to drive demand, they adopted the hortatory rhetoric familiar to readers of the highly competitive “partisan” press that reigned in the North. The opposition was not another political party, but another literary genre—the supposedly dangerous and deplorable novel. To say that these evangelicals were fired with determination is an understatement. One was hard pressed to escape the campaign to save America’s souls and move toward the millennium. The American Tract Society distributed the word to adults. The American Sunday School Union filled libraries with books for girls and boys. Determined to save the nation from specific sins that threatened souls and halted progress toward the millennium, social reformers took to print with the same zeal. In disseminating their message about peace, temperance, and antislavery, these reformers used the same strategies as their evangelical counterparts. Free print was the vehicle, a perfected nation the aspiration. The members of the early republic’s learned elite harbored aspirations that appeared to have nothing in common with the campaigns of newspaper editors and evangelical reformers. However, appearances bore little relationship to reality, as David Shields shows. In calling for a cultural revolution they considered as important as the political revolution that had led to the nation’s independence, the most ambitious among them wanted America’s arts and sciences to become a model for the rest of the world. The challenge they faced was daunting. The Reverend Sydney Smith of the Edinburgh Review spoke for cosmopolitans throughout Europe. “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? Or looks at an American picture or statue?” he asked rhetorically.1 Reckoning that the arts and sciences had to be nurtured by institutions, members of the learned elite adopted the same strategy as evangelical reformers, establishing voluntary associations and publication programs, which they organized by state, county, and city. The evangelicals had patterned their associations on a British model, the Society for the 176

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Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and those who were determined to elevate the arts and sciences did the same, choosing London’s Royal Society as their model. Publication carried peril as well as promise, as one of Shields’s most telling examples demonstrates. Conflict, deception, and outright fraud surrounded the publication in multiple versions of the Lewis and Clark exploration of the Louisiana Territory. Print disasters of this magnitude were singular events, at least in part because trained professionals gradually replaced independent amateurs, and publications were scrutinized by learned peers. That this was an arduous process is amply documented in the Shields’s case studies in natural history and philology. Ascendancy may have remained elusive, but, by the 1840s, Americans could claim a place in learned conversations taking place throughout the Atlantic world. Everyone depended on the postal system. The Post Office Act of 1792, which admitted newspapers and magazines into the mail at highly favorable rates, propelled a rapidly “Expanding . . . . Realm of Communications,” in the words of Richard John’s chapter title. Enacted in 1790, the “Act for the Encouragement of Learning” had equally notable ramifications. Not only did the legislation bring copyright law under federal jurisdiction, but it also mandated authorial rights and marked their duration. Both of these provisions encouraged American authors to shift from taking at least some of the responsibility for costs of publication and marketing to the outright sale of their wares, as Meredith McGill shows. Together the postal system and copyright law created a geographically extensive civil society that had profound consequences for highly mobile Americans. The postal system enabled the wide dissemination of print and the proliferation of rural printing. The accompanying prohibition on official surveillance ensured the unimpeded flow of information—except in the South. When in 1835 the New York City–based American Anti-Slavery Society mailed hundreds of thousands of abolitionist pamphlets to post offices throughout the region, local postmasters blocked delivery. The crisis sparked by the abolitionist press codified the regional distinctions in the nation’s political culture described by John Brooke and contributed to a heightening sectionalism. Copyright law proved more complex in its impact than congressional legislators, publishers, and authors had anticipated. The extension of this right across regional print centers established a monopoly in certain print properties such as books well before the development of a national market. Newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, local and federal government publications, broadsides, tracts, and sermons, all of which were seen as either too ephemeral or too local to benefit from copyright, constituted the basis for a decentralized print culture. And, as McGill, Brooke, Nord, and other contributors make clear, these staples of print were the key to I N T RO D U C T I O N

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the rapid expansion of that culture in the decades between 1790 and 1840. The legislation, which excluded from copyright protection books authored by noncitizens, left printers and publishers free to import and to reprint foreign works. This exclusion, as David Shields shows, was lamented by members of the early republic’s learned elite who believed that it contributed to the nation’s cultural dependence on Europe. And yet the same publishers who profited handsomely from the reprint trade and contributed more generally to the expansion of print culture increasingly employed their capital to purchase copyright from American authors. Whatever their aspirations in relation to advancing the United States as a model for the rest of the world, the early republic’s printers and authors, publishers and editors were central to the making of a print culture that, as Robert Gross tells us, was simultaneously local and cosmopolitan.

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CHAPTER 3

Government and Law PA R T 1

Print and Politics

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John L. Brooke . . . By far the greatest body of print in the “extensive republic” was found in newspapers, issuing weekly from presses scattered throughout the nation and integrally involved with the contests of political parties. Broadly speaking, historians interested in politics and print make a series of common assumptions about the activities of this “Fourth Estate” (a term popularized in the late 1830s). Newspapers were important arenas for debate and communication: through their medium, political leaders spoke to an electorate with the expectation of eliciting a response at the polls. Tickets won or lost, parties rose and fell, in a communication between candidates and voters that, in an increasingly mobile society, arguably took place most effectively on the printed page.1 Embedded in this account is a claim for the availability and accessibility of print. A fundamental assumption about American press history, and indeed about the history of the “modernization” of American life in the nineteenth century, posits an ever-expanding availability of and desire for the printed word: newspapers were widely distributed and universally consumed. The reality was far more complex, as the people of a vast and expanding nation inevitably had an uneven exposure to the printed word. Equally important, beyond mere supply and demand, the accessibility of the press depended on the character and conduct of the public debate it constituted in cold type. How diverse, we might ask, were the opinions expressed in print? In what styles were these opinions rendered? Was the world of political print unitary, classical, and republican in its form and expectations, or was it partisan, liberal, and democratic, permitting, even eliciting a contest of legitimately opposing opinions?2 And were these contesting opinions closed or open with regard to the questions and answers posed for public discussion: was the two-party press effectively closed to all but a narrow range of political issues, and if so, was this closure intentional on the part of editorial gatekeepers? When and in what venues did alternative voices emerge to generate a pluralistic rather than dyadic political culture in print?

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Did newspaper editors provide enough information for people to develop truly informed opinions, and was its presentation intended to be intelligible to elite or to popular audiences?3

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.

.

.

The newspaper of 1787 operated within a framework that was well understood in the eighteenth century and that persisted, in some of its terms, well into the nineteenth century. Colonial newspapers were arrayed along a continuum of support or opposition to government. At one end stood the “court paper,” the source of sanctioned information, its content approved and printed “by authority.” At the other was its adversary, the “country paper,” upholding the Whig ideal of a vigilant, jealous people monitoring and limiting the reach of the state. By the 1760s, after forty years of debate over war, religion, and money in the Boston newspapers, John Adams celebrated the press as a “sacred” conduit of political information and an essential safeguard against tyranny.4 Both traditions would inform the political press of the early republic. The Revolution and its aftermath brought important changes to the American press. The need to mobilize the people drove the establishment of new newspapers; the British occupation of seaports brought the establishment of printing offices in country towns. Between 1775 and 1790, through fifteen years of revolution, war, and political strife over the constitution, the number of newspapers in print jumped from thirty-seven to ninety-nine, and by 1790 more than half were published outside the old colonial centers, where less than a third had been printed in 1775. The reach and range of the press was a matter of style as well as circulation; readerships were cultivated or excluded by the dominant language of politics. Patriot newspapers employed a distinctive rhetoric, decorously exhorting the people through authoritative pronouncement and serial narrative on the virtues of the national cause. The press aspired to build an imagined community of Americans.5 In this effort, however, the press was hardly open to all shades of opinion. The special conditions of revolutionary crisis and nation building required the suppression of alternative voices; the open press leading resistance to British policy was closed to Loyalist arguments.6 And as sovereignty shifted in 1776 from empire to states in confederation, there was a subtle reversal of press roles; the “country-Whig” press, formerly leading the struggle with parliamentary tyrants, quickly assumed the role of the “court press,” supporting and supported by the newly constituted Patriot authorities. It was in this mode that the American press entered the era of the new republic, playing a vital role in constitutional debate beginning in September 1787. In their much-noted zeal for the new federal constitution, printers advanced the cause of a new national 180

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authority and proved as subversive of the confederation of American states as they had been of the British Empire. The model of the eighteenth-century court paper also shaped the press politics of the 1790s and even persisted well into the nineteenth century. But this understanding of the press clashed with fundamentally new directions in political life and led directly to a pivotal confrontation between the ideal of accessibility and traditions of closure. If the Revolutionary crisis spurred the transformation of a country-Whig press into a court-republican press, the Sedition Act of 1798, followed by the Jeffersonian victory of 1800, crystallized the emergence of a partisan political press. The first partisan papers of the 1790s can only be described as an evolving blend of a court and a factional press, supported by and representing great men in government as the leadership class moved from unity to contest. John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States was set up as a court paper in the new national capital of New York in 1789 and for some months boasted that it was printed “by authority.” By the time the government moved to Philadelphia, Fenno’s Federalism was blatant enough for Jefferson to cast about for his own editor, and Philip Freneau was put in charge of the oppositional National Gazette. From 1791 to 1793 elite political opinion began to polarize in the battle of the two Gazettes. After the collapse of Freneau’s enterprise, Benjamin Franklin Bache took up the Jeffersonian cause in the Philadelphia Aurora. Bache fashioned the model for the partisan press of the late 1790s, as rising Republican editors were prosecuted under the Federalist Sedition Act. They responded defiantly, with a strategy that joined party organization and party press in exactly the ways that the Federalists had feared. In this environment of contest and repression, the press expanded mightily in the 1790s, enjoying the fastest rate of growth in the number of newspapers for the entire century from the beginnings of the revolutionary movement down to the outbreak of Civil War.7 This growth was concentrated in the eighteen months between the passage of the Sedition Act and Jefferson’s election, as Republican papers were founded to challenge the Federalists, and Federalist papers multiplied, thanks to patronage granted by Congress in 1799.8 By the 1800 election, there were roughly ten Federalist papers in circulation for every six in the Republican camp. These changes unfolded within an enduring regional divide between northern and southern states. As had been the case before and during the Revolution, New England and the Mid-Atlantic continued in the early Republic to be well supplied with newspapers, while the South lagged behind. Southern newspapers were often located in state capitals, in a continuation of the colonial practice of cultivating proximity to government. In the ensuing decades, GOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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the southern press became somewhat more decentralized but compared to the North, the South had a relatively low number of newspapers per capita. Such scarcity would be a fixture for the next forty years. Important distinctions in the quality of political communication separated the sections. Andrew W. Robertson has suggested that the 1800 election saw the emergence of a “hortatory style of political rhetoric,” in which appeals to the people were couched in an informal, popular style that drew upon the developing forms of commercial advertising printed on the outer sheets of the newspapers. In Kenneth Cmiel’s formulation, a classical mode of rational discourse and debate, closed to nonelite audiences, was displaced by a boisterous populist style, which sacrificed deliberative depth for emotional impact. The new mode penetrated all domains of language by the 1830s.9 These interpretations are particularly useful for politics in the North but less so for the South. As Robertson sees it, the southern press maintained a “laudatory rhetoric,” which stressed the personal virtues of candidates, officeholders, and electorate at large and carefully limited direct appeals to political principles. Below the Mason-Dixon Line, newspapers took decades to make the transition to the populist hortatory style dominating northern papers of all persuasions after 1800.10 The sectional divergence in press style was the essential corollary to the sectional differences in newspaper production. A large volume of print constituted an effort to break out of the traditional channels of community, local authority, and deference and to pursue a large potential audience of independent voters. To this end, northern newspapers adopted the hortatory rhetorical style in the crisis of 1798–1800. But in the South, newspapers were fewer in number, and they perpetuated the classical laudatory style: the press operated as a vehicle for mobilizing elites rather than the people at large; gentry leaders would read news and opinion and communicate it selectively to common folk in their neighborhoods. Press partisanship during the era of the early republic thus did not surge over the nation in a sudden, overwhelming wave. Rather—to change the metaphor—it took shape as a complex mosaic. In the judgment of journalism historian John Nerone, the transition to a partisan press was far more limited than the standard accounts suggest. In Ohio, which Nerone has studied carefully, a consensual republican form of press was long-lived, persisting well into the 1820s, as it did in the South and Southwest, as well.11 In each region, the rhetorical style of the press depended on its relationship with state and national governments and on the struggle for governmental patronage.12 New England’s Federalist-dominated press made the transition to a popular style by 1810; in tandem with Federalist governors and state legislators, the Federalist press rallied the people against the Jeffersonians, and in this role 182

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it proved successful. In the greater Mid-Atlantic region, the political press in both capital cities and county towns was shaped by a far more complex configuration. Certainly, the Mid-Atlantic states saw a proliferation of Jeffersonian papers, whose editors would shape the party press for decades to come. But Federalist papers were strong as well. Urban commerce generated advertising and subscriptions, and with Republicans split into factions, Federalist editors and politicians could survive and grow on the political margins, forging the occasional strategic statewide alliance with centrist Republican “Quids” and sniping at the national Republican administration. Circumstances were quite different across most of the South and the West. Here party contests were muted, thanks to broadly shared agrarian interests and the political affinities between Republican state and national governments. In the South, a region dominated by one party, the press had no occasion to develop into an instrument for mobilizing voters. The occasional factional feuds disrupting southern politics were insufficient stuff for a partisan press. Thus, southern politics retained much of the character of the eighteenth-century public sphere: a classical means of communication and debate among the literate gentry. With its perpetuation of eighteenth-century practices, this southern mode subtly shaped the character of the national political press from the end of the War of 1812 to the emergence of the Jacksonian Democrats in 1828. Inheriting a patronage system of governmental printing contracts from the Federalists, the Republican establishment nurtured several new “court papers,” in particular the National Intelligencer. Starting with contracts from Jefferson, the paper functioned as the voice of the administration under Madison; during the 1820s the editors weathered a loss of patronage after supporting William Crawford for president and then enlisted as allies of John Quincy Adams in 1828. One of the critical services the Intelligencer supplied was recording the proceedings of Congress, whose members were allowed to edit the newspaper’s transcript of their speeches before publication. This arrangement, known as “talking to Buncombe”—adapting the representative’s remarks to the prejudices of his constituency—established a collaboration between editor and politician as gatekeepers over the nation’s affairs. In its reputation for authoritative information and its close relationship with both executive and legislative branches, the National Intelligencer was a powerful exemplar for the political press in the early republic, defining by its very authority the boundaries of the political terrain.13 Something of the tradition of the court paper thus lived on in this era of Republican hegemony, as editors aspired to the national preeminence of the Intelligencer and presidents cultivated dependable vehicles for their administration’s views. John Quincy Adams made the National Journal his official paper GOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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in 1825; Jackson followed suit by patronizing Duff Green’s United States Telegraph. After Green supported Jackson’s estranged vice president, John C. Calhoun, Old Hickory set up Frank Blair as the editor of the Washington Globe. For a decade, the Globe was the official voice of the Democratic administration and the de facto recorder of Congress. With the Globe, a system of press politics building since Jefferson’s election came to fruition. Newspapers throughout the country were linked in a hierarchy of contract and patronage emanating from the national capital. The administration organ in Washington sounded the party line, which was disseminated to the faithful across the extensive republic. The system drew upon the informal custom of exchange, dating back to the colonial era, by which newspapers borrowed news items from one another.14 In 1829 Jackson’s administration perfected the system, employing printing contracts, postmasterships, and a host of other patronage plums to forge a network of “pet” editors.15 The line between press and government was perhaps more effectively elided than the Federalists had dreamed possible. Far from promoting modern democracy, as historians once claimed, the Jacksonians were actually perpetuating a version of the classical public sphere. Even as they appealed to individual self-interest in rewarding supporters in the press, they had a larger corporate goal: the creation of a harmonious commonality, in which contrary voices were marginalized or stilled.16 Although they seldom enjoyed access to national patronage, the National Republicans and Whigs relied on the same means as their Democratic rivals to establish a national party line: clipping and reprinting articles and editorials from leading newspapers. The cumulative effect of these partisan exchanges, in the judgment of the historian Thomas Leonard, was a “numbing uniformity.”17 The partisan press in the age of Jefferson and Jackson contained an extremely limited and tightly controlled content. In great measure the parties sought to narrow the frame of political contest, and the press was the chosen instrument for that containment. The editors opened the doors of political party, primarily to white men, and only on the terms that the gatekeepers themselves had set. Party newspapers by no means exhausted the domain of “the political” in the 1820s and early 1830s. Former Federalist editors and audiences occupied one of several streams of publishing that were developing outside the arena of party politics. Displaced and excluded from formal politics, these former Federalists gravitated into areas of public life where print could convey both information and authority free from partisan control. Commercial, benevolent, literary, reform, and abolitionist publications all were shaped by the movement of Federalist gentlemen and editors, in pursuit of new sources of authority, into the arenas of middle-class reform.18 184

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Other avenues toward a more pluralistic press traced their route through alternative politics. The vigorous if short-lived Workingmen’s Party in New York City gave birth to the popular “penny press,” which set itself against the party organs and the business “advertisers” dominating the urban scene. Moving beyond their Workingmen origins, the penny papers sold the news to a broad middling audience by the middle of the 1830s.19 Despite, or perhaps because of, their declared contempt for parties, the New York penny press editors were the first to dispatch independent reporters to Washington and set them to work outside the patronage-contract nexus. Certainly the penny press had its impact on party papers: Thurlow Weed and Horace Greeley, emerging from anti-Masonic origins in New York, put the new style to work for the Whig Party by the end of the decade.20 But by then the gate-keeping power of the party editors was being challenged by alternative sources of information; politicians could no longer control what the voters far from the nation’s capital would hear. Thanks to these beginnings of comprehensive and competitive reporting by the penny press, the American public began to receive increasingly detailed and timely information on public affairs.21 At the same time, a second fundamental crisis shook the system of political communications during the 1830s. Echoing the crisis of 1798, when Federalists tried to suppress the partisan opposition press, the mid-1830s saw a massive reaction by established politicians against the new pluralizing of communications. The focal point of this crisis was the abolitionists’ campaign against slavery in newspapers and pamphlets. In the South, newspapers that even hinted at emancipation were forced to shut down, suspected abolitionist agents were lynched, and abolitionist pamphlets were burned with the approval of Amos Kendall, Jackson’s postmaster general. More than 140 cases of antiabolitionist violence have been documented, mostly in the North; among these were riots in Boston, Utica, and Cincinnati targeting abolitionist lecturers, editors, and presses. Antislavery sentiment was further restricted by the congressional gag rule tabling all abolitionist petitions. These attempts to suppress abolitionism reflected a broader unease with the shape the public arena was taking in the early 1830s. Steam-driven printing took off at the same moment as new voices were calling for immediate social and cultural reform. Together, these innovations undermined traditional assumptions about access to and the content of the public sphere. The world of print had been dominated by propertied white men talking about politics in organs controlled by partisan editorial gatekeepers; this stable, closed world suddenly opened up, as once-excluded groups claimed an audience in print.22 The violent attacks on the press, born of the reconfiguration of print communication in the 1830s, were symptoms of a wider general crisis of public life. GOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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The standard model of journalism history, framing this period as a transition from a partisan to a pluralistic press, fails to adequately describe this crisis. A structured and competitive national two-party system took shape in the mid- to late 1830s, just as print culture, in seeming contradiction, was diversifying and opening up to new voices. During the so-called heyday of the partisan press, roughly from 1798 to the 1830s, a period often depicted as a “dark age” in the history of American journalism, voter turnout fluctuated wildly, as on occasion did popular loyalties. But from the late 1830s, as the partisan press began to compete for readers in the new, pluralistic environment, voting rates and loyalties established reached a new and stable plateau. If disrupted by the final sectional crisis and the Civil War, this configuration—the “party period”—was quickly reestablished in the late 1860s and endured until the 1890s.23 The conventional narrative of journalism history cannot account for this paradox. Why were voters so seemingly volatile during the “dark age” of the party press? And why did these voters apparently become so fiercely partisan in the ensuing era of press pluralism? A new conceptualization is imperative. The half century from the 1780s to the early 1830s needs to be seen as an epoch of republican nation building, culminating a long early modern era in which corporate and classical ideals of political and moral unity shaped understandings of public space.24 The general crisis of the 1830s marked the end of this transition and inaugurated a modern era defined by democratic pluralism. In this perspective, the political culture of the early republic was a complex intermingling of incomplete forms, with eighteenth-century classical republican assumptions coexisting in awkward tension with the opening of nineteenth-century liberal democracy. But the innovations of the 1820s and 1830s, commercializing the public sphere of communications, introduced a new dynamic. The reading public, once assumed to be confined to the ranks of independent property holders, was transformed into an expansive and unpredictable free market in which editors—still intent on gate keeping, but now faced with lots of competition—had to sell their wares. No matter whether individuals were actually entitled to vote, all who joined in this freewheeling market—women as well as men, blacks as well as whites—were drawn into the assessment of public affairs.25 Thus, the classical public sphere collapsed into a pluralistic marketplace of print. Reacting against the new voices being heard in this tumultuous transition, men across the North and South erupted in the wave of rioting and violence that marked the mid-1830s. In this competitive publishing market, the political press was not swept aside, as an older literature would have it, but arrived at a new reach and sophistication (fig. 3.1). To be sure, appealing to the voters was nothing new; the Jeffersonian, Federalist, and Jacksonian presses had been doing so for decades. But 186

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FIGURE 3.1. Andrew Jackson is caricatured as a despotic monarch, holding a scepter in his right hand and a copy of a bill that he had vetoed. He disregards a book titled Judiciary of the United States and torn papers—one titled Constitution of the United States and the other bearing the seal of Pennsylvania and the words internal improvements and U.S. Bank. Probably issued after September 1833 when Jackson had exceeded his constitutional power by issuing the removal order and also directing that federal deposits be removed from the Bank of the United States, while alluding to the 1832 veto of the bill to recharter the Bank. Artist unknown, King Andrew the First, 1833. Lithograph 121⁄3 × 81⁄4 in. (31.4 × 21.0 cm) American Antiquarian Society.

the penny papers, transmuted into a new species of popular political press by such journalistic masterminds as Weed and Greeley, wrought a transformation in editorial tone and approach.26 The press was newly available and accessible, and it treated the voter as an active participant in the political process. With the 1840 presidential campaign, Americans entered the brave new world of mass politics and mass media. In this political marketplace, the virtuous gentlemen and freeholders of the eighteenth-century public sphere had lost their privileged place. They now experienced public life as equal participants with a new brand of readers and voters, who were construed as interested consumers to whom the press sold candidates and parties by the same methods as it sold patent medicines and dry goods (fig. 3.2).27 GOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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FIGURE 3.2. Prospectus for the Democratic Republican, a political newspaper: “Being informed that the Democrats of Crawford County are anxious to have a public print devoted to the great and good cause of disseminating the true principles of Democracy, the subscribers herewith propose to commence the work, as soon as a sufficient number of subscribers are obtained to justify the undertaking.” Bucyrus, Ohio: Thomas J. Orr and John White, 30 March 1840. American Antiquarian Society.

Nonetheless, this general crisis of the 1830s assumed profoundly different configurations in different sections of the country. The patterns were revealed in the 1840 federal census, which surveyed levels of literacy and the number of newspapers throughout the republic. Broken down by section and region, the data show no consistent relation between participation in print culture and voter turnout in the fiercely fought elections of 1840 and 1844 (table 3.1). Although literacy rates were highest and newspapers concentrated in long-settled sections of the North, only in the Mid-Atlantic region does print seem to have played an obvious role in drawing voters to the polls. There, as the classical public sphere exploded into a plural marketplace, northern political editors had to struggle to be heard. In the South, as well as the frontier Midwest, familiar forms of politics and communications remained in place. In both the 1840 and 1844 presidential elections, areas of the rural South, where literacy was 188

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TABLE 3.1. Newspapers, literacy, and voter turnout, 1840–1844 Percent turnout in presidential elections

Free population in 1840

Newspapers in 1840

Free population per paper in 1840

Percentage of white adults illiterate in 1840

14,190,223

1,354

10,480

6.7

77.6

74.7

North South

9,653,764 4,536,459

972 382

9,931 11,875

3.7 14.2

78.5 75.4

74.3 75.9

New England Mid-Atlantic Midwest Core Southa Louisiana Territory states

2,234,800 4,525,518 2,893,446 3,949,399

233 468 271 304

9,591 9,669 10,676 12,991

0.9 3.3 6.8 14.8

72.9 77.6 85.0 78.2

63.5 74.6 82.5 78.6

587,060

78

7,526

10.7

59.7

63.1

United States

1840

1844

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Source: Data assembled by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, University of Michigan. For a full presentation of these data, see Brooke, “To be ‘Read by the Whole People,’ ” Procs. AAS 110 (2002): 41–118. a. All southern states east of the Mississippi, except South Carolina, which did not hold popular elections for president.

weak and printers were few and far between, had relatively high voter turnout. By contrast, many northerners, particularly in New England, which enjoyed almost universal literacy and an abundance of media, were less likely to show up at the polls. Paradoxically, the old-style politics of the South proved at least as successful in mobilizing voters in the Log Cabin and Polk campaigns as did the modern innovations of northern Whigs. Apparently barbecues worked as well as—and sometimes better than—newspapers at getting out the vote. And many in the North were apparently drawn to different concerns in their growing engagement with a marketplace of print.28 By the early 1840s, then, the United States was divided into at least two distinct systems of political communications and even more regional cultures of politics. Certainly the parties required print for their national articulation, but perhaps they did not need too much, if the case of the South is any indication. A viable national party system might well have emerged without a popular press; such a system would have allowed for the limited circulation of a restrained discourse among a leadership class, who would then have mobilized the electorate in face-to-face relationships. But across the antebellum North, near universal GOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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popular literacy, a rapidly developing economy, accelerating urbanization, and the explosive effects of religious revival precluded that conservative path. Here the classical public sphere segmented into vigorous partisanship and then was transformed into a protean pluralistic marketplace. In this competitive environment, northern Whig and Democratic editors worked increasingly hard with paradoxically diminishing results and could only attempt to steer the process into acceptable directions. Conversely, many of the limitations of the classical public sphere of the eighteenth-century gentry endured across the plantation South. The proliferation of new voices and opinions in the northern press during the 1830s marked the opening of a modern and democratic world and posed a fundamental threat to a southern society ever more committed to the perpetuation of slavery. In the end, if we look forward two decades, the North’s transition from classical public sphere to a marketplace of public knowledge would play a formative role in bringing the collapse of the Second Party System and the onset of Civil War.29

PA R T 2

Have Pen, Will Travel: The Times and Life of John Norvell, Political Journalist

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Jeffrey L. Pasley . . . Although he was a founder of two venerable United States institutions, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the state of Michigan, John Norvell is best remembered today not for anything he did but instead for a screed he once provoked. In 1807 Norvell, a seventeen-year-old printer’s apprentice in rural Kentucky, wrote his hero Thomas Jefferson, the “Venerable Republican” president of the United States, and asked for some career advice. Like many young printers, the young man was planning to start his own newspaper. Did the president, a noted patron and advocate of the press, have any suggestions on how a newspaper should “be conducted . . . to be most extensively beneficial”? Undoubtedly to Norvell’s surprise, Jefferson had nothing good to say about the plan. His scorching reply, widely quoted in the years since, earned Norvell an enduring, albeit minor place in the Jefferson canon. The man who had written that he would rather have a press without a government than vice versa and whose own election was widely regarded as the 190

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triumph of newspapers, now condemned the press in terms almost as sweeping as his former praise: “A suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. . . . I look with real commiseration on my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world.” Smarting under the attacks of a newly energized Federalist press, Jefferson had come to share the distaste of the country’s educated elite for the politicization of the press since 1790s—his own role in the rise of partisan journalism notwithstanding.30 As the Reverend Samuel Miller expressed it, the rise of the party press had allowed “men of small talents, of little information, and of less virtue” to hijack the most potent agency for civic education available and subvert it to selfish ends.31 The aspiring young printer paid little heed to the presidential tirade. Inspired by the democratic, libertarian ideals that Jefferson and his party espoused, Norvell threw himself into the editorial fray and made a lengthy career of championing partisan causes and candidates. A hired pen in the service of his chosen party and faction, Norvell rose quickly from the printer’s bench to the editor’s desk and from employee to proprietor. But his fortunes were precarious, shifting wildly according to the success of his party at the polls and the vagaries of the subscribers, advertisers, and political associates who paid his bills. Even so, Norvell acquired influence in his editorial role, emerged as a political broker in Democratic-Republican circles, and eventually won high office in his own right. Norvell’s career, carrying him from backwoods Kentucky to the seaboard cities to the far frontier of the Old Northwest, was made possible by the rise of “newspaper politics” in the early republic. Prevailing political mores forbade statesmen from openly campaigning and cast suspicion on parties as permanent features of the governing process. So Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton founded newspapers to act as their surrogates in the very first public battles of the emerging party conflict, and from there the practice of newspaper politics mushroomed. It quickly became a political axiom that no political cause could be successful without its own network of newspapers. In most political contests from the 1790s until national party organizations solidified in the midnineteenth century, newspapers were the public face and the primary institutional embodiment of the parties they supported, and their editors served as local and national spokesmen and managers.32 Editors became the only truly professional politicians around, in the sense of actually making their living from political work. Over the course of four decades, John Norvell became a well-traveled exemplar of the type. Newspaper politics was a godsend for young printers with ambitions and interests that went GOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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beyond the usual ones of perfecting the skills of their trade and someday owning their own shop. Political journalism provided one of the few avenues into public life available for a workingman who could not go without a regular cash income. (Elite politicians typically relied on a law practice, plantation, or family fortune.) Printers seized upon it as a way to promote the democratic principles they loved and make a mark on their communities without completely abandoning their trade. Born into a farming family that had seen better days in the colonial Virginia gentry, Norvell came of age in the frontier settlement of Lancaster, Kentucky, some fifty miles south of Lexington, the state’s only significant urban center. The eighth of twelve children in a penurious household, the youth followed his older brothers Joshua and Moses into the newspaper business.33 He probably got his start in partisan journalism in the office of the Political Theatre, a Democratic-Republican newspaper they launched to champion James Madison’s succession to the presidency. Bitten by the political bug, Norvell headed east in search of a government clerkship in the national capital; when that plan failed, he moved to Baltimore and found work around 1812 as a journeyman and likely assistant editor in the office of the Baltimore American, the leading Democratic-Republican organ in the city. Soon he was immersed in the factional fights among local Republicans, joining in the takeover of one newspaper at odds with the Madison administration and changing its political tune. Though the paper folded after a few years, its vigorous support for Madison earned Norvell the government clerkship he had long sought. Unfortunately, it was a low-paying position in the Treasury Department, and by March 1814 Norvell was back in Baltimore and in the newspaper business again—this time thanks to the patronage of the state’s most powerful Republican, General Samuel Smith, who financed a new Republican organ called the Patriot as a vehicle to win back his old congressional seat. After two more years in Baltimore, Norvell, now a seasoned veteran of the newspaper wars, returned at age twenty-seven to his home state and took over its oldest newspaper, the Kentucky Gazette of Lexington. Fiercely devoted to the Republican cause, Norvell turned the formerly sedate Gazette into a passionate champion of the party politics that had provided his career. Skeptical of moves to create an “era of good feelings” free from partisanship, Norvell went on the attack after Kentucky’s Republican governor named the state’s leading Federalist, who now claimed to be a “no party” man, to a high post. “The truth is,” he remarked, “that never did a more gross delusion seize the minds of rational men” than the then-fashionable notion “that a cordial union could be effected between two parties so hostile in their feelings, so opposite in their principles.” Officials who abjured party were hostile to popular government: their aim was 192

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FIGURE 3.3. Masthead of the Philadelphia daily newspaper, Franklin Gazette (vol. 5, no. 837), 25 November 1820, during the period when Bache and Norvell were its editors. American Antiquarian Society.

simply to seek office for themselves or to avoid making promises to the voters. In the partisan world preferred by Norvell, editors would be powerful figures entrusted with voicing public opinion and holding elective officials accountable to its dictates “through the chastening and correcting animadversion of a free press.”34 For all his ambitions, Norvell did no better in Kentucky than in Baltimore, and soon he was casting about for a new venue. Once more he petitioned in vain for a clerkship in Washington, only to be driven back into political journalism, with its steady demand for hired pens ready and able to employ political and literary skills wherever opportunity beckoned. In 1820, recruited by the moderate “New School” branch of Philadelphia’s faction-plagued Democratic Party (as it was coming to be known), Norvell assumed the editorship of the Franklin Gazette, whose owner Richard Bache, a grandson of Benjamin Franklin, neglected the newspaper in favor of his duties as city postmaster— a job he did incompetently as well (fig. 3.3). As an inducement to relocate, Norvell was guaranteed the income from any printing or advertising contracts generated by Bache’s post office. Even more appealing was the prominent role Norvell would enjoy as chief spokesman for the dominant political party in one of the nation’s largest cities. Despite his lack of service or personal popularity in Philadelphia, the editor acquired an ex officio place high in party councils, and it was not long before anyone who had political business with Philadelphia Democrats contacted Norvell first.35 But Norvell overreached, both politically and financially. His moderate, probusiness faction, led by George M. Dallas and Thomas Sergeant, tried to play kingmaker in state politics, to the resentment of rural and western Pennsylvanians distrustful of the Philadelphia-based clique of office-holding insiders. In GOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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1824 “the Family,” as the group was dubbed owing to the incestuous personal and political ties among them, was eager to push the presidential candidacy of John C. Calhoun, then an aggressive nationalist in favor of the government-led economic development schemes in which many ambitious Pennsylvanians saw their future. The plan was for Norvell to put Calhoun’s name forward casually in the Franklin Gazette while working behind the scenes via private letters and conversations to build up support. He would thereby avoid the charge of “newspaper dictation” that was often flung at editor-politicians. But the scheme misfired. Rank-and-file Pennsylvania Democrats surprised “the Family” by endorsing Andrew Jackson over Calhoun at a state convention in 1824, and Norvell found himself accused of “indiscreet zeal” in pushing the losing candidate. In a statement that revealed the wide gulf opening between political professionals such as party editors and the antiparty political values still held by much of the population at large (including many elite statesmen), Norvell scoffed: “To be afraid of our own shadows is the most pernicious thing in politics. I must confess that I prefer even that ‘indiscreet zeal’ of which . . . we have been accused.”36 If a cause was worthy, it should be advanced with the highest possible level of energy, efficiency, and fervor. That was the political professional’s creed. Unfortunately, no amount of zeal could turn the Franklin Gazette into a profitable venture. Even with guaranteed income from postal contracts, the newspaper floated on red ink. Like most partisan editors, Norvell constantly worked against his own financial interests. In order to maximize readership and thereby enhance his political influence, Norvell signed up subscribers on credit, sometimes without request, and renewed them automatically. But payments were slow in coming, and as potential supporters at caucuses and polls, reluctant readers could not be pressured too harshly. “Tis a dismal business to collect newspaper debts,” Norvell sighed to an editorial colleague.37 Norvell spent endless hours collecting hundreds of small, far-flung debts, often from important people. At one point, he even dunned former president Madison, whose subscription had fallen more than three years past due. An ordinary business would normally retrench in the face of dwindling cash flow but not a political organ like the Franklin Gazette. As Norvell knew, a shabby-looking newspaper reflected poorly on the power and respectability of the public men for whom it spoke. If only proprietor Richard Bache had lived up to that reputation. He put the coup de grace to Norvell’s hopes through gross mismanagement of the post office. When it was discovered that Bache’s accounts were years in arrear, Norvell suffered the worst of the fallout from the scandal. Constrained by political loyalty, he had unwisely co-signed one of Bache’s notes, thereby assuming responsibility for the debt, and in the meantime had arranged 194

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to sell his share of the Gazette on the guarantee of continuing income from the post office. Now married to his third wife, with five children to support and more on the way, Norvell faced bankruptcy. What was a desperate party editor to do? Necessity drove Norvell into that darker region of political professionalism: office hunting. He lucked out when George Dallas was elected mayor of Philadelphia in 1828. As a longtime supporter of Dallas, he was rewarded with the post of city clerk. The election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 raised his expectations still higher. Hundreds of editors had labored for Jackson’s victory, and they looked forward to inauguration day. Unlike his presidential predecessors, who aided the party press mainly with printing contracts, Jackson opened up public office to his editorial backers. More than seventy won posts in his administration. Norvell heartily and self-servingly agreed with this policy. “The Editors of newspapers,” he observed, were “a class generally possessing character and talents equal to those of any other description of men” and were “entitled to the same consideration, which is due to all other professions and occupations.”38 But Norvell was doomed to disappointment. When Pennsylvania congressman Samuel D. Ingham was named secretary of the treasury in Jackson’s cabinet, Norvell got the brush-off and was made to understand that the elite insiders in “the Family” deemed him a mere parasite who was lucky to have been kept around at all. Norvell complained publicly about the ingratitude. One officeholder, he observed, was “at this moment enjoying an office, for life, with two thousand dollars per annum, and this office he never would have obtained but for the influence of the Franklin Gazette [and] its Editor. Two other individuals, now in Congress, owe it to the Franklin Gazette that they were ever named for seats in that body.”39 A bitter Norvell turned against his former backers, launching a competing paper, the Pennsylvania Inquirer (forerunner of the modern Philadelphia daily), to challenge “the Family” in state politics and to push Martin Van Buren over Calhoun as Jackson’s eventual successor. When his enemies triumphed in the next city election, Norvell was out of his job as city clerk and back in Washington searching for a handout. Reduced to disguising his political sentiments and laboring for the anti-Jackson National Intelligencer, Norvell in middle age had little to show for all his years with the party press. But rescue came in 1831, with Van Buren’s ascendancy over Calhoun as Jackson’s heir apparent and the purge of Calhounites (including Ingham) from the cabinet. The way was open for Norvell’s addition to the patronage rolls. Unfortunately, his reward was not the plum job in Philadelphia or Washington for which he had hoped but rather the postmastership of faraway Detroit in the Michigan Territory. With no other alternatives, Norvell took the job and abandoned editing as an occupation. It GOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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proved a smart move: Norvell exploited the new opportunity to build a political following for himself. Long accustomed to serving financial backers, Norvell was finally in a position to influence others through deft use of his new office. One of his earliest and shrewdest moves was to establish a close relationship between the post office and the Detroit Democratic Free Press. Well understanding a political editor’s need for outside income, he made certain that the Free Press received the printing business generated by the post office’s daily operations, frequently placing large advertisements for unclaimed letters and arranging contracts for the printing of necessary postal forms. Norvell also helped the newspaper on the editorial side. He supplied the editors with information through his Pennsylvania and Kentucky contacts, wrote for the journal frequently, and sent back news reports during his trips to Washington, the only sort of firsthand reportage available to a frontier paper. Under Norvell’s guidance, Michigan’s Democratic Party literally took shape in the pages of the Democratic Free Press. The principal beneficiary of this coverage was Norvell himself. Closely allied to territorial governor Stevens T. Mason, who appreciated the postmaster’s expertise as a veteran political professional, Norvell was named secretary of the Territorial Council in January 1834. That appointment made him the overnight star of the Free Press. In its pages, Norvell gained notice for his ardent support of statehood and aggressive advocacy of universal white manhood suffrage and public education. Thanks to Norvell’s efforts, the Michigan state constitution, adopted in 1835, mandated state support for a public university and public schools.40 That same year Norvell was sent by the territorial legislature to Washington as a United States senator, charged with winning congressional endorsement of Michigan’s admission into the Union. That election was a testament more to the former editor’s political skills than to his popularity. Contemporaries were often repelled by the fanaticism with which Norvell and his editorial allies fought party battles and by their lust for the spoils of victory. Norvell never lost his reputation as a regular at the public trough. One ostentatiously high-minded critic insisted that Norvell and his henchman at the Free Press, editor John S. Bagg, were a drag on the Democratic Party. The two men were “rather odious among the right and straightforward Democrats . . . ,” Thomas C. Sheldon complained. “What will ruin us if we are ruined at all will be by elevating men to place & office that are unworthy . . . notoriously unfit and unpopular.”41 As it turned out, Norvell spent four unhappy years in the Senate, where he was “not half as big a giant as he [had] supposed.”42 Although he served among thirty-two former printers, editors, and publishers during his time in Congress—they ranked next to lawyers as the most overrepresented occupa196

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tional group—Norvell could not escape his reputation as a beggar of political handouts. Nor was he much better off economically. Having declared bankruptcy on the eve of his move to Michigan, he was forced to do so again after creditors chased him down in his new state. His situation was made worse by election to the Senate, where the pay could not cover his travel and housing costs. In order to survive, Norvell took an insider loan from a Michigan bank on whose board he sat, and then used his influence to ensure its selection as a “pet bank” to receive federal deposits in the wake of Jackson’s war on the Bank of the United States. By the end of his term, Norvell was reduced to begging forty-dollar loans from political allies. Forced out of the Senate in 1841 by his money problems and the surging Whigs, Norvell returned to Michigan and aggressively pursued all petty appointments available. Eager to escape such “drudgery,” he embarked on a tortuous path through the politics of the 1840s in search of more suitable employment. After the 1844 presidential election, the longtime Van Buren man outmaneuvered several rivals and won a district attorney job from Van Buren’s party rival, James K. Polk. Four years later, he pulled off a similar move in a different direction, deserting the Democratic presidential candidate for victorious Whig champion Zachary Taylor and thereby keeping his job. He then brazenly applied to a former Whig nemesis for a diplomatic post under Taylor and got it. Unfortunately, Norvell died on the very day his credentials for a consulship in Turkey arrived in the mail. There was a principle behind Norvell’s switch to Taylor: opposition to slavery and especially its expansion. Van Buren himself ran for president on the Free Soil ticket in 1848, and in Michigan many Free Soil Democrats made common cause with the Whigs. At the same time, it was sadly characteristic of Norvell—and many other political professionals of his era—to turn even a principled stand into a pretext for office seeking. The truth was that for all their contributions to popular democracy in the United States, political editors got little respect. Often rising from the ranks of workingmen, young printers like Norvell were able to exercise influence in the service of political parties and, after the Jacksonian era ended, to win prominent public offices in their own right. But elective office had built-in limits. With its frugal pay, men without means were little better off than they were in the editorial offices from which they sprang or often a good deal worse in strictly financial terms. Consequently, few could establish permanent careers or lasting fame in national life. Instead, like John Norvell, they were obliged to engage in a constant hunt for any office that would pay the bills and shore up their status. Unsung heroes in the making of popular democracy, party editors in the early republic forged a style of politics—idealistic and self-seeking at once—that would prevail into the twentieth century.43 GOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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PA R T 3

Copyright Meredith L. McGill . . .

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.

Copyright was understood by the founders to be an important tool of nation building. Section 8 of the United States Constitution grants Congress the power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The civic purpose of copyright is apparent both in the enlightenment appeal to “Progress” and in the appearance of this clause alongside those that empower Congress to collect taxes, to borrow money, to regulate international commerce, to establish rules of naturalization and laws on bankruptcy, to coin money, and to establish post offices and post roads. Defining copyright as a matter of national and not state law did much to remove formidable barriers to interstate trade in books and to lay the groundwork for linking distant publishing centers. The Constitution guaranteed that American authors and publishers who held copyrights in their works could control the distribution of such books over the entire expanse of the republic. That this right was granted to authors and publishers for limited times provided an incentive for investment in book production without risking the consolidation of publishers’ power. As copyright law was drafted by the legislature and interpreted by the courts, it emerged as a powerful instrument for the federal government to use against the development of print monopolies. The effect of copyright law on American publishing was complicated by the extension of this right across multiple regional print centers and by the new nation’s continued cultural dependency on Europe. American copyright law gave authors and publishers a national monopoly on particular properties far in advance of the development of a national market for books. Copyright in the early republic was, paradoxically, both greatly valued and little used. On the one hand, copyright established and provided for the enforcement of a property right of which many were eager to take advantage. Copyright law concretized an author’s contribution to publication and provided a basis for negotiation between author and publisher as to its value. At the time of the passage of the first federal copyright law (1790), authors commonly assumed all or part of the financial risk of publication and, by generating lists of subscribers, often took an active role in the marketing of their books. Copyright law’s establishment of 198

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authorial rights and specification of their duration was a crucial factor in the larger shift in publishing practice whereby authors were disentangled from the process of production and began to be paid outright for their efforts. On the other hand, copyright conferred an “exclusive Right” that many authors and publishers found to be of limited, even negligible, value. James Gilreath’s study of the first decade of federal copyright records suggests that only a small percentage of authors and publishers actually availed themselves of this right.44 Many of the staples of the press, including newspapers, magazines, local and federal government publications, broadsides, sermons, addresses, and club and society rules and charters, were considered too ephemeral or too local in their circulation to be eligible for or to benefit from federal protection. Only texts likely to retain their value over time were registered for copyright. True to republican standards of literary value, the overwhelming majority of copyright entries from 1790 to 1800 were for practical, didactic, and commercially useful books.45 Copyright protected authors’ and publishers’ investments in scholarly, literary, and scientific works, as well as in their more practical and commercial speculations, and yet the growth of American print culture did not depend on copyright. In the early republic, a national print culture was established less through the sale of books than through the distribution of uncopyrighted newspapers, magazines, tracts, and pamphlets through the United States mail.46 Unlike in England, where copyright law helped to regulate a highly organized and centralized book trade, in the United States authors and proprietors of copyrighted books had to contend both with the difficulty of book distribution in a developing nation and with the revolutionary legacy of a cultural and political emphasis on the unrestrained circulation of print. The same law that granted copyright to citizens and residents denied such rights to foreign authors, bestowing on publishers an extraordinary license, that of the unrestricted republication of foreign texts. The value of copyright in the early republic, then, was diminished by the great demand for the kinds of texts that could freely be reprinted. It was also limited by the decentralization of publishing. Structurally speaking, where the distribution of printed texts is a challenge, the right to control distribution by limiting copying is a right of precarious value. However, even as publishers such as the Harper brothers built substantial enterprises printing and distributing uncopyrighted texts, they began to make different kinds of investments in the texts that, thanks to copyright, they controlled outright. More than simply stimulating book production in the early republic, copyright law’s uneven disposition of property rights in texts did much to shape the distinctive character of American publishing. Market competition between copyrighted texts and those that could be freely GOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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reprinted was not unique to the early republic. The first British copyright law, the Statute of Anne (1710), granted authors the sole right of printing for a limited term of fourteen years, renewable by the author, if alive, for a second term of fourteen years; this statute also protected all books already in print at the time of its enactment for a period of twenty-one years. Despite explicit language that defined when this legal property right expired, London publishers were able to maintain control over titles that had passed out of copyright through a combination of coercive guild practices and favorable rulings by English judges who were reluctant to challenge property claims of long standing.47 Scottish courts, however, interpreted the statute more strictly, ruling in a series of cases in the 1740s and 1750s that the reprinting of English books with expired copyrights was perfectly legal.48 It was the success of Scottish reprinters such as Alexander Donaldson that forced the English courts in Millar v. Taylor (1769) and Donaldson v. Becket (1774) to define the nature and limits of British copyright law. English publishers largely ignored Scottish reprinters, who supplied their home market with cheap reprints of English texts, until Donaldson brazenly opened a shop in London in 1763, undercutting the London booksellers by as much as 30 to 50 percent.49 The copyright case that bears Donaldson’s name served as a turning point in British law, establishing copyright as a statutory right of limited duration (rather than a perpetual right under the common law) and instantly transforming many of the most valuable English works from private into public property. The sudden availability for reprinting of texts by long-dead authors such as Shakespeare and Milton, and more recent texts by Defoe, Thomson, and Fielding, arguably helped popularize the very notion of classic texts in English.50 In the wake of Donaldson v. Becket, literary works with expired copyrights joined early modern steady sellers such as catechisms and primers as books that could be freely reprinted in a variety of editions for a wide range of potential readers. While still under British rule, colonial printers were subject to English laws and customs, including those that governed intellectual property. The colonies did enact numerous laws to benefit individual inventors and on one occasion circumvented Stationer’s Company’s privilege by awarding John Usher a printing patent for his compilation of the laws of Massachusetts.51 Popular texts such as almanacs, psalms, Psalters, catechisms, and educational books were locally printed and reprinted without interference from London, although colonial printers faced stiff competition from imported books. Benjamin Franklin did not hesitate to reprint Isaac Watts’s Psalms of David (1729) and Samuel Richardson’s popular novel Pamela (1742), but neither was commercially successful, owing to the difficulty of coordinating supply and demand in a literary marketplace still dominated by imports.52 200

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The need for general copyright and patent laws began to be articulated with some urgency toward the end of the Revolutionary War as state legislatures were besieged by petitions from authors and inventors seeking protection for individual works. At the behest of Noah Webster, Joel Barlow, and others, Connecticut was the first state to pass a general copyright statute, in January 1783. Barlow also wrote an influential letter to Elias Boudinot, president of the Continental Congress, urging that body to pass a resolution encouraging the states to follow Connecticut’s example. While the resolution passed by the Congress on 2 May 1783 was successful in its aims—all the states except Delaware had passed a copyright law by 1786—authors attempting to secure property rights in multiple states were confronted by a baffling array of terms of copyright protection; differing registration, deposit, and renewal requirements; and statespecific conditions, such as price-control provisions and reciprocity agreements.53 Noah Webster’s 1782–83 trip to Trenton, Philadelphia, and Hartford, and his 1785 tour to Charleston, Richmond, Annapolis, and Dover, both undertaken in order to secure property rights in his Grammatical Institute (1783–85), suggest the extraordinary effort that was required of authors who sought more than a local or regional market for their books. The constitutional copyright provision promised to remedy this confusion by bringing copyright and patent law under federal jurisdiction. The Constitution grants Congress the power to confer on “Authors and Inventors” an “exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,” justifying such rights through their anticipated benefit to the public. And yet the constitutional provision leaves most of the specification and administration of this right to the legislature. Indeed, the language of the constitutional provision leaves unanswered many of the most important questions about the nature of the power it bestowed on Congress. Central to the American debate over copyright, as it had been in the recently concluded British legal struggle, would be the question as to whether copyright statutes were the origin of authors’ rights, or whether they offered a kind of secondary protection for rights that the author held in perpetuity at common law. That the Constitution speaks of “securing” rather than “vesting” rights, as the British Statute of Anne (1710) had done, suggests that the founders understood copyright law to bolster a right that was already held by authors. That copyright is repeatedly linked with patent law in compound constructions (“Authors and Inventors,” “Writings and Discoveries”), complicates this assumption, as inventors were never assumed by English law to hold common-law rights to their inventions. At stake in this debate will be both technical matters such as the point of origin and duration of copyright protection and the more philosophical question as to whether copyright is a private property right founded on natural law principles independent of the state, or GOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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whether copyright is a right of public origin, granted at the discretion and for the benefit of the state. It took a few years after the ratification of the Constitution for Congress to employ its power to draft a copyright law. There was some ambiguity in how to proceed. The Constitution’s copyright and patent clause did not specify whether Congress should grant individual petitions or enact a general law. In the absence of the latter, individual requests for copyright and patent protection began pouring into Congress. Under the weight of these petitions and at the behest of George Washington, who, in his January 1790 State of the Union speech, urged Congress to do more to promote science and literature, copyright and patent bills were assigned to separate drafting committees for reasons of expediency. This procedure would prove consequential, as different patent and copyright systems would evolve out of these initial bills: patent law would require an examination for originality and the supply of models or specifications, whereas copyright law would require little more than the publication of the intent to publish and official registration. The first copyright law, “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning” (Act of 31 May 1790), drew both on the Statute of Anne and on various state copyright laws for its provisions. Broadening its scope to include both “authors and proprietors,” the act secured “copies of maps, charts, and books” to citizens and residents for a period of fourteen years. As in the Statute of Anne, American copyrights were transferable within the initial fourteen-year period, but they could be renewed for a second fourteen years only by the author, if he or she were living. It is important to note that by twenty-first-century standards, this is a right of extremely short duration and one that places strict limits on heritability; copyrights could not be renewed posthumously by an author’s widow or children. The 1790 act also created procedures for establishing copyright, requiring that a printed copy of the title of a prospective work be deposited at the clerk’s office of the district court; that a copy of this record be published in one or more newspapers “for the space of four weeks”; and that a copy of the work itself be delivered to the secretary of state within six months of publication. Though copyrights were national in scope, fell within the purview of the secretary of state, and were recorded in terms of the “year of the independence of the United States of America,” copyright law preserved the decentralized registration that was characteristic of the state statutes. Key features of some of the state statutes, however, were not included in this legislation, including price controls, licensing agreements, censorship and blasphemy restrictions, and the explicit naming of copyright as a property right. According to the act of 1790, copyright conferred “the sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing, and vending.” As Lyman Ray Patterson has argued, the further copyright legislation 202

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was removed from the petition of the individual author, the more its concerns shifted from property rights to the problem of commercial regulation.54 Perhaps the most consequential feature of the Act of 31 May 1790 was Section 5, which maintained “That nothing in this act shall be construed to extend to prohibit the importation or vending, reprinting, or publishing within the United States, of any map, chart, book or books, written, printed, or published by any person not a citizen of the United States, in foreign parts or places without the jurisdiction of the United States.” Patterson has suggested that this unusual clause is based on a misreading of Section VII of the Statute of Anne, which allowed for the importation into England of books written in a foreign language as a means of combating censorship.55 And yet the shift in defining the point at which state protection ceases seems important enough to be a deliberate recasting. By making citizenship and not linguistic identity the cutoff for copyright protection of works published “in foreign parts or places,” the American provision underscores the statutory nature of this right while also acknowledging that the identity of the state is not founded on linguistic difference. The act of 1790 allowed for political difference alongside cultural continuity by stopping short of bringing British works—foreign texts written in a common language— under its protection. Foreigners could copyright their maps, charts, and books if they were residents when their works were published in the United States, but these rights did not extend past national borders. Both nationalist and colonial, the act called attention to the government’s limited interest in protecting and limited jurisdiction over the rights of noncitizens even as it ensured that foreign works would continue to be published and circulated in the new nation. This first federal copyright act was supplemented in 1802 and revised in 1831, but interpretation of its core ideas would wait until Circuit Court and Supreme Court cases tested the tolerances and reach of the statutes. The Act of 29 April 1802 extended the benefits of copyright beyond maps, charts, and books “to the arts of designing, engraving, and etching historical and other prints” and added the requirement that the copyright record be inscribed on the work itself. In the case of maps, charts, and engravings, this act provided for a shortened form of the copyright notice to be inscribed on the face of the document or on the engraver’s plate. In the case of books, it required that the author or proprietor “give information by causing the copy of the record, which . . . he is required to publish in one or more of the newspapers to be inserted at full length in the title page” or, in its now-familiar position, on the page immediately following. The circuitousness of this language, which supplements the public (but singular and stationary) district court register with a circulating newspaper notice, which is then copied into the object itself, suggests a concern to mark the public origins of the right to restrict publication. If the Act of 29 April 1802 GOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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extended the reach and clarified the conditions of copyright, the Act of 3 February 1831 represented an important rethinking of the nature and extent of copyright protection. This first major recodification of copyright was prompted by a number of factors: the extension of the term of protection in British copyright law to twenty-eight years or the life-span of the author (Copyright Act of 1814); petitions from literary men and other print entrepreneurs; and the advocacy of the stalwart and aging Noah Webster.56 Webster sought passage of a law giving “authors and their heirs the exclusive and perpetual property in their works.”57 While Congress refused such a radical redefinition of copyright, the act of 1831 importantly extended the initial term to twenty-eight years and provided for a fourteen-year renewal by an author’s “widow, or child, or children” should he die before the first term of copyright expired. Despite some resistance on the floor to the term extension, passage of the Act of 3 February 1831 successfully redefined copyright as familial, heritable property.58 It also marked the waning, at least in the legislature, of a revolutionary attention to marking the public origins of copyright. The 1831 act revised the language of copyright registration, requiring that the date be recorded not in terms of “the year of the independence of the United States of America,” but with the Latin, Christian “anno Domini.” The requirement to publish notification of copyright in the newspaper for four weeks was also dropped, being retained only for copyright renewals. The changes made to the copyright law in 1831 turned out to be lasting ones. Over the next few decades, the law concerning copyright deposits was repeatedly amended, performance rights in dramatic compositions were added to the law (in 1856), and copyright was extended to cover photographs (in 1865), but the basic structure of the 1831 law held until the next general revision of the copyright code in 1870. Interpretation of the law by the courts was similarly slow to develop; fewer than twenty copyright cases were tried in federal courts in the first fifty years following the passage of the Act of 31 May 1790 (table 3.2). While the number of copyright cases would dramatically increase with the expansion and coordination of regional markets in the 1840s and 1850s, the earliest cases demonstrate both the strong demand for instructional books, prints, maps, and newspapers and the potential conflict between private property rights in printed texts and the interests of the state. Few of these early cases established significant legal precedents, though the texts at issue give a useful overview of the literary marketplace by indicating the kinds of works deemed valuable enough to fight over. Legal publications lead the list, followed by schoolbooks, manuals, and other useful works such as maps and charts. But newspapers were denied the privilege of copyright—an exclusion affirmed in the precedent-setting case of Clayton v. Stone (1829). In this case, Edwin Clayton challenged William Leete Stone and Francis Hall’s 204

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TABLE 3.2. Chronological list of U.S. court cases involving copyright and literary property, 1789–1840

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Hudson and Goodwin v. Patten (Connecticut, Hartford County, September Term, 1789) Patten v. Goodwin (Connecticut, Hartford County, February Term, 1790) Kilty v. Green (General Court of Maryland, May Term, 1799) Nichols v. Ruggles (Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors, June 1808) Denis v. LeClerc (Superior Court of the Territory of Orleans, Spring Term, 1811) King v. Force (Circuit Court, District of Columbia, June Term, 1820) Binns v. Woodruff (Circuit Court, Eastern District, Pennsylvania, April Term, 1821) Ewer v. Coxe (Circuit Court, Eastern District, Pennsylvania, October Term, 1824) Snowden v. Noah (New York Court of Chancery, 31 January 1825) Blunt v. Patten (Circuit Court, Southern District, New York, June Term, 1828) Clayton v. Stone (Circuit Court, Southern District, New York, 1829) Gould v. Banks & Gould (New York Supreme Court, January 1832) Wheaton v. Peters (Circuit Court, Eastern District, Pennsylvania, 1832) Wheaton v. Peters (United States Supreme Court, January 1834) Monk v. Harper (Vice Chancellor’s Court, New York, 16 May 1837) Brandreth v. Lance (New York Court of Chancery, 16 July 1839) Gray v. Russell (Circuit Court, District Massachusetts, October Term, 1839) Miller v. McElroy (Circuit Court, Eastern District, Pennsylvania, October Term, 1839) Bell v. Locke (New York Court of Chancery, 7 January 1840) Gould v. Hastings (Circuit Court, Southern District, New York, April Term, 1840)

regular practice of copying his daily price current, or market report, directly into their newspaper. Arguing that the constitutional copyright provision was not intended for “the encouragement of mere industry, unconnected with learning and the sciences,” the court ruled that the fluctuating nature of the price current made it ineligible for copyright. Only works “of a more fixed, permanent and durable character” (i.e., works that were likely to remain useful past the point at which state protection ceased) were entitled to the property right. Moreover, newspapers were too important in establishing the public sphere that justified the granting of copyrights for them to be treated as literary property. The court in Clayton v. Stone suggested that, in order to be rewarded for their labor, the plaintiffs would have to seek “patronage and protection from [the price current’s] utility to the public, and not as a work of science,”59 maintaining a distinction between the market for books in general and the interests of the state in promoting and protecting certain kinds of publications. By far the most important of these early cases and the first and only case from this period to reach the Supreme Court, Wheaton v. Peters (1834), raised the question, Who has the right to publish and profit from the sale of Supreme Court reports? Whereas the eighteenth-century British legal dispute over the GOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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nature of copyright had centered on James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730), a long descriptive poem that aspired to the top of the hierarchy of literary genres, the American restaging of this debate was provoked by a text more typical of early American book production, an annotated collection of the oral opinions of the nation’s highest court. The self-reflexivity of this case brought into stark relief the potential contradiction between the private ownership of texts and the public interest. Taking control over the dissemination of federal law as its subject, Wheaton v. Peters staged a clash of absolutes: the inviolability of private property under the common law was countered by the young republic’s urgent need for a widespread knowledge of the decisions of the federal judiciary. At the time of their initial publication (1817–27), Henry Wheaton’s Reports were more of a scholarly than a commercial success. Wheaton was the first official Supreme Court reporter, and he relied on the sale of his carefully annotated texts of the oral opinions delivered by the court to supplement his modest salary.60 Because of Wheaton’s scholarly thoroughness, readership of his Reports was limited to an elite audience; because of the volumes’ extraordinary bulk, they were priced out of the range of all but the wealthiest consumers. Wheaton’s successor as Supreme Court reporter envisioned a wider audience for court reports and issued both his own and prior Reports in a condensed form—one more accessible to ordinary users—at a fraction of the price. Richard Peters’s strategy of opting for high-volume sales at a low marginal profit rate was ideally suited both to the republican dream of a universal diffusion of learning and to the American reality of widespread literacy, an increasing need for a knowledge of national law, and expanding western markets. The success of Peters’s Condensed Reports rendered Wheaton’s copyright virtually worthless and prompted him to seek legal redress. Wheaton’s counsel, Daniel Webster and Elijah Paine, argued for his rights to his Reports under both the common law and the statutes, providing the court with an opportunity to restage the British debate over the nature of copyright (was an author’s common-law right to his text reinforced or superseded by statutory protection?) and rule on the nature of the statutes themselves (were statutory requirements essential to the establishment of copyright or merely directory?). The debate in Wheaton v. Peters was complicated by the example of the Supreme Court reports, which aligned the printed text with public property, and by the entanglement of copyright in the broader question of the division of state and federal powers. Wheaton’s claim to a common-law right in his Reports was met by a republican emphasis on the publicity of print and the political necessity of its wide dissemination. The populist appeal of Peters’s defense was embraced by a court concerned about the federal regulation of commerce and committed to consolidating power at the national level by limiting common-law protections 206

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at the state level. Brought before the Marshall court while the Charles River Bridge case was waiting to be reargued, Wheaton v. Peters revisited the concept of copyright as a limited monopoly right within the volatile context of the Jacksonian struggle to redistribute government privileges to a wider public.61 Wheaton’s counsel mounted a vigorous defense of the author’s right to the products of his labor but had difficulty stretching the common law to embrace the technology of print. Webster and Paine repeatedly described the author as the sole owner and producer of the text, ignoring both the fact of mechanized production and the fact of the market, the necessary difference between an author’s and a reader’s property in a book. Typical of the mismatch between argument and example on the common-law side was their response to the proposition that it is impossible for an author to have a property in his works after he has published and sold them: “As well might [one] say that a man who leases lands, parts with all his property in them, and can never claim the reversion; and that the tenant has a right to sell or waste the inheritance. As well might he say that one who loans a chattel can never reclaim it.”62 In trying to establish for literary property the integrity, stability, and continuity of real property, Wheaton’s counsel urged the court to think in terms of inheritance rather than production, leasing instead of sale, and the reclamation of an object rather than profit or exchange. Peters’s counsel, on the other hand, exploited the political and social dimensions of the large-scale production and distribution of texts. J. R. Ingersoll and Thomas Sergeant built their case around the special nature of court reports, characterizing them as texts that do not so much contain as enforce the law by enabling citizens to behave according to its strictures. Turning the tables on those arguing for authorial property from the vantage of the common law, the defense argued that to restrict the circulation of these reports would be to undermine the common law itself. The central paradox of the defense in Wheaton v. Peters—that the sovereignty of law is dependent on and constructed in the image of that which it must also regulate—is played out in the majority opinion, which set precedent both for establishing the technical requirements for federal copyright protection and for clarifying the nature of federal law itself. The majority opinion favored the defendant on three important points of law, ruling (1) that an author’s commonlaw property in his text ceased upon publication; (2) that strict compliance with all statutory requirements was necessary for establishing title in a work; and (3) that there could be no common law of the United States. Both narrowing its jurisdiction and strengthening its power, the Supreme Court determined that the common law did not extend beyond state boundaries: “There is no principle which pervades the union and has the authority of laws,” it asserted, “that is not embodied in the constitution or laws of the union.”63 GOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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Justices Smith Thompson and Henry Baldwin dissented from these rulings, insisting that an author’s common-law right to his text existed quite apart from the question of statutory protection. And yet all six justices voted unanimously that “no reporter has, or can have any copy-right, in the written opinions delivered by this court.”64 This final ruling proved most damaging to the prospects of Henry Wheaton, who was left with the expensive option of pursuing a property claim in what amounted to little more than his editorial apparatus. Writing for the majority, Justice John McLean established the moment of going-intoprint as a point of crossing. As McLean explained, an author holds property in his text under the common law up until the moment of publication; thereafter he surrenders his common-law right in exchange for statutory protection. McLean insisted that an author’s property claim in his text was satisfied at the point of sale: “The argument that a literary man is as much entitled to the product of his labour, as any other member of society, cannot be controverted. And the answer is, that he realizes this product by the transfer of his manuscripts, or in the sale of his works when first published.”65 This ruling not only establishes a distinction at law between handwriting and print, identifying the former as personal and the latter as public property, but also provides for state intervention at the point of transfer from one medium to the other—the point at which the manuscript becomes potentially profitable. In his dissent, Justice Thompson objected that the court sought to restrict an author’s rights at the very moment he tried to exercise them. He found it ironic that an author could maintain absolute control over his text only insofar as he did not attempt to publish it. Yet the majority agreed with McLean that the fact of publication transported the text outside the bounds of private law. The complex status of the printed text as a form of temporarily alienated public property is evident from the procedural requirements that the court insisted were absolutely necessary for establishing copyright. Ruling that an author must perform registration, deposit, and notification requirements in the order in which they were prescribed or fail to achieve “perfect title” in his work, the court in Wheaton v. Peters emphasized the fact that the correspondence between an author and his copyrighted text was fully mediated by the state.66 According to the majority, the title page was not the locus of a private right but evidence of a multistep process by which the public, which authenticates the book and consents to restrict its distribution, is acknowledged. Wheaton v. Peters settled for American law the vexed question of the statutory nature of copyright and did much to shape a nineteenth-century legal tradition in which the property claims of authors and proprietors were forced to give way to the public interest. . . . 208

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The popular debate over literary property in the 1830s and 1840s centered on the question of international copyright. In the spring of 1836, the British publishing firm Saunders & Otley set up a branch office in New York City in a bid to control the reprint market for the books the firm had originally published in England. Soon realizing its claims were unsustainable without an international copyright agreement, the publisher circulated a petition among prominent British authors, gathered signatures, and submitted it to Congress, setting off a flood of memorials both for and against international copyright (fig. 3.4). Proponents of a bill extending copyright to foreign authors lamented the injury to texts, reputations, and profits caused by unauthorized reprinting. Claiming that the availability of cheap British reprints pushed American publications from the field, they called on Congress to defend the author as the producer and preserver of national identity. Opponents of such a bill saw the reprint market itself as the locus of national values, arguing that international copyright would raise the price and limit the circulation of books, placing American readers in thrall to British publishers. The absence of property rights in reprinted texts allowed copyright opponents to imagine a market in which editions could be limitless in number and thoroughly dispersed. They called on Congress to preserve the decentralization of the literary marketplace as an important barrier to the tyranny of centralized power. The report returned in June 1838 by the Senate Committee on Patents and the Patent Office came down emphatically on the side of those who opposed international copyright. No doubt influenced by the crisis in credit and banking that had led to depression in 1837, the report calculated the amount of capital invested in the book trades that would be put at risk by changes in the law and the many laborers who would be put out of work if British editions for the American market were published overseas. Like the anticopyright petitioners, who argued that the nationality of a book was instantiated in the process of its production—the small type and narrow margins of the American reprint broadcasting a defiance of the high prices and monopolizing intentions of the London press—the committee decided that national interests lay with the publishing industry and not with the struggling American or pirated foreign author.67 Resistance to international copyright in this period is most often seen from the author’s perspective as a setback for the nation, a just cause turned back by the lobbying of publishing interests. But unlike aspiring authors, many American publishers were less concerned with producing a literature that met and thereby replicated British standards than in sustaining a radically different system of publishing. Numerous literary forms and formats flourished under the culture of reprinting: eclectic magazines produced regional versions of the British quarterlies; newspaper “extras” reprinted entire novels, ecclesiastical GOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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FIGURE 3.4. Groups of citizens and members of printing trades opposing the passage of an international copyright law prepared and sent petitions to Congress. In them statistics such as the number of people—many of them women—employed in the printing trades whose jobs would be endangered and the fallacy of the argument that even best-selling British authors were forgoing income in the United States were cited. “Memorial of the Columbia Typographical Society, of the City of Washington, against the enactment of an international copy-right law. February 13, 1838.” 25th Cong., 2nd sess., 1838, S. Doc. 190. American Antiquarian Society.

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histories, and scientific manuals in standard quarto size, blurring the line between disposable literature and books that were worth preserving; and ordinary publications such as abolitionist pamphlets and temperance tracts gained wide distribution, as did extraordinary publishing projects such as Harper & Brothers’ Illuminated and New Pictorial Bible (1843–46), which was published in fifty-four installments and distributed as a periodical through the mail, accompanied by more than sixteen hundred illustrations. The reprint trade flourished alongside and at times gave a boost to the publication of works by American authors. Some of the same publishing houses that made a fortune reprinting foreign works, notably Carey & Lea in Philadelphia and Harper & Brothers in New York, also invested heavily in the work of American authors. Neither simply a bar nor a boon to American publishing, the uneven disposition of property rights in texts, upheld by custom, law, and politics, helped to make the literary marketplace of the early republic unusually expansive, innovative, and volatile.

PA R T 4

Expanding the Realm of Communications

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Richard R. John . . . “Among the improvements in the United States, there is, perhaps, no one that has advanced more rapidly, or proved more extensively useful, than that of the transportation of the mail.” So wrote an anonymous contributor to the Port Folio, a Philadelphia-based literary magazine, in 1810. “In point of public utility, [the postal system] holds a rank but little inferior to printing. Copies may be multiplied at the press, but, without this establishment, how limited must be their distribution!”68 In the early republic, the United States experienced a communications revolution with enduring consequences for American life. At its core was the rapid and unprecedented expansion of the main pillars of long-distance communications: the postal system, the stagecoach industry, and the periodical press. Together these institutions created the infrastructure for a distinctive informational environment that would hasten the emergence of a national market, mass political parties, and nationally oriented voluntary associations. This communications revolution was set in motion by innovative legislation guided by the GOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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novel philosophy that government had an obligation to provide the citizenry with access to information about public affairs. Its cornerstone was the Post Office Act of 1792, a landmark in American communications policy and one of the most far-reaching pieces of legislation enacted in the half century between the adoption of the Constitution in 1788 and the Panic of 1837.

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Before the establishment of the new federal government, the United States was an informational ancien regime, with limited facilities for long-distance communication. As late as 1788, the Post Office Department boasted a mere sixtynine offices, only two more than had been maintained by the royal postal system in 1765. Most were located in a single seaboard chain on what is today the “Old Post Road,” just as they had been prior to the break with the crown. The vast majority of postal patrons were merchants engaged in overseas trade. Newspapers and magazines circulated in limited numbers, and few traveled through the mail. No periodical received a favorable postal rate. Though postal administrators sometimes permitted printers to trade copies of their newspapers, the practice was merely customary and lacked the force of law. The Post Office Department, as one official explained in 1788, had been established by Congress “for the purpose of facilitating commercial correspondence,” and, as such, had “properly speaking,” no connection with the press.69 In the great constitutional debates of 1787–88, few contemporaries regarded the existing state of communications as a major problem. Under the Articles of Confederation, ordinary Americans living far from Philadelphia were accustomed to learning only sporadically about the activities of their delegates to Congress. What information did arrive often came courtesy of individual delegates, who had the right to transmit or “frank” through the mail an unlimited number of items free of charge. James Madison took this state of affairs for granted in his Federalist essays. According to Madison, the citizenry would receive the bulk of its information about public affairs from representatives returning to their home districts to meet constituents face to face. In Federalist 10, Madison went so far as to hail poor long-distance communications as a safeguard for minority rights. Thanks to the enormous geographic extent of the country, he conjectured, political factions—whether special interests or popular majorities—would be incapable of organizing across state boundaries and imposing their will on the country. The only prominent public figure in the 1780s to propose a significant augmentation in the facilities for long-distance communications was the Pennsylvania physician Benjamin Rush. Rejecting outright the fiscal mandate for postal policy that had long prevailed in Great Britain and its colonies, Rush substi212

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tuted an educational rationale better suited to the needs of a republic. To adapt the “principles, morals, and manners of our citizens to our republican forms of government,” Rush proclaimed in a widely circulated essay published shortly before the Constitutional Convention, it was “absolutely necessary” that the government circulate “knowledge of every kind” throughout every part of the United States. To this end, Rush looked to the postal system, the “true nonelectric wire of government” and the “only means” of “conveying light and heat to every individual in the federal commonwealth.”70 With the passage of the Post Office Act of 1792, Rush’s vision became the law of the land. At a stroke, Congress liberated American communications policy from the constraints of monarchical precedent and gave it an expansive new republican cast. To expand access to information on public affairs, Congress admitted every newspaper into the mail at extremely low rates. To ensure that the news was broadcast far and wide, it established an administrative mechanism that guaranteed the rapid extension of the postal network into the hinterland. And to safeguard the sanctity of personal correspondence, it proscribed its surveillance by postal administrators, ending a practice that remained common in Great Britain and France. The Post Office Act of 1792 reflected a widespread commitment to the ideal of an informed citizenry. Yet questions remained about how Congress ought best to proceed. Everyone agreed that political information was best conveyed by newspapers. But which ones? Some wished to admit only certain newspapers into the mail, raising the fear that favored printers would become the nucleus of a potentially tyrannical “court press.” Others urged the circulation of every newspaper free of charge. After an extended debate, Congress adopted a middle position: it admitted every newspaper into the mail, provided their subscribers paid a modest fee. In addition, Congress codified the exchange privilege that newspaper printers enjoyed. In so doing, it gave legal standing to a news-gathering mechanism that dated back to the colonial era and that would remain a mainstay of press practice throughout the early republic. Two years later, Congress expanded the subsidy for the press by admitting magazines into the mail at highly favorable rates. No issue proved more contentious than the designation of new postal routes. Before 1792, this power remained vested in the executive branch, as it had been under the crown. While postal administrators lobbied to retain this privilege, expansion-minded legislators urged its transfer to Congress. This seemingly arcane issue had considerable practical import, because it was well understood that congressional control would greatly hasten the expansion of the network. Congressmen, after all, had powerful incentives to support legislation that benefited their constituents, and few measures were more popular than the establishGOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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ment of new postal routes. Proponents of congressional control prevailed, and, as expected, Congress quickly established routes well in advance of commercial demand. Many of these new routes, one congressman estimated in 1797, would not bear “one-hundredth” of their expense.71 No single piece of legislation did more to expand the geographic horizons of American public life. By 1795 even fiscal conservatives like Alexander Hamilton rejected the idea of using the postal system to generate revenue to pay down the national debt. Postal administrators would continue for several decades to return a modest surplus to the treasury. Yet at no subsequent point did policy debates revolve around the competing claims of revenue and service. Instead, Congress focused on how postal revenue ought best be spent. Postal subsidies for newspapers gave printers ample reason to increase their supply. By 1794, a mere two years after Congress had first admitted newspapers into the mail, they made up 70 percent of its weight, while generating a mere 3 percent of the revenue. By 1832 they accounted for 95 percent of the weight and only 15 percent of the revenue. Without this substantial subsidy, the United States could not have emerged as the leading publisher of newspapers in the world. Among its legacies was the rise of the “country press,” which had been virtually nonexistent before 1792. Thanks to the expansion of the postal network, newspapers proliferated not only in major commercial centers, as they had in the colonial era, but throughout the hinterland. French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville credited political decentralization with hastening the expansion of the press. Had Tocqueville carefully scrutinized the newspapers the press churned out, he would have discovered that most of them were filled with reports of distant events rather than with accounts of local politics. Postal policy helped a far-flung citizenry remain connected with the wider world. Magazines enjoyed an analogous subsidy and received a parallel boost. By the 1830s, postal patrons had access to a wide range of reading matter, from learned essays in the North American Review to poetry and prose in Godey’s Ladies Book. Writers of imaginative fiction such as Edgar Allan Poe, Catharine Sedgwick, and Nathaniel Hawthorne took advantage of this new publishing venue to help popularize the short story as a literary genre. Though ambitious authors preferred to publish books, British imports presented them with stiff competition, because many Americans preferred popular writers from abroad to their own countrymen. A further constraint was posed by postal policy: before 1851, Congress banned books outright from the mail. Starting in the late 1830s, a number of entrepreneurs brazenly circumvented this rule by issuing entire novels in newspaper format and flooding the mails with the latest works of fiction by popular British and American novelists. Staggering under the weight and cost of distributing such mammoth periodicals as Brother Jonathan, fed214

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eral administrators clarified the definition of a newspaper. Only those publications that included “intelligence of passing events,” declared Attorney General Hugh S. Legaré in 1842, were entitled to preferential postal rates. Excluded from this category were “mere dissertations and discussions, or literary and poetical miscellanies.” In Legaré’s judgment, such publications did not deserve the special privileges the government accorded the news.72 Various public subsidies encouraged the proliferation of congressional speeches and government reports. The results were predictable: in any given year, public documents constituted approximately one-quarter of all the imprints published in the United States. During presidential campaigns, electioneering tracts made up a substantial fraction of the total weight of the mail. Most of this material went under the congressional frank, the “galvanic current,” observed one candid former House member, that “animates the organization of both political parties.” Almost every member of Congress, in the Senate as well as the House, “feels that his re-election is more or less dependent” on an active exercise of it.73 The only form of literary production that postal policy discouraged was letter writing. The primary constraint was cost. To help pay for the various subsidies without running the postal system into debt, Congress kept the basic letter rate high. In an age in which many laborers made at most $1.00 a day and journeymen printers $1.50, postage on a single letter, customarily paid by the recipient, could easily total $.50. Before the Panic of 1837, this policy sparked little public discussion, in large measure because the vast majority of letterwriters were merchants, presumed capable of covering the cost. Their commercial correspondence helped to pay for the circulation of public information. As late as 1833, congressmen defended the high letter rate on the grounds that it underwrote the various other services the Post Office Department provided.74 By transferring resources from the few to the many, the high letter rate operated as a hidden tax on merchants and other heavy users of the network. Personal correspondence was by no means unknown. Migrants to the transAppalachian West routinely kept in touch by letters with family members back east. According to one country curate in 1820, “A few days carries a communication with mathematical certainty from one point of the Union to the other. Distance is thus reduced almost to contiguity; and the ink is scarcely dry, or the wax cold on the paper, before we find in our hands, even at a distance of hundreds of miles, a transcript of our dearest friend’s mind.”75 Many of these correspondents were women—as many as a fifth of all recipients of unclaimed letters in lists run routinely in the newspapers. Still, before the Post Office Act of 1845, postage remained, for all but the well-to-do, a significant barrier to longdistance communication. The vast majority of Americans were more likely to reGOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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ceive a newspaper than a letter, and often they evaded postal fees by inscribing personal notes on newspapers sent to friends and relatives through the mail. In 1840 merchants remained the country’s most prolific letter writers, just as they had been before 1775. Other frequent letter writers included congressmen and other federal public officers, including postmasters, who took advantage of the franking privilege to send and receive a large volume of mail free of charge. The surviving caches of the letters of federal public officers furnish a major source for the justly celebrated documentary editing projects of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and the other founders of the republic and help explain why national politics in the early republic continues to command such sustained scholarly attention, even though it has long been recognized that many key public policy decisions took place in the states and localities. With a few minor exceptions, no public officer at the state and local levels had the frank; in large part for this reason, they rarely left behind such a revealing paper trail. Just as postal policy favored certain literary forms and not others, so too it hastened the creation of a distinctive kind of informational environment. In 1800 the network included 903 offices; by 1810, it expanded to 2,300, and by 1820, to 4,500. In 1828, the United States had 74 post offices for every 100,000 inhabitants—far more than the 17 in Great Britain and the 4 in France. The rapid increase in the size of the postal network awed contemporaries. Were we not to have the facts before us, remarked one newspaper editor in 1826, its astonishing progress would seem only a “romantic tale” with “no foundation but in the regions of fancy, in the wanderings of imagination.”76 Another beneficiary of postal policy was the stagecoach industry. Throughout the early republic, stagecoach proprietors received as much as one-third of their revenue from mail contracts; making them, along with newspaper editors, one of the largest recipients of federal largesse in the country. Postal policy helps explain why so many stagecoach travelers complained about the bumpiness of their ride: by subsidizing stagecoach travel, but not road building, the federal government established a rudimentary public transportation network without providing for the maintenance of the right of way. Postal administrators took advantage of their financial leverage to set stagecoach timetables and to fine contractors if they ran late. Their administrative efforts help to explain why, throughout the early republic, the mail stage was ordinarily the fastest and most reliable means of transportation. Indeed, to an extent that might seem incredible today, it was widely hailed as the sine qua non of speed. In 1831 a spokesman for the Charleston and Hamburg Railroad sought to reassure potential riders about the reliability of the new mode of 216

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transportation. Its schedule, he confidently forecast, would be as “certain and prompt as the mail arrangements.”77 Few features of the informational environment were more innovative than the ban on official surveillance.78 At no point in the early republic did the executive branch establish a department to inspect personal correspondence that was in any way comparable to the British secrets office or the French cabinet noir. (The one exception was undeliverable mail, which could be opened by a special corps of postal administrators known as “dead letter” clerks.) Only in the United States, as one nineteenth-century postal administrator exulted, was “silence” as “great a privilege as speech.”79 The prohibition on official surveillance posed problems for public authorities intent on blocking the transmission of information offensive to important constituents or critical of the party in power. In 1798, had Congress been able to rely on government functionaries to police the mailbags—a common practice in Europe—it might have successfully resisted pressure to enact a Sedition Act to check the spread of malicious ideas. Critics of that law, such as Thomas Jefferson, preferred to leave the regulation of printed matter to the states. Decentralization, however, was no necessary guarantee of a free press. In 1835 the New York City–based American Anti-Slavery Society launched a massive campaign to convert slaveholders to the cause of immediate emancipation, shipping hundreds of thousands of abolitionist pamphlets, all unsolicited, to post offices throughout the South. To stop their circulation, Jefferson’s ideological heirs turned to state law to institute the largest peacetime blockade of information in American history. The southern strategy received a major boost from Postmaster General Amos Kendall, a Yankee transplant to Kentucky and unapologetic slaveholder, who advised local postmasters to contravene federal law and block the delivery of the incendiary mail. In justification of his position, Kendall endorsed the novel claim of proslavery radicals that the South had supported the Constitution in order to gain “more perfect control” over slaves.80 Historians have been slow to recognize the extent to which the resulting cordon sanitaire intensified the growing rift between the slaveholding and non-slaveholding states. Yet its consequences were profound. In the South, antiabolitionist legislation quickly became a cornerstone of the states’ rights creed; in the North, it crystallized the suspicion that the federal government had been captured by a reactionary “Slave Power.” Nowhere were the implications of the communications revolution more fundamental than in the conduct of American trade. Long before the railroad created a national market for goods, the federal government established a national GOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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market for information. To move crops to market, merchants relied on the Post Office Department to transmit orders and even banknotes. “No inconsiderable amount of the active capital of the country, in one form or another,” was sent in the mail every year, estimated Postmaster General John McLean in 1828.81 The high-speed transmission of market information was such a priority that Congress refused to suspend the transportation of the mail on the Sabbath or to allow the closing of post offices on that day—an infringement of local autonomy that troubled many devout citizens and that prompted the first large-scale petition campaign in U.S. history. By the early 1850s, some $100 million was being transmitted annually in this way; the figure may even have been larger before the rise of the express industry in the late 1830s.82 Not surprisingly, theft was a major concern, and mail robberies received detailed coverage in the press. “Security in the transmission of banknotes and valuable papers through the mail,” as McLean observed, was of “great importance to the community at large, and particularly to the commercial part of it.”83 On the relatively rare occasions when mail was lost or stolen, postal patrons had no legal remedy: the federal government offered no insurance against theft and no compensation for items lost or stolen in the mail. Equally far-reaching were the consequences of the communications revolution for public life. After 1792, the public sphere was no longer patrimonial in the sense of being more or less congruent with the relatively small numbers of people who lived in close physical proximity to the seats of power. Instead, it now became disembodied, stretching far beyond specific localities to enlist the minds and hearts of millions of people, few of whom would ever meet in person. Political strategists relied on the improved facilities for long-distance communications to build mass parties; evangelicals established voluntary associations on a nationwide scale. When Madison published his Federalist essays in 1788, public opinion had yet to emerge as a major category of political thought. By the time Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831, it had become a keystone of the new “science of politics” for a democratic age. “There is no French province,” Tocqueville observed, in which “the inhabitants knew each other as well as do the thirteen million men spread over the extent of the United States.”84 Tocqueville was but one of many foreign observers to be impressed by the consequences of the new informational environment for public life. When the mail arrived, one English traveler recounted, the inhabitants hurried to the post office, where they “formed a variety of groups round those who were fortunate enough to possess themselves of a paper.” This was true, the visitor added, not just in the cities, but throughout the countryside.85 The arrival of the mail was dramatized by the painter John Lewis Krimmel in his Village Tavern, set dur218

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FIGURE 3.5. The arrival of the mail carrier (left) at a small-town post office (and community center) is the subject of one of the first American paintings to depict a scene from everyday life. Slung over his shoulder is the portmanteau with the letter mail; under his elbow is a basket brimming with newspapers full of information on public affairs. John Lewis Krimmel (American, 1786–1821), Village Tavern, 1813–14, oil on canvas. 167⁄8 by 221⁄2 in. Toledo Museum of Art, purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey bequest in memory of her father Maurice A. Scott, 1954.13.

ing the War of 1812 (fig. 3.5); Richard Caton Woodville’s War News from Mexico (1848) depicted a similar scene during the Mexican War. Both artists chose the post office as the backdrop for their tableaux, a tribute to the centrality of the mail as a source of information about public affairs.86 The expanding realm of communications helped to impress upon ordinary Americans two related presumptions: first, that the federal government had the capacity to shape the pattern of everyday life; and, second, that the boundaries of the national community more or less coincided with the territorial limits of the United States. The principal beneficiaries of this new informational environment were the white men who dominated the electorate. The disadvantaged included women and free blacks, who risked harassment every time they ventured into the post office to pick up mail, and slaves, nearly all of whom were barred either by law or by convention from learning to read. Still, by empowering ordiGOVE R N M E N T A N D L AW

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nary white men to join together in countless post offices to discuss public affairs, the federal government helped create the national community that a generation of men would fight and die for in the Civil War. White women, too, obtained advantages from the post office, notwithstanding the obstacle course they ran; periodicals sent through the mail addressed female concerns, sustained women writers and editors, and built networks that female reform groups mobilized to influence male lawmakers and public opinion. Letter writing remained expensive in the United States until the passage of the Post Office Acts of 1845 and 1851.87 Here, as in other ways, postal policy in the United States lagged behind postal policy in Great Britain. Yet in one respect the United States led the world—and that was in the establishment of facilities to circulate information on public affairs. Long before the advent of the steam railroad and the electric telegraph, the postal system, the stagecoach industry, and the periodical press had laid the groundwork for the eventual emergence of the United States in the twentieth century as one of the most powerful media empires in the modern world.

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CHAPTER 4

Benevolent Books Printing, Religion, and Reform

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David Paul Nord . . . In 1815 the Reverend Noah Worcester of Brighton, Massachusetts, proposed a plan to abolish war. He understood that war had raged from time immemorial, that all nations embraced war, and that nearly everyone on earth considered war an immutable fact of human life. He believed, however, that war was not fixed in human nature; it was a custom of society. And customs could be changed. Worcester expected his plan to be met with scorn. “Some may be ready to exclaim that none but God can produce such an effect as the abolition of war; and we must wait for the millennial day. We admit that God only can produce the necessary change in the state of society, and the views of men; but God works by human agency and human means.” By what human means would God’s work be done? The Reverend Mr. Worcester thought he knew: by the organization of peace societies and the distribution of tracts, books, and periodicals. For Worcester, social change was analogous to religious conversion; in both, change came through hearing the word. “If God has appointed that men shall be saved by the preaching of the gospel,” he said, “the gospel must be preached, or the end will never be accomplished. . . . Do we expect that our Bibles will spread their covers for wings, fly through the world, and convert the nations without the agency of christians?”1 Noah Worcester made his plea for peace in a remarkable tract titled A Solemn Review of the Custom of War; Showing that War Is the Effect of Popular Delusion, and Proposing a Remedy. This pamphlet quickly became a classic in the literature of the American peace movement. It also is an exemplary statement of the theory and practice of evangelical reform in early nineteenth-century America. It reveals the power of Christian faith to energize human action. It illustrates how that energy could be transferred from religious conversion to social change. And, most important for this chapter, it shows how evangelism, in social reform as well as religion, idealized the power of print and made print central to the voluntary associations that dotted the cultural landscape of early nineteenth-century America.

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This chapter is about those voluntary associations and print culture. Its theme is the importance of noncommercial forces in the creation of mass-circulation publishing in the first half of the nineteenth century. Historians have labeled this era the “market revolution,” a time when commercial markets expanded enormously and market relations came to dominate economic and social life in America. Printing and publishing are properly part of that story. Like other goods, printed materials gradually came to be commodified, mass-produced, and sold in increasingly distant locations.2 But this is not the whole story. During this era, publishing societies arose whose purpose was to foil the market, to gather national audiences independent of the needs of commerce, and to use mass communication to lead the market rather than to follow it. The operations of these noncommercial publishers changed over the first half century of independence, and some of these changes will appear as themes in this essay. They include the concentration of capital, the development of advanced printing technologies, and the growth of organizational scale and complexity. All of these processes took off dramatically after the end of the War of 1812. But the more interesting theme is continuity. The fundamental principles of evangelical publishing did not change. Whether preaching the Gospel of Christ or of man, from home missions to peace, temperance, and antislavery movements, the noncommercial publishers remained firm in their faith in human agency, in the power of knowledge and of print, in the efficacy of notfor-profit business organization, and in the hope that a bright millennial dawn was breaking upon the early nineteenth century. The noncommercial publishers knew well that they were moving against the rising tide of commercial culture. Indeed, that was their purpose. They aimed to turn the power of print to anticommercial ends. If their message was unpopular, so much greater the need to propagate it. Like Saint Paul, they would labor alone if necessary, and they would convert an unwilling world with words. Writing about the abolition of war, Noah Worcester declared: “Let not the universality of the custom be regarded as an objection to making the attempt. If the custom be wicked and destructive, the more universal, the more important is a reformation. If war is ever to be set aside, an effort must some time be made; and why not now as well as at any future day?”3 Why not now? For many Americans in the decades after 1790, now seemed just the right time to change the world. From the beginning Protestants had been people of the word. The propagation of the Gospel through preaching had always been part of American religious belief, and missionary outreach part of religious practice. The printed word also had played a central role in the Protestant enterprise, especially for New England Puritans.4 Before the Revolution, missionary efforts had been haphazard and often sponsored by British religious societies. Only after in222

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dependence was the American evangelical spirit fully awakened and wedded to systematic organization. This marriage of evangelism and organization produced the rapid expansion of new churches, notably the Methodists and Baptists, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.5 It also produced, in New England especially, a new kind of religious society, the nondenominational voluntary association. This new voluntary associationism was built upon a bedrock confidence in the power of knowledge, of hearing and reading the word.6 The prototype for the new evangelical voluntary association was the Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and Others in North-America (SPGNA ), founded in Massachusetts in 1787. This group, like most of the religious associations that followed it, was patterned on a British model, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, which dated back to 1701. The Massachusetts society quickly launched a fund-raising campaign through individual subscriptions and appeals to church congregations. By 1791 it had also received a state government grant and substantial income-bearing endowment.7 The new era of the evangelical voluntary association was under way. The SPGNA was nominally a mission to the Indians, but quickly the society turned more to the “others” mentioned in its name, the poor white folk on the Massachusetts frontier, especially the eastern counties of Maine. The problem in Maine, as members saw it, was ignorance. According to the society’s 1791 annual report, the settlers down east scrabbled out miserable lives in a “state of barbarism” as dangerous to peace and good government as it was fatal to the soul. “Few of them are taught to read, and those who have been taught, cannot now procure books,” the society’s secretary lamented. “Many families have not had a bible or a testament in their houses for years past, and such is their poverty as to forbid their purchasing them.”8 For these Congregationalists, knowledge was the vital precondition of faith, and the source of knowledge was the Bible and the Bible alone. “Since the sacred volumes were completed,” the Reverend John Lathrop reminded the society, “there have been no visions, no voices from heaven, no immediate revelations, for the instruction and direction of the children of men.”9 And yet few doubted that God did provide signs and wonders of another sort. “Signs of the times” abounded in this era, portentous signs, announcing that the earthly reign of Christ was near. To speed this great work, the word of God, propagated by human agency, was required.10 The Society for Propagating the Gospel supported not only missionaries and Indian schools but the gathering and giving of books as well. By 1798 it had distributed 8,945 volumes.11 The SPGNA did not print books; it procured them through donation, purchase from booksellers, and direct publishing contracts with printers. Nor did it sell books; the society gave them away. This arrangement imposed adminisB E N EVO L E N T B O O K S

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trative burdens that commercial book publishers and sellers did not have to bear. Who deserved the society’s charity? With no price mechanism to allocate books, someone had to evaluate the worthiness of each recipient. To do this, the society designated “persons of integrity and virtue only” as missionaries and local volunteer agents in distant places. The society required each missionary or agent to keep “a daily journal,” including “an exact account of the manner in which you distribute the books entrusted to your care.”12 Though devoted to books, the Society for Propagating the Gospel was not a true book and tract society. Its evangelical mission was eclectic; it supported missionaries and schools as well as book giveaways.13 The style of organization pioneered by the SPGNA in the 1790s was long-lasting. Most charitable societies in New England, whether involved in books or not, followed the same legal and organizational model. The SPGNA was structured as an eleemosynary corporation, conducted by a board of managers and funded by annual membership subscriptions, donations, and legacies.14 At first, administration was minimal. But as book distribution became a costly aspect of the enterprise, the society set up rudimentary administrative procedures for employee record keeping and for management oversight—techniques that would become increasingly common in other organizations after 1815. The chief legacy of the SPGNA was the unshakable belief in the indispensability of knowledge to faith and in the efficacy of human action. That spirit inspired the founding in 1803 of the first American association devoted solely to religious books and tracts, the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (MSPCK ). Like the SPGNA , this new society was patterned on a British model, the century-old Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The Massachusetts society also drew inspiration (as well as books and tracts) from the Religious Tract Society, founded in London in 1799. The society conducted its first “general distribution” in 1804, giving away 6,253 tracts and books. In a second major effort in 1806, the society distributed 9,174. Most of these were scattered through the rural reaches of Massachusetts, including Maine; some went to Rhode Island, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia. By 1815 the society had distributed 30,350 tracts and 8,224 bound volumes.15 In organizing its work, the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge built upon the example of the SPGNA . It contracted with William Hilliard of Cambridge (later the firm of Hilliard and Metcalf ) for printing and for handling stocks of books and tracts and commissioned ministers and pious gentlemen in distant places to distribute them. To ensure that the publications were given only to deserving indigents, the society provided printed instructions to the volunteer agents and required them to sign formal agreements, to keep daily journals, and to submit written reports.16 224

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The Massachusetts Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge was thoroughly committed to evangelism by print. As in the older SPGNA , the new society’s leaders complained of ignorant rustics, unlettered Baptist preachers, and shocking scenes of religious enthusiasm devoid of religious knowledge. But now a new worry nagged as well: willful, knowledgeable infidelity and error, driven by a sinful print culture. Bad books, not just no books, were increasingly the problem. The Reverend Jedidiah Morse, pastor of the First Church of Charlestown and a founder and guiding spirit of the society, believed that religious tracts provided the ideal antidote to the poisonous literature of infidelity, deism, and sectarian error.17 The founders of the MSPCK imagined orthodox Protestantism under siege from two opposite flanks. On the one flank were the hosts of “infidelity” and “liberalism,” ranging from Unitarian Congregationalism to Methodism to Universalism. To opponents such as Morse, these movements were anathema for rejecting the Calvinist scheme of salvation. Equally objectionable were the extreme New Lights on the other flank who preached the doctrines of unconditional election, limited atonement, and the inability of human beings either to choose or to reject the irresistible grace of God. Supporters of the MSPCK denounced the ultra-orthodox Calvinists as vigorously as they blasted deists and liberals.18 Falling between these extremes was a middle way, a moderate, evangelical Calvinism that reserved for God the power of grace but allotted to men and women the ability to learn and to teach the knowledge that opens the heart to grace. For moderate Calvinists, such as Morse, evangelicalism was preeminently about knowledge, not about the flash of religious enthusiasm or the selective gathering of the elect into covenanted churches. And for him and others involved in the MSPCK , the quintessentially modern vessels of religious knowledge were cheap books and tracts.19 Jedidiah Morse was the ideal entrepreneur of print-driven evangelism. Morse styled himself an orthodox Calvinist, and he made his reputation within Congregational denominationalism as the scourge of Unitarians and the negotiator of rapprochement between the moderate Old Calvinists, who dominated the MSPCK , and the more theologically rigorous New Divinity men, who were influential in the new missionary societies that had sprung up in Massachusetts and Connecticut after 1800. Morse cared about doctrine, but he cared more about pragmatic, organizational success. His second career as the author of popular works on American geography placed him squarely into the practical business world of book publishing.20 His belief in the centrality of knowledge to religious faith, coupled with his grasp of both the literary and the business aspects of popular publishing, led Morse not only to found the MSPCK but also to launch in 1814 a much grander scheme to flood the new republic with evangelical print. B E N EVO L E N T B O O K S

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Morse’s grand scheme was the New England Tract Society (NETS ), organized in Boston in 1814. Like the MSPCK , the new society was founded upon a faith in the transformative power of popular print. In an address to the public (borrowed by Morse from the Religious Tract Society of London), the new society laid out the qualities of a good Gospel tract. It must be simple, striking, entertaining, nonsectarian, and full of ideas: “A plain didactic essay on a religious subject may be read by a Christian with much pleasure; but the persons for whom these Tracts are chiefly designed, will fall asleep over it. This will not do; it is throwing labour and money away. There must be something to allure the listless to read, and this can only be done by blending entertainment with instruction.”21 In the early years, many of the tracts produced by the New England Tract Society were borrowed from Britain, especially from the MSPCK . The chief novelty of the society was not its tracts but its organizational vision. The NETS was intended to be not a tract-giving organization but a wholesaler. Although it never achieved its goal, the plan was to create a large-scale, national publishing house, producing and selling tracts at cost and at high volume to charitable tract societies all over the country.22 The founders of the New England Tract Society built their organization upon the business principles of centralization for economies of scale in production, coupled with localization in distribution. By 1814 they could see that tract societies were sprouting up all over the new nation. But in the United States, they said, “No Society has hitherto been established, on a plan of operation sufficiently extensive and permanent to answer all the great purposes for which such an institution is needed.” In a burst of enthusiasm, the founders rushed into print 300,000 copies of fifty different tracts even before the society’s formal organization in May 1814. Within a year of that date, the society had published 141,000 more and had established formal relationships with several printers, mainly Flagg and Gould of Andover, Massachusetts. Meanwhile, it had begun to link up with existing local tract societies and to form new ones around the country.23 While Jedidiah Morse and his colleagues were systematizing religious tract publishing in New England, a parallel movement was under way in the production and distribution of the most important evangelical book of all: the Bible. In this effort, the New Englanders were a half step behind the vanguard. The first American Bible society was founded in Philadelphia in 1808; Bible societies in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York were launched the following year. By 1815, nearly one hundred state and local Bible societies had been organized in the United States.24 At first, even the largest state-level societies, were essentially book-giving charities, similar to the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Christian Knowl226

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edge. They purchased Bibles from printers and booksellers, then gave them away to the “indigent and careless,” as the Connecticut Bible Society called its clients, those who were excluded from the commercial Bible market because they lacked either the money or the desire to buy.25 In 1809 the Philadelphia Bible Society, the nation’s first, decided to expand operations dramatically by publishing Bibles rather than merely buying and distributing them (fig. 4.1). That move was prompted by the society’s desire to take advantage of the new technology of stereotype printing, a process that had been adapted to Bible work in England by Cambridge University Press only a few years before.26 Printing from stereotype plates was ideal for the production of the Bible, a standard text reprinted in many editions over time. But though it had the potential to lower costs in the long run, stereotypography was capital intensive. The first set of plates that the Philadelphia society ordered from England cost about $3,500. Despite that enormous sum, the managers decided to take on the considerable financial risk.27 The decision to invest in stereotype plates was fateful for the Bible Society of Philadelphia and ultimately for all noncommercial book publishing in America. The society was transformed from a book-giving charity into a book publisher— and necessarily a large publisher. To achieve the full economies of scale from their investment, the managers of the society would have to produce Bibles in numbers far beyond their own needs and their own means. To do this, they would have to sell Bibles. This was a problem, because the constitution of the society seemed to contemplate only free distribution. But the managers quickly decided that they could sell Bibles—at cost and even at a profit—as long as the income was plowed back into the charitable enterprise. Indeed, they must sell Bibles. Only through sales could the society raise the money needed to keep its capital (the stereotype plates) efficiently employed.28 But selling Bibles seemingly contravened the mission of giving them away to the destitute. To harmonize this charitable goal with the practical need for high-volume production, the Bible Society of Philadelphia resolved to operate mainly as a supplier of Bibles to auxiliary societies. In 1810 it announced a plan to establish “a little Bible Society in every congregation of Pennsylvania.” These local groups would collect donations and seek members for the Bible Society in Philadelphia. In return, they would “be allowed to demand Bibles from the managers of the Society, at first cost, and to the full amount of the contributions made;—the Bibles to be distributed as a free gift.”29 In the first three years of stereotype printing, the Bible Society of Philadelphia published fifty-five thousand Bibles and New Testaments.30 Some were sold directly by the Philadelphia office at a modest profit, but most were distributed at cost to local societies who then gave them away. This mix of cenB E N EVO L E N T B O O K S

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FIGURE 4.1. The first American Bible printed with stereotype plates was published by the Philadelphia Bible Society in 1812. William Fry was the printer. Within a decade most Bible and tract printing in the United States was done with stereotypography. The Holy Bible (Philadelphia: Bible Society at Philadelphia, 1812). American Antiquarian Society.

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tralized publishing and localized distribution was vital. To achieve economy in production, the Philadelphia society had transformed itself into a publisher and high-tech printer. At the same time, it had become the “parent society” of a network of local auxiliaries. Because the ultimate goal was charitable giving, the Philadelphia society could not depend on a price system to allocate the product. Instead, the society had to rely on local organizations in the field to raise money and to distribute the books, to make the crucial decision to give or not to give.31 By 1815 both the evangelical style and the business structure that would characterize noncommercial religious publishing through the first half of the nineteenth century were essentially in place.32 The New England Tract Society and the Bible Society of Philadelphia had evolved along similar lines, from bookgiving charities to substantial publishers with grand ambitions. That organizational model combined centralization to achieve economies of scale in printing with extensive local distribution. The noncommercial character of the operations demanded this dualism. Only local organizations could generate income while giving away the product for free. Thus was born the standard structure of early nineteenth-century noncommercial publishing (and many nonpublishing charitable organizations as well): a “parent society” linked to a network of local “auxiliaries” scattered across the land. The business of benevolence boomed after 1815, when peace finally settled upon the Atlantic world and the United States entered the new phase of economic life known to historians as the “market revolution.” Propelled by both westward expansion and eastern urbanization, trade, agriculture, and smallscale manufacturing flowered everywhere and drew ordinary Americans—artisans and farmers—to regional markets and commercial relationships.33 The market revolution fueled the growth of religious publishing in two ways at once. It fostered a competitive and enterprising spirit among religious entrepreneurs of sundry theological and ecclesiastical stripes, inspiring the formation of new churches and denominations and the establishment of newspapers to advance them. Benevolent leaders set about building truly national institutions to fulfill the millennial dream of putting books and tracts in everyone’s hands. Yet, the same forces of commerce and technology that enabled the rise of religious publishing stirred alarm. To evangelicals, private enterprise, selfishly obedient to the law of supply and demand, was poisoning the nation by furnishing consumers with wicked literature. To counteract that threat, religious entrepreneurs inverted the strategy of private business. They proposed to deliver a product to everyone, regardless of ability or even desire to buy. To accomplish this anticommercial goal, they needed to turn the market on its head, to make demand conform to supply.34 B E N EVO L E N T B O O K S

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Founded in 1816, the American Bible Society (ABS ) was the first, largest, and most ecumenical of the religious publishing societies organized in the post-1815 era. In the optimistic atmosphere of 1816, the founders of the American Bible Society believed the time was right for a genuinely national institution. “Concentrated action is powerful action,” they declared in their constitution. And they proposed to concentrate everything: capital, technology, and, administration. The headquarters would be in “the London of America,” as one founder put it: New York City.35 New York in 1816 was exactly the right place to build an American Bible society. Already the nation’s largest city by 1810, New York was growing rapidly in commerce, manufacturing, and wealth. No other American city could match New York’s access to both foreign sources of supply (such as paper) and the burgeoning settlements of the trans-Appalachian West, where Bibles were most needed.36 Perhaps most important, New York in 1816 was the American incubator of technological innovation in the art of printing. For Bible work, the most important innovation was stereotyping. The experience of the Philadelphia Bible Society and the New York Bible Society had already proved the value of stereotyping for large-volume, low-cost Bible printing. Therefore, the first order of business for the national society was the acquisition not of Bibles but of stereotype plates. And New York was home to the American pioneers of stereotype founding. In August 1816 the managers of the new society solicited bids from three stereotypers for up to six sets of plates, three in octavo and three in duodecimo. D. and G. Bruce came in with the lowest bid of $4,000 for three sets. Meanwhile, the New York Bible Society voted to turn over its stereotype plates to the ABS . By November 1816 an edition of 10,000 Bibles in duodecimo size, brevier type, was printed and ready to ship—the first imprint of the American Bible Society. Within three years, 100,000 Bibles and Testaments had been printed.37 Even the most zealous centralizers in the American Bible Society did not at first suppose that all the work of printing could be done in New York. In the beginning, the managers envisioned a network of regional printing plants, and in late 1816 they voted to send plates to Lexington, Kentucky, to serve the West. In 1819 the Kentucky Bible Society began to print Bibles for the ABS . Very quickly, however, the Kentucky experiment proved to the New York board that branch printing was a mistake. An ABS committee reported that suitable materials and skilled workmen were not available in Lexington, and, in any case, the society there had neither the funds nor the demand to keep the plates efficiently employed. The Kentucky operation was soon closed, and the first branch printing plant was the last.38 Although stereotyping was the most important technological innovation for Bible work, the fledgling American Bible Society pursued other improve230

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ments with equal ardor. In the 1820s, the society became a major patron of the power press. The new printing technology that caught the attention of the ABS managers was Daniel Treadwell’s steam-powered bed-and-platen press, generally considered to be the first successful powered press to be built in America. Treadwell began experiments with power printing in Boston in 1822; the ABS opened negotiations with him in 1823; and by 1829 the society had installed sixteen Treadwell presses, probably built by Robert Hoe of New York under a franchise arrangement with Treadwell. The Treadwell press made the printing process physically easier and sped it up as well, thus reducing the cost of labor and increasing the efficiency of capital invested in stereotype plates. The introduction of the power press at the American Bible Society was managed by Daniel Fanshaw, who signed on with the society in 1817.39 A third technological innovation patronized by the American Bible Society was the papermaking machine, first developed in the 1790s and 1800s in France by Nicholas-Louis Robert and in Britain by the Fourdrinier brothers. In the 1820s, Fourdrinier machines began to be imported into the United States, and in 1829 George Spafford and James Phelps began building an improved version of the Fourdrinier machine in South Windham, Connecticut. Their first customer was Amos Hubbard, of Norwich, Connecticut, a chief paper supplier to the American Bible Society.40 By the end of the 1820s, the American Bible Society had built in New York a highly capitalized, technologically sophisticated printing operation that virtually monopolized the production of inexpensive Bibles in the United States.41 To power this enormous national enterprise, the society required, even more than its less ambitious predecessor in Philadelphia, a decentralized network of local societies. The American Bible Society needed these auxiliaries precisely because it was a charity publisher giving Bibles away for free. To carry out that mission on a grand scale, the society needed a grand income. To get it, the benevolent publishers needed to sell books to their auxiliaries, which in turn would give them away. The marriage of business and charity depended upon the parent-auxiliary structure pioneered by the Philadelphia Bible Society and the New England Tract Society. As a determinedly national institution, the ABS carried this idea to the extreme: in the 1820s, all printing and production work was concentrated in New York. Meanwhile, each year the society established links with more auxiliary societies scattered around the country. By the end of the decade, the ABS had 645 formal auxiliaries, many of which had their own auxiliaries.42 So compelling was the need for cash that in 1819 the Bible Society decided to abandon the traditional policy of free distribution in favor of what might be called differential pricing—that is, selling Bibles to people who were able and B E N EVO L E N T B O O K S

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willing to buy at the price they were able and willing to pay. The idea was to increase the total number of Bibles distributed by selling some at cost in order to conserve funds for free grants. Although they were easing into sales, the Bible Society managers continually reminded the auxiliaries that the overarching mission was a charitable one. “On the plan which the Managers have recommended,” they said, “the Scriptures are still given freely to the destitute who are without means, or without disposition to pay for them.”43 Just as the Philadelphia society had determined that selling books to auxiliaries was consistent with the principles of charity publishing, so now the ABS expanded the definition of charity to allow auxiliaries to sell directly to the people. To some observers, especially commercial publishers and booksellers who had made a good income selling Bibles, this new policy of the American Bible Society was an outrageous perversion of “charity.” One critic mocked the society’s embrace of the traditional motto of Bible work: “without money and without price.” The reverse was true, he declared: “They district cities, towns, and villages, and scour them, either singly or in squads, seeking purchasers with money, not the indigent without it.” Furthermore, the writer continued, “the Managers . . . would render nugatory all competition.”44 The managers of the Bible Society did hope to dominate—even to monopolize—the market for cheap Bibles in America. In that way only could they achieve maximum economies of scale in printing. But they rejected the charge that selling Bibles was inconsistent with charity, for they still required that auxiliaries give Bibles freely to the needy. On the one hand, they regularly urged auxiliaries to sell books whenever possible, and they imposed strict accounting and reporting procedures to make sure the job was properly done. On the other hand, when some overly parsimonious auxiliaries took this to be a mandate to grant no free books at all, the managers chastised them for being too strict.45 In the 1820s other national religious publishing societies followed the organizational lead of the American Bible Society. The two most important were the American Tract Society (ATS ) and the American Sunday School Union (ASSU ). The sole mission of the American Tract Society was to distribute tracts and books; the mission of the American Sunday School Union was to found and support Sunday schools, which largely meant supplying them with children’s books and periodicals. Both societies built large, modern publishing operations in the 1820s; both centralized their printing work; and both followed the pattern of the Bible Society in distributing publications through ever-growing networks of local auxiliaries. The American Tract Society was organized in New York City in 1825 to capture economies of scale in both printing and distribution. Like the ABS , the ATS was designed to be a genuinely national institution, headquartered in New York. 232

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It quickly supplanted Jedidiah Morse’s New England Tract Society, which had cherished hopes of playing such a national role, even taking the name American Tract Society for itself in 1823. But by then it was clear to nearly everyone but a few New England conservatives that Andover was not the communications metropole of America. In 1825 New York was the obvious choice both for its concentration of advanced printing facilities and for its unrivaled proximity to markets. As the founders explained, New York possessed “greater facilities of ingress and egress, and more extended, constant, and direct intercommunications with foreign ports, and every part of our interior, than . . . any other locality in the nation.”46 Like the Bible Society, the American Tract Society quickly became a major patron of technological innovation in printing. Its predecessor, the New England Tract Society, had begun to stereotype its tracts in 1823, and stereotyping became an even more urgent project for the new national society in New York. In its first year, the managers took over the existing plates of the New England and New York tract societies and launched their own stereotype operation. By the end of the first year, they had plates for 155 tracts (about two thousand pages). By the end of the second year they had stereotyped 45 more and had provided for a stereotype foundry in the basement of their new building.47 The American Tract Society also moved quickly into steam-powered printing. Under the supervision of Daniel Fanshaw, also printer for the Bible Society, the Tract Society installed ten new Treadwell presses shortly after its founding. Except for some earlier experimental presses in the city, Fanshaw’s Treadwells at the American Tract Society were the first power presses in the publishing business of New York.48 The American Tract Society eagerly adopted not only new technologies but new styles and genres of popular print. The aim, as the early tract pioneers had understood, was to entertain as well as to instruct, to capture the fleeting attention of a busy reader in a busy age. This was the singular virtue of a tract, as the society’s publication committee frequently explained in its reports. “Tracts are needed in the most simple style,” the committee declared, “and especially narratives calculated to engage and fasten the attention.”49 The religious newspaper was another medium that required a striking, pungent, and condensed style that would appeal to everyone. The ATS managers spelled this out explicitly: “Our ideal of a religious paper would not be met by giving it the method and stateliness of a sermon. . . . No; the newspaper requires varied and lively talent in a style of its own.”50 In other words, the leaders of the American Tract Society were willing to enter the marketplace of ideas. The ATS , along with the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, viewed with growing alarm the burgeonB E N EVO L E N T B O O K S

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ing print culture of the American market society. These religious reformers were appalled by the flood tide of “vicious literature” washing over the land— works of religious infidelity, fictions and fantasies, stories of romance, piracy, and murder. From the founding onward, the society’s publications brimmed with denunciations of the “satanic press.” The first book-length account of the society’s activities declared that “the plagues of Egypt were tolerable, compared with this coming up into our dwellings of the loathsome swarms of literary vermin to ‘corrupt the land,’ to deprave the hearts, and ruin the souls of our citizens.”51 To fight this foe, the managers of the ATS urged competition, not censorship. They proposed to engage the enemy on his own ground, on his own terms, with his own weapons. Again and again, from the 1820s on, the society reiterated its marketplace mantra: if the devil works fast, let us work faster.52 Although eager to compete in the marketplace of ideas, the Tract Society refused to rely upon the marketplace of trade. Private enterprise was the cause of the evil print culture of America; it could not be the cure. This theme was emphasized routinely in society publications: “No nation on the globe, perhaps, has so large a reading population; and in none is the press more active, or more influential. What the reading matter prepared for such a nation would be, if left solely to private enterprise, may be inferred from an examination of the catalogs of some of the respectable and even Christian publishing houses. Selfinterest would shape the supply to the demand; and the mightiest agent God has given to the world for moulding public opinion and sanctifying the public taste, would be moulded by it, and be made to reflect its character, were there no conservative, redeeming influences.”53 The Tract Society proposed instead to make supply drive demand. To accomplish this charitable mission—to distribute tracts and books against the current of the commercial market—the American Tract Society organized a network of local auxiliaries. By the early 1830s the society had nearly one thousand formal auxiliaries and had links to more than two thousand other groups.54 Like the auxiliaries of the American Bible Society, these local organizations were supposed to administer a noncommercial distribution system. The goal was to “tender the message of the Gospel to all—high and low, rich and poor,” and the auxiliaries were the key players. They bought tracts and books at cost from the parent society and raised money through donations and sales. Like the ABS , the Tract Society managers pressed their auxiliaries to sell books when they could, and they continually dunned them for money. They also required careful record keeping, accounting, and reporting. At the same time they implored their auxiliaries not to let financial considerations drive their work but to carry tracts and books to everyone regardless of ability to pay.55 234

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The third great national religious publishing society of the early nineteenth century was the American Sunday School Union, organized in Philadelphia in 1824. The mission of the ASSU was to found Sunday schools, especially in the West. For this purpose, the society appointed itinerant missionaries and agents—twenty-seven by 1826, seventy-eight by 1832. Like the leaders of the Tract Society, the founders of the ASSU , who were mainly Presbyterians, believed that the printed word was the vital means of grace. At the heart of every Sunday school, then, must be a free library filled with books and periodicals for all.56 To produce the materials they thought children needed, the managers of the American Sunday School Union followed in the footsteps of the Tract Society and Bible Society and became a large-scale publisher. Indeed, the chief impetus to national union was economies of scale in publishing. In 1825, its first full year of operation, the ASSU published 224 separate editions of books, pamphlets, and periodicals, amounting to more than fourteen million pages. As with the other national societies, stereotyping was the crucial technology. The ASSU established a stereotype foundry at its headquarters, and its annual reports happily reported the numbers of plates added each year. By the end of four years, the society had more than ten thousand stereotype plates on hand.57 Like the Tract Society, the Sunday School Union proposed to compete for the attention of its intended audience, the children of America. The new print culture brimmed with bad books, “books abounding with foolishness, vulgarity, and falsehood.” To entice children to choose virtue over vice, virtue must be presented in its “most attractive garb of blended instruction and amusement.” Some supporters of the Sunday school movement were skeptical of the popular style of many ASSU publications, and the managers frequently had to explain to their critics that children would not automatically read even the best religious literature. “It should be borne in mind,” they insisted, “that there is no such thing as a natural taste for religious reading.” The opposite is true; there is a natural distaste. To succeed, therefore, children’s books must “arrest the attention and interest the feelings of the child.”58 ASSU leaders believed that they were foiling the market, not following it. They did not seek to sell books to children; they provided them free of charge through Sunday school libraries. Children could often be drawn into the school by the privilege of a free library, even if they were not interested in religious instruction. In the long run, the ASSU managers believed that the supply of Sunday school books would increase the demand for them, perhaps even drive bad books out of circulation (fig. 4.2).59 To establish free libraries everywhere, the American Sunday School Union needed money, and in the 1820s the group went about raising it in the usual way. The key players were local auxiliaries. Like the Bible Society and Tract Society, the ASSU sold books at cost to orgaB E N EVO L E N T B O O K S

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nizations that would make them available to children for free. The grand object of the society was universal circulation of the word.60 By the end of the 1820s, the American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, and the American Sunday School Union had become such large publishers that their leaders could imagine something new in American print culture: mass media. From the beginning of the Bible and tract movements, evangelical publishers had hoped one day to produce genuine mass media, that is, universal circulation of the same message. Now, at last, they believed that they had the technological and economic resources to accomplish their goal: placing religious publications into the hands of every man, woman, and child in America. The Bible Society gave these efforts a businesslike but dramatic name: General Supply. The American Bible Society launched its first General Supply at the society’s annual meeting in May 1829. The assembly resolved to distribute Bibles to every family in the country who needed one and to do it within two years. With a full complement of stereotype plates and with sixteen steam-powered presses and twenty hand presses on line at the New York Bible House by 1829, the managers were certain that they could supply all the Bibles needed. They were less certain that the auxiliaries could supply the “systematic organization” and the “judicious and systematic division of labor” that would be required to move the Bibles from New York into the hinterlands where they were needed.61 Despite their practical reservations, the managers held fast to a millennial hope that the project could not fail. The General Supply, they said, “is one of those bold, but not presumptuous measures, to which, in quick succession, the Most High is prompting his servants, as harbingers, we believe, of the latter day glory of the church.”62 As it turned out, the General Supply did fail, and for the reasons the managers had originally feared. Success had depended upon the auxiliaries, and too many of them did not come through. Many regions, including thirteen states and territories, were fully supplied, but many other areas, especially in the West, were not canvassed at all, and even in some areas that were canvassed “the work was often imperfectly done—many families were overlooked.” Moreover, auxiliaries often defaulted on their special pledges and their payments for books, so the parent society was plunged into debt to banks and paper suppliers.63 But on the production side, the General Supply was a triumph. In the three years between 1829 and 1831, the society’s presses churned out more than one million volumes, an unprecedented performance. Though the universal circulation of these myriad books was still a problem, the production-side practicality of mass media was now clear.64 The millennial vision of “general supply” also inspired the American Tract 236

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FIGURE 4.2. Before they could draw children into religious reading, Sunday School Union teachers often had to teach basic literacy. These are the opening pages of a beginner’s alphabet book published by the society in numerous editions in the antebellum era. The inside pages include hand-colored woodcut illustrations for the letters of the alphabet. The Musical and Pictorial Alphabet (Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, [between 1827 and 1835]). American Antiquarian Society.

Society and the American Sunday School Union in the late 1820s and early 1830s. In 1829, beginning in New York City, the leaders of the ATS commenced what came to be known as the Systematic Monthly Distribution plan. The idea was to organize teams of local volunteers to place into the hands of every city resident at least one tract, the same tract, each month, much like a monthly magazine. The New York project was highly effective, and the ATS officers regularly pressed other auxiliaries, large and small, to conduct similar systematic efforts. In 1834 the national office began a broader effort in the South and West, dubbed the Volume Enterprise, the aim of which was to place at least one religious book into every household.65 In 1830 the Sunday School Union launched its own version of a “general supply” in the trans-Appalachian West: the Mississippi Valley Project. Again, the goal was as simple as it was audacious: “to estabB E N EVO L E N T B O O K S

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lish a Sunday school in every destitute place where it is practicable, throughout the Valley of the Mississippi.” Such a plan required libraries for every school, books for every child.66 Like the Bible Society, the Tract Society and Sunday School Union saw their drives for universal circulation of religious publications frustrated by inefficient auxiliaries and, perhaps more important, by the sheer magnitude of the task, especially on the sprawling western frontier. The difficulties encountered in the Monthly Distributions, the Volume Enterprise, and the Valley Enterprise led both societies after 1835 to move away from dependence on volunteer auxiliaries and toward the use of paid agents, salaried and supervised by the national office.67 But despite frustrations, the great national enterprises of the early 1830s were remarkable publishing and distribution events. Though the managers of the ATS admitted in 1831 that some ten million Americans were still beyond their reach, some two million to three million people were being reached regularly by the Systematic Monthly Distributions. In the years 1829–31 the society’s production of tracts never fell below five million annually. Counting all its publications, the American Tract Society annually printed at least five pages for every person in America.68 Meanwhile, in the first three years of its Mississippi Valley Project, 1830 to 1833, the American Sunday School Union established 4,245 new schools, revived 2,899, and placed into Sunday school libraries more than 500,000 volumes.69 A million Bibles, fifteen million tracts, half a million Sunday school books: these were impressive numbers. And the ABS , the ATS , and the ASSU were only the largest and most conspicuous players on the religious publishing stage in the 1820s and 1830s. Denominational publishers, especially the Methodists, were expanding their publication work as well. The Methodist Episcopal Church had set up a Book Concern in 1789, but the operation did not prosper until it was taken over by the energetic Nathan Bangs in 1820. By the late 1820s, Bangs had modernized the New York–based Book Concern along the lines pioneered by the ABS and the ATS , moving to stereotype printing in 1828 and new printing presses in 1829.70 New York, of course, was not the only place to conduct a publishing business in the 1820s. The Methodists, for example, established a Western Book Concern in Cincinnati in 1820, and small-scale religious publishers were sprouting up everywhere in America in the 1830s.71 But centralization was the more striking sign of the times. It was the concentrated power of the great noncommercial publishing societies that marked the 1830s as a new age of mass communication and national organization. It was the overlapping “general supply” projects of the ABS , the ATS , and ASSU in the early 1830s that vividly revealed the enormous power and potential of evangelical print. The era of cheap Bibles and tracts, stereotype plates, steam-powered print238

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ing presses, “general supplies,” and millennial hopes was also the Age of Reform. As Noah Worcester knew, evangelism was an expansive idea. If words could transform the human heart, they could transform the world. If the Gospel of Christ could be mass-produced and universally circulated, so could other gospels. And in the years after 1815, nearly all of the techniques of evangelical publishing were exported into the realm of social reform.72 The cause of temperance provides one of the best case studies of how the evangelical publishing style was transferred from religion to social reform. Like Bible and tract societies, local temperance societies began to appear in the 1810s. The first statewide effort was the moderate Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance, which was founded 1813.73 A more ambitious and radical national temperance movement was inaugurated in 1826 by a group of evangelical clergymen in Massachusetts who had been associated with the New England Tract Society. This was the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance, more commonly called the American Temperance Society. The leaders of the new society developed an ideology of temperance reform remarkably like that of religious conversion. They likened the desire for drink to the desire for sin; its gratification produced only the desire for more. The solution was to renounce ardent spirits entirely and immediately, as one would renounce the Devil and all his works.74 Individuals would be converted to temperance, as they were converted to Christianity, through educational “means.” In this case, the managers declared, “the grand means, under Providence, of accomplishing this infinitely glorious result, is, it is believed, the universal dissemination in all countries, and among all classes of people, of a knowledge of the facts, with regard to the nature and effects of intoxicating drink.”75 Like Noah Worcester’s Peace Society and the religious publishing societies, the American Temperance Society rested upon a faith that knowledge is power and that deep-seated social customs could be changed. “What is wanted is information brought home to the fireside, and the bosom of the individual,” the managers wrote, “and should it be universal, there is reason to believe that it would, with the divine blessing, do much towards changing the habits of the nation.”76 The kind of information they had in mind was factual and statistical: the chemistry of alcohol, the numbers of gallons of liquor manufactured and consumed, and the narratives of those left dead and diseased, widowed and orphaned, by drink. To convey this evangelizing information to the nation, the leaders of the American Temperance Society commissioned agents and promoted the formation of local and state auxiliaries all over the country—more than one thousand by 1829, seven thousand by 1834. More important, they turned to print. From the beginning, they sought to place their message into the newspapers and periodicals of the time; they distributed tracts and circuB E N EVO L E N T B O O K S

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lars; and in 1829 they began the Journal of Humanity, a weekly newspaper sold by subscription as well as given away for free by the auxiliary societies.77 The managers of the Temperance Society celebrated the new communications technology, especially stereotyping and steam-powered printing. As soon as practical, they began to stereotype their annual reports and to circulate them as cheap, paperbound books. They produced a concise Temperance Manual designed for free circulation, much like the small books of the American Tract Society’s Volume Enterprise. In the early 1830s, they began publishing the Temperance Almanac, a popular annual filled with facts and statistics, narratives, and children’s stories.78 In 1832 the American Temperance Society announced its version of a “general supply.” One of the chief instigators of this project was executive committee member Justin Edwards, who had earlier pushed the “general supply” idea at the American Tract Society. Edwards and his colleagues stereotyped and printed a twelve-page National Circular, which they hoped to deliver to every family in the United States. In conjunction with this publishing effort, they also planned a day of temperance meetings to be held simultaneously on 26 February 1833, in every city, town, and village in the country (fig. 4.3).79 These two efforts to produce simultaneous, universal circulation of the temperance message were not entirely successful. The society simply did not have the funds to produce the kind of mass media its leaders desired. But their vision of mass media was clear. They believed that $10,000 would be sufficient to supply the National Circular to everyone in America. And they never doubted that their publishing campaign would eventually prevail, that drunkenness would vanish from the earth, and that the second coming of Christ would be hastened.80 The success of reform evangelism varied greatly. The peace movement converted few; the temperance movement, on the other hand, enrolled some 1.5 million members by 1835 (12 percent of the free population of the United States). And alcohol consumption fell dramatically.81 But the reform evangelism that stirred up the greatest response in the 1830s—though not the most converts— was the antislavery movement. The sudden rise of the American Anti-Slavery Society in the mid-1830s provides perhaps the most striking example of the export of evangelical publishing from religion to social reform. Within two years, 1833 to 1835, the abolitionists adopted all of the key organizational and publishing strategies of evangelical book and tract work, and they applied those strategies to a decidedly unpopular cause. In the process, they revealed to Americans, perhaps more vividly than had any of their sister movements, the powerful role that noncommercial forces could play in the development of mass media in the modern world. Founded in 1833, the American Anti-Slavery Society was organized and 240

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FIGURE 4.3. Although the American Temperance Society did its own publishing, the society also relied on materials produced by the American Tract Society. This narrative tract offers a version of the standard temperance redemption story: a drunken father neglects child, wife, and Bible; he confronts a sobering family crisis; he is reformed and saved through the benevolent intervention of a pious neighbor. The Eventful Twelve Hours; or, the Destitution and Wretchedness of a Drunkard, No. 395 (New York: American Tract Society, [1839]). American Antiquarian Society.

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managed by veterans of the Bible, tract, Sunday school, and temperance movements, including most prominently Arthur and Lewis Tappan of New York, who brought large sums of money as well as evangelical fire to the cause.82 The society’s analysis of the problem of slavery and its approach to reform were borrowed explicitly from the temperance movement, which had in turn borrowed its style from Christian evangelism. “Immediate emancipation,” the radical new idea of the Anti-Slavery Society, grew from the conviction that slaveholding was a sin, which, like any sin, must be renounced immediately and unequivocally. The target of abolitionism was the conscience of both the slaveholder and the non-slaveholder. By stirring individuals to repent and renounce sin, abolitionists aimed to produce “a radical change in public sentiment.” The means of conversion was “the power of truth.” As with temperance, so with abolitionism: “Now our principle of action, in regard to slavery,” the leaders of the AntiSlavery Society declared, “is precisely the same; and why should it not possess the same efficacy?”83 For the abolitionists, as for their predecessors in proselytizing, the power of truth lay in the printed word. The founders of the new society imagined an antislavery empire organized along the lines of the Bible Society or the Temperance Society. The American Anti-Slavery Society would be the parent society, headquartered in New York, with auxiliary societies spread across the land. These societies would employ oral communication, of course: the pulpit, meetings, conversations, lectures. But at the heart of the mission must be the dissemination of antislavery literature, produced by the latest printing technology. The founders of the Anti-Slavery Society made this clear from the outset: “The committee, regarding the press as one of the most powerful engines of reform, have devoted to it as much effort as the state of the treasury would allow.”84 By the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society, the standard pattern for conducting an evangelical crusade was set, so the new society was able to move rapidly into action. Within two years, the society had linked up with more than two hundred local societies; within three years, five hundred. By 1835 the society was publishing a regular series of four monthly periodicals, including a lively four-page newspaper, Human Rights, and a small-format tract series for children, the Slave’s Friend, which adapted the popular, sentimental style of the evangelical tract to the antislavery cause. Most of these periodicals were distributed in bulk for free circulation as tracts. By 1835 the presses were churning out tens of thousands of copies each week. During the year ending May 1835 the society published more than one million periodicals, reports, and circulars (figs. 4.4 and 4.5).85 The rise of the American Anti-Slavery Society was so quick, so auspicious, that the leaders of the society, especially the Tappan brothers, were confident 242

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by early 1835 that abolitionism was ready for its own “general supply.” The annual convention that year voted to raise $30,000, mainly to mount a nationwide tract campaign.86 Although part of the 1835 project followed the standard style of evangelical publishing campaigns—centralized printing, localized distribution—one aspect of it was new. Because of popular hostility and the absence of local societies in the slaveholding states, the Anti-Slavery Society decided to rely heavily on the U.S. postal system to move its publications into the South. With a mailing list of some twenty thousand prominent southerners (compiled from city directories, ministerial directories, and associational proceedings), the abolitionists hoped to reach influential community leaders with bundles of free antislavery publications. At the peak of the campaign in July 1835 the Anti-Slavery Society mailed 175,000 pieces to the South, a number equal to the entire periodical output of the South for an equivalent period. The northern abolitionists hoped to touch the consciences of an educated, pious southern elite. Instead, the “Great Postal Campaign,” as it came to be called, touched off a firestorm.87 On 29 July 1835, a group of men, styling themselves patriots in the tradition of the Boston Tea Party, broke into the post office at Charleston, South Carolina, and hauled off the bags of abolitionist mail from New York. The next night, before a cheering crowd, they burned it. Charleston provided only the most dramatic scenes of outrage. Throughout the white South, the resistance to the onslaught of abolitionist literature was massive, violent, and hysterical. “The indications are,” said John C. Calhoun, “that the South is unanimous in their resistance, even to the extent of disunion, if that should be necessary to arrest the evil.”88 What had seemed to white southerners as a relatively harmless lunatic fringe, now appeared to be a powerful cultural and political conspiracy. It was not. The printing presses of New York had amplified enormously the faint voices of a tiny handful of true believers. These fears were exaggerated but not altogether inaccurate. Immediate abolition had little support anywhere, North or South, in 1835; the American AntiSlavery Society was neither a political nor a cultural threat to slavery. On the other hand, the Great Postal Campaign did demonstrate vividly the power of modern mass media, a nationalizing force that did emanate, as angry southerners could see, from New York City. Perhaps more important it demonstrated the power of noncommercial media. The Postal Campaign was the climax of the decade of “general supply” and, in some ways, of the entire founding era of evangelical publishing. The Bible, tract, Sunday school, and temperance societies had discovered that media could be mobilized against the tide of market forces. Indifference was the worst response they elicited. By contrast, the target audiences for abolitionism usually reacted with hostility and contempt. Yet they B E N EVO L E N T B O O K S

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FIGURE 4.4. Although some publications produced by the American Anti-Slavery Society were aimed at the South, most were for northern consumption. The Anti-Slavery Almanac was a lavishly illustrated annual compilation of antislavery propaganda, statistics, and reprints from other publications, including runaway slave advertisements from southern newspapers. On the cover of this edition for 1840 the society attacks New York State’s treatment of fugitive slaves. The American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1840 (New York: American AntiSlavery Society, [1839]). American Antiquarian Society.

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FIGURE 4.5. Like the religious publishing societies, the American Anti-Slavery Society hoped to touch the hearts of children with their message. The Slave’s Friend was a tiny periodical for children filled with illustrations, brief narratives, and sentimental poetry. The pricing information on the cover shows how printed material was sold in bulk to local auxiliaries, the same distribution model pioneered by the religious Bible and tract societies early in the century. Slave’s Friend 1, no. 2 (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, [1836]). American Antiquarian Society.

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got the message anyway. In 1835 everyone in America was agitated and talking about antislavery. Such was the reach of the noncommercial press. In 1833 a Boston publisher brought out a book called The Harbinger of the Millennium. It was not a theological treatise on eschatology; it was an account of the work of the Bible, tract, Sunday school, temperance, antislavery, and kindred societies. For this author and for many American Christians in 1833, the signs of the end times were not miracles or tribulations but the steady cadence of the printing press and the steady confidence of benevolent men and women that tracts and books could change the world. “Let us rejoice in the different religious enterprizes,” the author declared. “They all help to usher in the latter-day glory of Zion. The day-star has already risen. The twilight has appeared. Signs burst forth on every side and indicate that the world’s redemption is drawing nigh. This age of benevolent effort and of pouring out of the Holy Spirit, is the Harbinger of the Millennial day.”89 As it happened, the millennium was delayed; the Panic of 1837 arrived instead. And the economic depression and social upheaval that followed had a devastating impact on the evangelical publishing societies. Ordinary members were strapped for funds; big donors, including the irreplaceable Arthur Tappan, were bankrupted. With the loss of financial resources came a loss of confidence and zeal, especially at the level of the local auxiliary. Meanwhile, the spirit of national unity and common cause, already attenuated by the 1830s, seemed to vanish altogether. The peace, temperance, and antislavery movements splintered; purely denominational publishing houses and Sunday school movements gained strength against the union societies. The two major evangelical publishers—the American Bible Society and the American Tract Society—lived on and even prospered after 1840. But they gradually changed their mode of operation, building increasingly bureaucratic businesses that relied more on paid agents and employees and less on the volunteer energies of local auxiliaries.90 After 1840 religious and reform publishers pressed on with the work. They continued their struggles to navigate against the currents of the marketplace, to create genuine and powerful noncommercial mass media for America. The story continued, but in a new chapter. By 1840 the first great age of evangelical publishing in America—an age that began with a few believers in new technology and in human agency and that culminated in the heady, millennial atmosphere of “general supply”—was over.

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CHAPTER 5

The Learned World

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David S. Shields . . . In the decades between 1790 and 1840, learning was a value recognized by the international community of letters.1 To achieve equivalence with the other civil states of the world, the nascent United States had to demonstrate that it could engage in the global conversation that contributed to human understanding. Because learning was a traditional category of endeavor, the terms of the new nation’s adequacy or inadequacy were not prescribed by Americans. What learning was, how it applied to the condition of human beings, and how it was supported institutionally were defined by developments in a transatlantic world. Those persons aspiring to learning in the early republic did so conscious that the new nation lacked the requisites of European learned culture, notably a metropolis with a national university and an aristocracy capable of patronizing learned inquiry and publication. There were those—Noah Webster, for instance—who believed these liabilities would be outweighed by political liberty enabling free inquiry, a precondition for advances in the arts and sciences; Webster therefore argued that American leaders should be trained in American schools.2 Besides its vaunted liberty, the United States did possess a number of colleges scattered along the Atlantic seaboard, an array of cities each supporting distinct centers of printing and book selling, and a handful of societies ambitious for national roles in the consolidation of knowledge, the oldest being the American Philosophical Society. At the end of the eighteenth century, learning was understood universally to be a historical process through which developed “the progress of the human mind, the gradual improvement of reason, the successive advances of Science.”3 The Enlightenment valued learning as a critical component in the liberation of the human mind from superstition and prejudice. If philosophy defined the fields of inquiry, scholarship and science determined the findings. In contrast to the rote prescriptions of schoolmen, philosophy was distinguished by tireless intellectual inquiry. It marked off several areas of study: morality, politics (or history), and science. American cosmopolitans who engaged in transatlantic conversations debated the relative importance of these three areas. Was the study of human nature more valuable than that of “external nature”? Could the moral

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condition of humankind be understood without recourse to history and politics? Would the country’s signal contribution to learning be the improvement of political science? “While all other sciences have advanced,” John Adams observed, “that of government is at a standstill—little better understood, little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.”4 The republican elite was eager to demonstrate American capacity in the arts and sciences. Convinced that the genius of the new nation must be demonstrated through the creation of knowledge and art equal to European accomplishments, intellectuals understood that a learned culture had to be nurtured by institutions (fig. 5.1). This commitment inspired the founding of national learned societies. In the United States, the prototype was the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS ). Organized in Boston in May 1780, while the War of Independence was still being fought, the AAAS laid out a nationalist agenda for learning in the young United States, specifying that “the end and design of the institution of the said Academy is to promote and encourage the knowledge of the antiquities and the natural history of America; to determine the uses to which the various natural productions of the country may be applied; to promote and encourage medical discoveries, mathematical disquisitions, philosophical enquiries and experiments, astronomical, meteorological and geographical observations, and improvements in agriculture and arts, manufactures and commerce; and, in fine, to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.”5 Learning, as envisioned in the charter, promised benefits to all Americans. It would serve their commercial interests, facilitate their pursuit of happiness, and make them players on the world stage. Despite its continental scope, the academy was in practice a gathering of Massachusetts men with a scattering of national luminaries enrolled in the membership lists. Geographic barriers and habits of localism circumscribed the reach of learned societies until well into the nineteenth century. Although “American” in ambition, the cultural institutions of the early republic were organized by state, city, and sometimes county.6 Major centers of activity—Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston—developed associations and publication programs.7 From 1800 to 1840, these associations steadily evolved from the encyclopedic purview of the AAAS to more specialized inquiries. Enlightenment universalism was discarded as miscellaneous and diffuse, and the diverse topics it once encompassed crystallized into discrete domains: history, medicine, geography, agriculture, mathematics, astronomy, meteorology, philosophy, and manufactures. Following the models of the Royal Society (1660), the American Philosophical Society (1743), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, intellec248

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FIGURE 5.1. Antiquarian Hall, 1820 (center right) was one of the earliest buildings constructed in the United States that was specifically designed as a library. The American Antiquarian Society was founded in 1812 as a learned society in Worcester, Massachusetts, by the retired printer and publisher Isaiah Thomas. The address delivered at the opening celebration on 14 August 1820 notes that the hall was “received as a donation from the President of the Society,” the capacity in which Thomas served from 1812 until his death in 1831; the AAS’s functions continued in that building (with additions) until 1854, when the second of its three headquarters was constructed. This engraving was one of five city buildings illustrated on Edward E. Phelps, “Map of the Village of Worcester, July 1829” (Worcester, Mass.: C. Harris). American Antiquarian Society.

tuals in the early republic were quick to organize formal associations for their varied pursuits.8 Sometimes the area of inquiry organized the institution. The Oriental Society, for example, was established in 1842 to study the cultures of the East; its quarterly journal, commencing in 1843, encompassed an extraordinary variety of topics, including Persian music, cuneiform, the history of Buddhism in India, and the ideographic character of Chinese script. In other cases, such as the American Statistical Society (later, the American Statistical Association, founded 1839, chartered 1841), the promulgation of a method inspired association. In order “to collect, preserve, and diffuse statistical information in the different departments of human knowledge,” the society aggressively T H E L E A R N E D WO R L D

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publicized the virtues and applications of statistics. Fellows were required as a condition of maintaining membership to “prepare at least one article a year on some statistical subject which shall be at the disposal of the publishing committee.”9 Membership in these societies conveyed authority, and often title pages bruited lists of societies to which the author belonged. Dr. Peter A. Browne’s 1837 Essay on Indian Corn noted beneath its title that the author was “professor of geology and mineralogy at Lafayette College, Easton, Pa., professor of geology in the Cabinet of Natural Science in Montgomery County; member of the Geological Society of Pennsylvania; and corresponding member of the Cabinet of Natural Science of Chester County.”10 His disquisition was read before the cabinet of which he was a corresponding member and published at its direction. Publication projected both the authority of the member and the legitimizing power of the society. Throughout the early decades of the republic, political commentators declared an advantage of national organization and a fruit of liberty would be the “general diffusion of learning.”11 Thomas Jefferson’s 1778 scheme of public education, extending from primary schools for basic literacy to college education in the liberal arts and sciences, envisioned a hierarchy among the citizenry. While the vast majority would obtain lessons in history, morality, and other forms of useful knowledge, a small elite, trained at the College of William and Mary, would cultivate higher learning. In Europe, learned men were closely allied to monarchs and aristocrats, on whom they depended for support; in the new republic, they would apply their knowledge for the benefit of all. Four decades later, as Jefferson was building the University of Virginia, he assigned a central role to science in the progress of knowledge. “Science is more important in a republic than in any other government,” he claimed, articulating a widely held conviction. Such science represented a cosmopolitan enterprise transcending national boundaries, depending on the university rather than the state as its nurturing institution and the book as its principal instrument.12 While Jefferson’s plan said nothing about higher learning for women, many in the postrevolutionary elite debated the character of such training and, starting in the 1790s, launched a campaign to improve female education by introducing formal instruction in rhetoric and mathematics alongside the customary lessons in such graces and accomplishments as French, drawing, music, and ornamental needlework. Female academies sprang up all over the new republic, with an expanded course of study designed for both intellectual and aesthetic refinement. Polite letters entered the curriculum, thanks to the influence of Hugh Blair in Scotland and Timothy Dwight in New England, who linked rhetoric to belleslettres in fostering the skills of speaking and writing and in cultivating taste. 250

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Young women in the classroom read history, natural history, works of moral instruction, and the writings of approved authors—Pope, Addison, Young, Dr. Johnson, and the American founders. While the offerings differed from institution to institution, most schools made efforts to incorporate the latest advances of the age, including astronomy, biology, botany, and the discoveries of archaeology stemming from the Napoleonic expeditions in Egypt. The lectures and books did not remain in the classroom; in the numerous literary societies founded at female academies, they were discussed, debated, written up, and performed. At school ceremonies of convocation and commencement, where declamations and recitals were the featured exercises, young women gained a public platform for the performance of learning. They would soon be applying their knowledge to moral and social ends through organized benevolence and reform.13 Projects for social betterment provided outlets for humanistic inquiry but little opportunity to examine the natural sciences, particularly discoveries by women. Before 1840, women with interests in medicine or natural history were independent scholars working by necessity on their own.14 The Enlightenment’s promise of universal knowledge inspired a host of imitation Jeffersons, ranging widely in natural sciences, native antiquities and languages, classical learning, and belles-lettres. Constantine Rafinesque (1783– 1840) carried that intellectual ambition to extremes and revealed its essential vanity in a career that took him from birth in Turkey and schooling in western Europe to the far frontier of the United States and ultimately to a settled life in Philadelphia. A gifted draughtsman, tireless botanist, scientific controversialist, college professor, paleontologist, philologist of biblical Hebrew, banker, fabricator of bogus Algonkian texts, pharmacist-huckster with a cure for tuberculosis, and poet who titled his most ambitious composition The World, Rafinesque poured forth his learning in 220 published pieces during his lifetime.15 His writings were as miscellaneous as his peripatetic existence and, by the time of his death, utterly outmoded. Knowledge in all fields in all languages had become so vast and unwieldy that no single person, however talented, could embody the swelling curriculum or epitomize the scholar. Consequently, learned men narrowed their ambitions to mastery of a single area of knowledge. In the United States Joseph Leidy of Philadelphia won renown as a scientific polymath and Basil Gildersleeve of Baltimore as an omnicompetent philologist.16 Mastering a field meant saturating oneself in the entire conversation of a community of experts. This could be accomplished only by comprehensively reading the printed literature of a field and by corresponding with its major figures. Access to a library with an international collection was thus imperative. Few individuals could acquire such holdings in the early republic. All too often American savants were lone operators, depending upon an inadequate supply T H E L E A R N E D WO R L D

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of books and correspondence with others in distant places. The alternative was to affiliate with an institution (college, museum, lyceum, or professional society) that maintained a library in a particular area of interest.17 In the early nineteenth century, several libraries were established to serve urban communities of scientists and scholars. The Library of the Academy of Natural Sciences (1812), based in Philadelphia, operated under the aegis of a learned society. Other collections were housed at colleges, such as the library donated by several South Carolina gentlemen to the College of Charleston in 1828. Such specialized holdings had a distinctive character. The typical college or subscription library in this period focused on books. By contrast, the core of the learned library consisted of scholarly serials, which kept readers up-to-date on fast-changing areas of inquiry. Assuming an equal and sometimes greater importance than books, these periodicals formed the basis of America’s first research libraries. The model of the learned journal was set by the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which dated back to 1665. Each issue carried dynamic accounts of the society’s proceedings in London. At these periodic sessions, resident fellows would present not only their own research but also reports submitted by an international array of correspondents; those accounts winning the fellows’ approval were memorialized as essays in the Transactions. Thus began the practice of peer review in scholarly periodicals. The American Philosophical Society (APS ), founded in 1743, instituted a similar conversation in North America. Initially, the APS aired contributions to knowledge in the form of occasional volumes; later it inaugurated a regular series of periodicals. This method of publishing was followed by most learned societies in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, the ability to support a periodical series by subscription was a sign of cultural adequacy and a source of prestige in the decades before 1840. The important periodicals included the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1785), Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences (1817), American Journal of Science and the Arts (1818), Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (1830), and the Boston Journal of Natural History (1835). This sequence of journals with ever more specialized titles attests to the turn away from amateur observation in the international practice of science. Cutting-edge research now required critical empirical investigations heeding a strict, professionally adjudicated protocol. Upholding this professional standard of inquiry was the mission of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS ), founded in 1830. Intent on policing scientific discourse, the BAAS excluded from its ranks the unschooled provincials once welcomed by the Royal Society. In the United States, the genteel amateur enjoyed greater tolerance. Not until 1848 was an American counterpart to the BAAS established. Appropriately named the American Association for the Advancement of Sci252

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ence, it promoted both applied and basic sciences, including engineering and navigation alongside astronomy, chemistry, geology, and other natural sciences in its purview.18 The changing status of the gentleman-naturalist was manifest in the nowlegendary expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark through the Louisiana Territory (1804–6) shortly after its purchase by the United States in 1803. Neither man was chosen for his credentials as a naturalist. The thirty-yearold Lewis, a captain in the United States Army, was serving as aide-de-camp to President Thomas Jefferson when he was tapped to lead the Corps of Discovery, as the government-sponsored expedition was officially known. He was immediately dispatched to Philadelphia for quick study of botany, zoology, medicine, and astronomy. His colleague Clark, at age thirty-four, was likewise notable for his military service and frontier skills. In an era when the model of the naturalist was a self-taught amateur such as John Bartram (1699–1777), who had mastered botany by private reading and direct observation, lack of formal training was no disqualification. In the eighteenth century, Captain James Cook did much to popularize the botanical and biological novelties he encountered around the globe through multivolume reports of his Voyages for a general readership. His journalistic accounts took the form of travel narratives and did little to organize or analyze his discoveries. Undertaken for national and imperial ends, these explorers’ reports subordinated scientific information to political assertion. But the weaknesses of the voyage as a vehicle for natural philosophy did not worry Lewis and Clark. Their biggest problem was simply getting an authoritative account of the expedition into print.19 Hopes were originally high for speedy publication of an official report. In February 1806 Thomas Jefferson provided a preliminary description of the expedition in progress to Congress in a Message from the President of the United States Communicating Discoveries Made in Exploring the Missouri, Red River, and Washita, which was excerpted in newspapers from the District of Columbia to New York and from Natchez across the Atlantic to London.20 Ten months later, following the safe return of the exploring party, Jefferson congratulated Congress on the success of the mission, inspiring a second spate of newspaper stories and fanciful elaborations. Meanwhile, Meriwether Lewis was busy drafting a summary of the expedition in the conventional form of a letter written by William Clark to his brother. Copies of the manuscript circulated and found their way into newspapers from Kentucky to Massachusetts.21 But this brief account was upstaged by the simultaneous publication in 1806 of an anonymous “Account of Louisiana, and of the Missouri and Columbia Rivers,” which was appended to the Navigator, a guide for travelers along the great rivers of the western interior issued by Pittsburgh printer Zadock Cramer. T H E L E A R N E D WO R L D

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In March 1807 Lewis issued a prospectus for a three-volume account of the mission in two parts, the first to present a narrative of the journey and the second its scientific discoveries. This prospectus forcefully asserted the primacy of the planned account in the face of two other narratives already in the hands of booksellers and announced for publication. One was the journal of Robert Frazer, a private in the corps, which never saw print and is now lost; the other was the journal of another private, Patrick Gass.22 Pittsburgh publisher David M’Keehan defied Lewis’s preemptive claims to authority and, employing the printing services of Zadock Cramer, published A Journal of the Voyages and Travels of a Corps of Discovery under the Command of Capt. Lewis and Capt. Clarke . . . in July 1807. This quick-and-dirty volume lacked elaborate illustrations or learned disquisitions on flora and fauna. Despite its distinctly unlearned cast, it shaped the world’s understanding of the voyage of discovery for the next seven years, while Lewis and his collaborators dithered in preparation of their final report. Gass’s journal, reprinted in London in 1808, inspired sharp critical barbs for its rough-and-ready style and its lack of scientific rigor. Nonetheless, it continued to be reprinted—in Paris in 1810, in Austria in 1811, and in Philadelphia in 1811 and 1812 by Mathew Carey, who spiced up the text with imaginative illustrations. Portions of Gass’s account were also cobbled together with Cramer’s sketch of Louisiana in an 1808 edition of the Navigator to produce a more imaginative and richly visualized view of the territory. This process of recombination and fanciful supposition introduced a second phase in the expedition’s publishing history: the fabrication of apocryphal narratives. The first of these pseudovoyages, The Travels of Capts. Lewis & Clark, by Order of the Government, Performed in the Years 1804, 1805, & 1806, appeared in 1808 under the imprint of a supposed Philadelphia publisher named Hubbard Lester. There was no such person. Unlike the eighteenth-century literature of burlesque voyages, this narrative purported to be the real thing. But it was nothing more than a collection of extracts plagiarized from Jefferson, Gass, Cramer, and even the Canadian explorer Alexander McKenzie and woven together to concoct a plausible voyage. The bogus narrative enjoyed a brief international fame with reprints in London (1808) and Leipzig (1811); a German publisher in Pennsylvania issued two editions (1811, 1813). Fittingly, the fraudulent work was pirated and repackaged in 1812 as William Fisher’s New Travels Among the Indians of North America; Being a Compilation, Taken Partly from the Communications Already Published, of Captains Lewis and Clark—only to reappear in yet another guise as a Maryland imprint in 1813.23 As alternative versions of the voyage of discovery proliferated internationally, Lewis and Clark struggled to complete their report. A host of personal problems culminating in Lewis’s death interrupted the work. Financial travails, dif254

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ficulties in contracting illustrators, and an incapacity to organize the materials beset the project. Finally, despairing of his abilities, Clark enlisted corps member George Shannon and the Philadelphia diplomat, man of letters, and financial wizard Nicholas Biddle to put the materials into shape.24 Biddle and Shannon promptly issued a second prospectus, The History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Through the Continent of North America, Performed During the Years 1804, 1805 and 1806, by Order of the Government of the United States in 1810. After reviewing the written archive of the expedition with Clark and grasping its sprawling and miscellaneous character, Biddle subcontracted the editing of the journals. The job went to the poet and journalist Paul Allen, who took personal responsibility for writing the bulk of the narrative, which connected or commented upon extracts from the manuscript records. Preparation of the text extended over four years. Finally, in 1814, The History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark was published by the Philadelphia firm of Bradford and Inskeep in an edition of two thousand copies. The publishers, ardent expansionists and sympathizers with American filibuster adventures, went bankrupt shortly after the book issued from the press. Allen’s name appeared on the title page as the sole author, apparently with Biddle’s approval. The two-volume work was a substantial production, running more than one thousand pages and containing a map of the expedition and five other engravings. True to its prospectus, the book supplied only a chronicle of Lewis and Clark’s travels. Yet the project appeared incomplete without the comprehensive account of scientific discoveries that Lewis had promised back in 1807. That omission was only partly mitigated by the publication in London that same year of Frederick Pursh’s Flora Americæ Septentrionalis, containing descriptions and illustrations of many of the plants discovered by Lewis and Clark. European critics continued to fault the History for its lack of analytical material on the biology and botany of the American West, though many admired its ethnographic observations. Despite its shortcomings, the Biddle-Allen text reached a wide audience in Europe, with three reprints in Dutch (1816, 1817, 1818), excerpts in French describing the Indians (1821), and a very selective German version (1821, 1826). With its diffuse and dubious publishing history, the Lewis and Clark expedition fell far short of its goal of making an important American contribution to learning. Its disappointing record of scholarship exposed the fundamental limitations of the genteel amateur, and it thereby contributed to shaping the consciousness of a rising generation of natural philosophers. For these investigators, the familiar approach of the natural historian—observing and recording the scenery while traveling through uncharted country—no longer constiT H E L E A R N E D WO R L D

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tuted an adequate description of places and things. More rigorous study in the library and laboratory was essential. For this purpose, the private academy and the college offered valuable support. Yale College had led the way in promoting the academic study of science when in 1802 it appointed Benjamin Silliman to a new professorship of chemistry and natural history. Silliman, a Yale graduate and lawyer, had no formal training in these subjects, and he soon realized that he could not master them on his own. With Yale’s support, he took courses at the Medical College of the University of Pennsylvania to prepare for his new assignment and traveled to Edinburgh for further lessons. In 1818, after fifteen years of lecturing about geology and chemistry, Silliman founded the American Journal of Science, the leading periodical in the field, which he edited for three and a half decades. Like Silliman, most of the major American figures in such fields as botany, paleontology, physics, and zoology found productive homes within higher education. (By the 1820s, colleges provided a crucial gateway to scientific knowledge.) Under their instruction, aspiring scholars learned to participate in the transatlantic conversations frequently conducted in print.25 Writings intended for publication in learned journals followed a strict protocol. A scientific report was representational; it depicted and described an object—often a specimen in a collection or “cabinet” that was capable of being examined by other scientists if occasion warranted. Such reports were literary simulacra of the specimen cases commonly assembled and displayed by museums during this period. Throughout the nineteenth century, every important natural history periodical was affiliated with an institution—a college, museum, or learned society—maintaining a collection. The representational claims of natural science were put on view in the illustrations accompanying printed texts.26 Accuracy was the prime desideratum, but its requirements were changing. From Maria S. Merian’s Metamorphosis of Surinamese Insects (1705), early nineteenth-century naturalists inherited a convention of portraying biological subjects in precise detail. Not so for the contexts in which these creatures were placed. Rather than connect an organism to the immediate environment integral to its biological success, illustrators preferred to follow Merian’s example and array insects and birds in relation to the characteristic plants of an area. This anecdotal association of fauna with flora endured from Mark Catesby’s The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands (1731–43) to Alexander Wilson’s American Ornithology (1809–10).27 Wilson and collaborator Charles Lucien Bonaparte’s static, iconic representation of birds placed a premium on the accurate representation of surface features, but it conveyed little of the characteristic gesture or habitat of the subjects. By contrast, John James Audubon, who met Wilson in 1810, pioneered a new method of scientific illustration in his monumental work, Birds of 256

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America. In an approach that might be termed ecological portraiture, Audubon depicted birds in distinctive habitats posed dynamically in typical attitudes. His style was marked by experiential verisimilitude, attending closely to what a human observer would see in a subject’s natural setting. (Unfortunately, owing to the exigencies of printing, Audubon was forced to compromise his standard of accuracy and to combine birds in the depictions presented on the final plates of his book.) Sold by subscription and published from 1826 to 1838 in double elephant folio, the engraved and hand-colored sheets of Birds of America measured twenty-nine by thirty-nine inches. Like Wilson before him, Audubon found that no American printer could administer and capitalize the work of translating his watercolors into colored engravings. Finding printers in Great Britain proved nearly as problematic. William Home Lizars of Edinburgh printed the first ten plates before retiring from the project. Robert Havell of London took up the challenge and printed the remaining 425 images on fine-quality paper manufactured by J. Whatman. The illustrations combined copperplate etching, engraving, and aquatinting.28 Distributed in eighty-seven parts containing 435 engravings, or bound into four volumes, Birds of America sold for an extraordinary $1,000. While Audubon’s opus served both to burnish the national pride of the young republic and to advance his fame, it proved a difficult model for emulation. First, its fixation on an elaboration of surface (environment and object) ran counter to the dominant outlook in the scientific world, which still focused on describing biological and botanical structure in accord with Linnaean taxonomy. Second, Birds of America staked out an unparalleled scope of coverage. In its exorbitant cost and extravagant ambition, this masterpiece of natural history was sui generis. Where ornithologists portrayed external forms, whether in the iconic, decontextualized fashion of Alexander Wilson or in the ecological perspective of Audubon, other naturalists penetrated beneath the surface and projected images of the interior. Illustrations of flayed creatures, with their internal bones and organs exposed, spread widely, thanks to the burgeoning field of paleontology, which studied the skeletal remains and fossilized tissue of ancient animals. Samuel G. Morton’s Synopsis of the Organic Remains of the Cretaceous Group of North America (1834) supplied a graphic survey of dinosaur bones arrayed in rough taxonomic order. It was soon followed by the most spectacular work of interior illustration ever attempted in antebellum America, Morton’s Crania Americana (1839), which used the skulls of diverse peoples to argue for the separate origins of the races. Although Crania Americana is notorious for its racial “science,” the work, with seventy-eight lustrously tonal lithographs and a colored map, marked the coming of age of American scientific illustraT H E L E A R N E D WO R L D

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tion. The text reordered understanding of the biological subject by providing a rational schema for the human body; the illustrations evoked an alien, interior landscape.29 Scientific learning in word and image at once documented and defamiliarized the world and its operations for a select company of savants. Nonetheless, with its recondite dress and its fascinating images of prodigies and wonders, natural history radiated a mystery and novelty that stirred the popular imagination. Satisfying that interest proved a daunting challenge, for it required the creation of a market for costly volumes depicting the features of nature in unprecedented detail. Such works were the product of collaboration among author-artist, publisher, printer, and illustrator—a complex undertaking even for a modest project such as Timothy A. Conrad’s New Fresh Water Shells of the United States (1834), a competent imprint with color plates and full scientific notation (fig. 5.2). Next to Thomas Say, author of the seven-volume American Conchology, Conrad (1803–77) was the most reputable expert on shellfish in North America. The Pennsylvania Quaker and son of a Philadelphia printer inherited Say’s mantle by seeing the master’s final, posthumous volume through the press.30 Conrad had a particular fascination with invertebrate paleontology, amassing a collection of fossils that eventually went to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, of which he was a member. He was also, like Rafinesque, a capable watercolorist and a lively poet, who composed an “Ode to a Trilobite.” But unlike that indiscriminate naturalist whose name became a byword for amateur superficiality, Conrad participated in the cutting-edge science of his day. New Fresh Water Shells earned recognition among the learned, and in 1836 Conrad was recruited for the New York State Natural History Survey, one of the many state-sponsored investigations of natural resources popular in the 1830s. He was tasked with describing the geology and paleontology of New York. The workload was tremendous, so much so that he eventually resigned his post out of anxiety about his ability to do the job. This episode marked the nadir in a distinguished career that eventually saw election to the American Philosophical Society and the general adoption of his methods of dating geological strata by faunal remains.31 The publisher of New Fresh Water Shells was Judah Dobson, heir of the successful Philadelphia bookseller Thomas Dobson. Setting himself up in business by selling off his father’s unsold stock, the younger Dobson built his firm by concentrating on publications about science and technology. In 1826 Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts employed him to produce its Journal, which fulfilled its mission by publicizing improvements in manufacturing, turnpikes and canals, and general science. With this vote of 258

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FIGURE 5.2. Shells found in the Black Warrior River region, south of Blount’s Springs, Alabama, by T. A. Conrad, a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. T. A. Conrad, New Fresh Water Shells of the United States (Philadelphia: Judah Dobson, 1834), plate 4. American Antiquarian Society.

confidence from the learned community, Dobson tried branching out into fine arts and belles-lettres but with little success. His forte lay in learned imprints: a two-volume catalog of the Loganian Library commissioned by the Philadelphia Library Company (1828), a history of the Schuylkill Fishing Company (1830) for that most ancient of American clubs. In 1831 Dobson published the first volume of Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, the narrative explaining the habits of the birds illustrated in Birds of America; the text sold miserably, and T H E L E A R N E D WO R L D

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Dobson passed the project on to other publishers. Conrad’s New Fresh Water Shells of the United States was his most elaborate single volume, with colored lithographs of Conrad’s drawings produced by one firm and the printing done by another. With these scientific treatises, Dobson signaled the arrival of a new brand of publisher. In contrast to his father, who became a publishing power in Philadelphia with a wide assortment of books—novels, schoolbooks, political tracts, travels, religious treatises, and translations—Judah Dobson found his niche in the service of learned culture. So, too, did publishers in other cities, notably, Hezekiah Howe in New Haven, William Hilliard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and John Wiley in the latter part of his career in New York, whose connection with learned institutions and public reputation for scientific quality created for them a reputable place in the volatile world of publishing. Whereas publishers might seek success through specialization, printers did so at great risk. E. G. Dorsey made his reputation as a printer in Philadelphia with the production of Conrad’s volume and enjoyed a decade of success culminating in his 1842 edition of S. S. Haldeman’s Monograph of the Freshwater Univalve Mollusca of the United States, which had originally been published by Dobson in parts. In tribute to his excellent standing as a printer of scientific texts, Dorsey was selected to be the American printer of all seven volumes of a new edition of Birds of America issued between 1840 and 1844. Yet his financial survival as a printer depended on a variety of genres. Over the dozen years from 1833 to 1845 he printed more than ninety titles covering a wide range of subjects from millenarian tracts and religious history to instructional guides to dancing, singing, farming, and morals to municipal reports and political disquisitions. His half-dozen scientific publications were noteworthy for the elaborateness of their production and expense and the lavishness of illustration. The third collaborator in the success of Conrad’s New Fresh Water Shells was the lithography firm that translated Conrad’s watercolors and sketches into vibrant illustrations, the partnership of Cephas Childs and George Lehman. Childs, a senior illustrator on the Philadelphia scene, had traveled to Paris in 1831 to secure the most advanced talent in the field.32 He hired Peter Duval, who immigrated to Philadelphia and worked with Lehman on a wide range of illustrated material, including sheet music. Conrad’s volume marked the close of Childs’s career. In its wake, he sold the business to his French recruit and his junior partner, who formed “Duval & Lehman, Lithographers” to take advantage of the strong market for their skills. Ever since the success of Edward Lear’s Illustrations of the Family of Psittacid . . . , or Parrots in 1832, lithography was decidedly the medium of choice for scientific illustration. Duval would be the most active lithographic illustrator in Philadelphia for the next decade. For all their labors to win recognition abroad, learned men could not always 260

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get respect at home. In the summer of 1817, the Linnaean Society of New England became a laughingstock in the press when it dispatched a committee to investigate rumors that a strange sea creature had been discovered by sailors off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts. The members quickly determined without ever seeing a specimen that a new species had been found to the greater glory of American science. With much solemnity, they named it Scoliophis Atlanticus. But their official report evoked widespread derision from wits up and down the Eastern seaboard. Even a Harvard graduate named William Crafts got into the act. A lawyer and poet who had settled in Charleston, South Carolina, Crafts mocked the sages of Boston and Cambridge with a dramatic jeu d’esprit in three acts entitled The Sea Serpent; or, Gloucester Hoax (1819).33 In ensuing decades, newspapers continued to find sport in the wonders of nature and the pretensions of the learned, especially after the rise of the penny press. In August 1835 the New York Sun captivated readers with its famous “Moon Hoax,” filling its front page with the sensational news that British astronomer Sir John Herschel had discovered a vibrant world on the moon, thanks to his invention of a super-powerful telescope. In a series of revelations that stretched out the story for days, the Sun portrayed a host of fantastic beings, including two-legged beavers living in huts, blue unicorns on hilltops, and winged humans (“man-bats”) around a mysterious temple. Before the hoax lost steam, the paper more than doubled its circulation from 8,000 to a remarkable 19,360 readers daily. The spectacle of science was also on display at Barnum’s Museum in lower Manhattan, where such marvels as the Fiji mermaid—actually, a desiccated, shaved monkey torso sewn onto the tail of a fish—awed, entertained, and tested the wits of the curious and the credulous. Even serious museums eager to acquire and exhibit the oddest new saurian skeleton and other startling finds could not escape the taint of showmanship and curiosity mongering. The lines between elite learning and popular culture blurred in the expansive print media of the mid-nineteenth century.34 The degradation of learning extended even into the colleges, where, in the view of furious critics such as the Charleston lawyer Hugh Swinton Legaré, Latin and Greek had lost their nobility in the education of young men. As Legaré diagnosed it in 1828, the condition of “classical learning” in the United States was dire. No longer did colleges expose students to the beauties of the classical languages and to the charms of ancient eloquence and thought. Instead, classes in Latin and Greek had degenerated into mindless exercises in translation, turning Caesar and Cicero into “uncouth or nonsensical English.” Students acquired nothing more than a “wretched, vulgar, and worthless smattering of classical literature”—a superficial acquaintance with a handful of reputable classics force-fitted into contemporary commonplaces rendered in the verT H E L E A R N E D WO R L D

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nacular.35 Legaré was not simply a reactionary with a rosy view of the past. To judge by the annual tributes in Latin verse that undergraduates at the College of William and Mary were required to pay to the state legislature, sophisticated mastery of the classics was on the decline. For Legaré and his generation of learned classicists, the counterforce was philology, the science of critical linguistic study being pioneered in Germany. Philology, like natural science, was born of the Enlightenment’s impulse to rationalize learning. Philologists sought a systematic understanding of the grammatical structure of languages—what would come to be known as linguistics—a historical understanding of the evolution of languages, and a critical understanding of the deployment of language and figures in speech and in text. No form of learning was more logocentric and print mediated. The ambition of philology matched that of natural science in that philologists declared as their ambition a global historical understanding of all expressive capacities of every language. Through such in-depth knowledge of how languages originated, developed, and functioned, classical studies would regain their former glory.36 As it happened, philology exercised a more immediate effect on Protestant theology, especially in New England, than on the Latin and Greek recitations of college students. In the creedal battles of the early nineteenth century, both liberals and conservatives seized upon the critical methods and findings of German philologists to advance their cases.37 For liberals, who had been pushing for rational religion ever since the emotional upheaval of the Great Awakening, German scholarship provided a battering ram against Calvinist orthodoxy. The Reverend Joseph Stevens Buckminster (1784–1812), the Harvard-trained son of an orthodox New England minister, was the foremost of these liberal critics. After reading Göttingen professor J. D. Michaelis’s Introduction to the New Testament (1750), Buckminster experienced an iconoclastic revelation: the orthodox Calvinists of New England were imprisoned by their own dogma and cut off from the true meaning of scripture. “The catalog of American divines is not crowded with philogers [philologists] and criticks, with scholars versed in the sacred idiom, and proved with the furniture of sacred science,” he declared, “but we discovered in the villages and hamlets of New-England scholastic theologues, hair splitting metaphysicians, long breathed controversialists, pamphleteers, and publishers of single sermons.”38 The sacred science of philology would set them free. Applying to the Bible the critical methods he absorbed from the Germans, Buckminster set about distinguishing between the “received canon” (the traditional writings reckoned to have apostolic authority by most Christians) and the “true canon” (“those books only, the genuineness of which is established upon satisfactory evidence”). His goal was to determine, from historical and philological evidence, 262

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the true canon. In the quest for divine truth, human reason was the supreme judge. Buckminster died in 1812 at age twenty-eight before being able to undertake his grand mission. But he performed one service that influenced biblical scholarship in the United States for a generation. In 1807 Buckminster traveled to Europe and purchased a library of three thousand books, including the entire published corpus of German philological scholarship.39 Few of those titles were available in America. On his return home, the liberal scholar arranged for the reprinting in Latin of Johann Jakob Griesbach’s critical edition of the New Testament, supplemented by his own corrections. This text became the touchstone of scriptural study in America. Buckminster’s vast library, auctioned after his untimely death, seeded the next generation’s scholarship. Harvard president John Kirkland purchased volumes for the college library, where they would serve the liberal cause. The eminent orthodox scholar Moses Stuart did the same for the library of Andover Seminary, the conservative bastion. Perhaps the single most important volume purchased at the auction was J. G. Eichorn’s Introduction to the Old Testament, secured by Stuart. From that landmark of the German higher criticism flowed a remarkable stream of philological work by conservative scholars that constituted the most significant contribution Americans made to biblical studies in the early nineteenth century (fig. 5.3). For the bibliocentric champions of Reformed Christianity, German scholarship posed a challenge that had to be met. How well did orthodox Protestants know the sacred text they revered? How fully had they mastered the Hebrew and Greek in which it was written, the history it recorded, and the geography it entailed? Moses Stuart forthrightly answered: not well or fully enough. He made it his life’s work to correct the inadequacy. He became the most energetic Hebraist in the English-speaking world, compiling several standard Hebrew grammars, and wrote A Critical History and Defence of the Old Testament Canon (1845), arguing against the liberal dismissal of the pertinence of Old Testament religion to a rationalized Christianity. His students included the brilliant linguist Joseph Willard Gibbs, antebellum America’s foremost philologist and language theorist at Yale College, and Edward Robinson, who translated leading works of German scholarship before producing his masterwork, Biblical Researches in Palestine, a critical survey of biblical geography published simultaneously in Halle, London, and Boston in 1841 and internationally celebrated as the first scientific examination of the subject.40 Whereas orthodox scholars drew on German philology to shore up their traditional faith, the leading liberal intellectuals—Andrews Norton, Edward Everett, George B. Noyes, and Theodore Parker—welcomed the historicist approach to the Bible.41 All believed that an accretion of Christian doctrine had T H E L E A R N E D WO R L D

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FIGURE 5.3. Emblematic of the impact of linguistic study on biblical interpretation are the descriptions of Novum Testamentum, Græce, edited by J. J. Griesbach, offered in three bindings, and The New Testament, in an Improved Version. This page of advertisements appeared as the back matter in a fiftyfive-page pamphlet, Review of “The New Testament, in an improved version, upon the basis of Archbishop Newcome’s translation”: Including a review of Griesbach’s Edition of the Greek Testament; with Remarks upon the Various Editions and Versions of the New Testament, and an inquiry into the propriety of a new translation (Boston: W. Wells, 1810). American Antiquarian Society.

muddied the original sense of the scriptures. (One of these obscuring doctrines was that of the divine Trinity. All believed that the Gospels embodied that divine truth.) Yet all were nervous at the spirit of skepticism driving Germanic scholarship. Unitarians, like the orthodox, needed the Gospels to be genuine, if they wished to claim a religious warrant for their beliefs. That imperative lay behind Andrews Norton’s The Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels (1837), which upheld the good news of the Gospel against the demythologizing bent of such writers as D. F. Strauss, whose humanizing Life of Jesus was published that year. But in the face of Norton’s theological counteroffensive, many liberals 264

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turned away from biblical studies and embraced social activism. Even at Harvard Divinity School, enrollment in Bible classes declined. While the higher criticism of the Bible only added new controversies and debates among the earnest seekers after divine truth, philology transformed the character of religious education and the notion of a learned ministry. At seminaries, conservative and liberal alike, instruction in Hebrew and Greek took on a historicist cast. College-trained ministers acquired an appreciation of the historical circumstances affecting the lives of the biblical people—an understanding at odds with the ideas held by the uneducated prophets and evangelists peopling the American religious landscape. Through the preaching and teaching of an educated clergy, higher learning gradually spread from elite circles to the larger body of churchgoers. By 1840, there was a widening gap between the two branches of learning that had once been closely allied: one concerned with the supernatural, the other occupied with nature. The two realms drifted apart in an intellectual climate skeptical of, if not downright hostile to, customary authority. Through the exercise of reason and the critical method and as a result of constant changes in the fields of study (in natural science by new discoveries; in philology by expansion of the archive, the recovery of the historical record, and archaeology), old certitudes lost hold. The only answer to disputes in both fields was more of the same: appeals to the rational judgment of informed individuals. These continuing debates took place in face-to-face gatherings of learned societies and in the impersonal medium of print. While the mechanisms devised over the period between 1790 and 1840 to conduct conversations among the learned could not eliminate contentions, they did produce startlingly different results in the humanities and the natural sciences. The former acquired an acute selfconsciousness, as students of language and literature turned their attention to the act of interpretation itself as a key source of interpretive disagreement. Hermeneutics was coming to frame humanistic learning. In the sciences, the challenge of uncertainty prompted a different response: a greater emphasis on empirical methods. Scientific knowledge took on the assertiveness of positivism. To be successful in the sciences, a scholar had to master a system of information. The aspiration to universal knowledge was now gone, and the rift between the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities, which would characterize intellectual life in the next century, was on the horizon.

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A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

Section III

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Educating the Citizenry

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A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

Introduction

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Mary Kelley The call for an informed citizenry made education an imperative in the new nation. Whether in public schools or private academies, social libraries or literary societies, male colleges or female seminaries, that education was constituted in text-based curricula. Teachers, principals, and presidents played a vital role in the distribution and consumption of the millions of schoolbooks publishers marketed in the decades between 1790 and 1840. Ranging from alphabet books and spellers to readers and grammars to treatises on moral philosophy, these were education’s steady sellers. In insisting “too much pains cannot be taken to teach our youth to read and write our American language,” educational reformer Benjamin Rush voiced the nationalism inspiring those who claimed the early republic as the model for the rest of the world. As Gerald Moran and Maris Vinovskis show, New England took the lead in the expansion of public schools with the Middle Atlantic and the South trailing behind. In all regions, children attended private academies and dame schools. Boys and girls were schooled in their letters by learning the alphabet and then spelling aloud, syllable by syllable, before they proceeded to readers, where they mastered essays, speeches, poetry, and sermons. The road to literacy was secularized in schools after the Revolution. As children moved from alphabet book and speller to advanced reading, they no longer began with the hornbook or ended with the Bible. Basic literacy, which was a key to economic, social, and cultural mobility, increased substantially in the years between 1790 and 1840, reaching 90 percent for adult whites by 1840. Nonetheless, literacy rates throughout the South were significantly lower than the rest of the nation, as were rates for free blacks in the North. Embraced as an American ideal, an informed citizenry was still a variable that was inflected by region and race.1 The initial reliance on reprints and the unflagging competition that characterized publishing generally also marked the traffic in schoolbooks, as Charles and E. Jennifer Monaghan tell us. Thomas Dilworth’s New Guide to the English Tongue on which colonial Americans had relied was rapidly replaced by Noah Webster’s American Spelling Book. English no longer, this American alternative sold more than twelve million copies between its publication in 1783 and 1843.

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Nationalism did not register with all instructional manuals. Former Loyalist Lindley Murray foiled Webster in the fiercely competitive trade in readers and grammars. Murray’s English Reader, which appeared in 1799, along with the three grammars he published in 1795, 1797, and 1801, sold more than twenty million copies in the first half of the nineteenth century. However, Murray himself derived little benefit. Instead, publishers on this side of the Atlantic profited mightily from the reprinting of his readers and grammars. Webster’s and Murray’s sales remind us that the demand for primers, readers, and spellers was fundamental to the expansion of publishing in the early republic. The phenomenal success of Murray’s reprints notwithstanding, other readers appeared from the presses in accelerating numbers and bewildering varieties. Many in New England chose John Pierpont’s National Reader, which imitated Webster’s speller in its appeal to Americans’ sentiments about their place in the world. The McGuffey Readers settled the issue. These readers, which reflected an increasingly popular child-centered approach to learning, appeared on the market in the late 1830s. Within a decade, they had eclipsed Murray. Literacyrelated texts are only part of the story. Myriad editions of geographies and arithmetics also made their way into classrooms throughout the country. Published in 1784, Jedidiah Morse’s Geography Made Easy dominated the market for more than three decades. Four years later, Nicholas Pike offered readers the New and Complete System of Arithmetic for the Citizens of the United States. Complete it was—with its 512 pages of algebra, geometry, and trigonometry along with arithmetic, Pike’s text was designed for adults as well as children. Teachers of boys and girls looked to Nathan Daboll’s Schoolmaster’s Assistant, which appeared in 1799. In addition to providing schooling for children, local communities across the North and to a notably lesser extent the South pooled resources to increase adult access to print. They adopted the same instrument as evangelical and social reformers, dispensing the word through voluntary associations incorporated as social libraries. In this, as in celebrating knowledge, they also paralleled those who sought global primacy in learned culture. These libraries, hailed by Jeremy Belknap as the “easiest, the cheapest and most effectual mode of diffusing knowledge among the people,” spread across the landscape in the three decades following the Revolution. But did they meet Belknap’s expectation? The answer is no, as Kenneth Carpenter tells us. Except for libraries such as Boston’s Athenaeum, Philadelphia’s Library Company, and Charleston’s Library Society, the collections were very limited, as were the hours of operation.2 Typically, male members of a town’s elite, who had purchased large numbers of shares, had the most say in choosing the books. With an intensity that registered their strong convictions about print’s influence on readers’ attitudes 270

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and behaviors, founding members debated the degree to which their collections should be religious or secular, resolutely serious or at least slightly entertaining. Not surprisingly, fiction, the enemy of the evangelical reformers, generated the most controversy. The leading members’ decision to restrict the purchase of novels proved to be their undoing. Increasingly, women patronized the profitbased circulating libraries that catered to their taste for fiction. Equally important, social libraries with relatively little money to buy books, whatever their character, found it increasingly difficult to compete with commercial circulating libraries, which offered readers more diversified fare. Libraries designed for Sunday schools, lyceums, and school districts sprang into existence to serve specialized needs. Other readers had to wait until the second half of the nineteenth century for public libraries that were as capacious in their holdings as the tastes of their patrons. Students at male colleges and female seminaries faced the same challenges as readers who yearned for social libraries stocked with all sorts of reading. Like social libraries, the collections were limited at these schools, as was access to the holdings. Male college students found little to satisfy them. But, as Dean Grodzins and Leon Jackson show, they took matters into their own hands, stocking the shelves of their literary societies with belles-lettres, including fiction. Students at female seminaries did the same, as Mary Kelley notes. Heads of colleges and seminaries purchased American reprints of the British-authored texts, and instructors drilled their charges in William Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion, and Archibald Allison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste. The exception was Levi Hedge’s Elements of Logic, which the Harvard professor began assigning his students in 1816. Two decades later, Brown professor Francis Wayland’s Elements of Moral Science entered the lists, competing handily with Paley’s Principles. Susanna Rowson, Sarah Pierce, and Emma Willard—all heads of seminaries—authored popular histories. Catharine Beecher, who founded three seminaries, published the Elements of Mental and Moral Philosophy five years before Wayland’s Elements of Moral Science appeared. Those who presume that students at colleges and seminaries engaged with print alone will discover that they, like their counterparts in the nation’s common schools, were immersed in oral culture. Day in, day out, students stood before their teachers and recited passages they had committed to memory. In their literary societies, they debated issues ranging from female education to Indian removal. They also penned and performed essays, dialogues, poems, and songs, which they circulated as manuscripts. Increasingly, in the decades after 1820, they coupled oral and scribal production with print publication. I N T RO D U C T I O N

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Students themselves were the publishers. The cultural productions that had originated in literary societies appeared in student-initiated magazines and newspapers. For teachers, print brought remuneration and reputation. For students, it played an equally crucial role as they apprenticed themselves for lives as makers of public opinion in their communities, their regions, and, in some cases, their nation.

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CHAPTER 6

Libraries and Schools PA R T 1

Libraries

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Kenneth E. Carpenter . . . From 1790 to 1840, Americans formed thousands of social libraries or, to use the term preferred by the few extant today, membership libraries. Most such libraries were voluntary associations of neighbors, and they were similar enough to be considered an institutional type, though they differed in ways large and small as Americans adapted the institutional form to local circumstances and desires. The impetus for these libraries came from the wish to pool resources in order to obtain access to more reading matter—the same idea that lay behind Benjamin Franklin’s inauguration of the first such American library in 1731. Although usually formed, financed, and patronized by a small core group, these institutions were considered “public libraries,” meaning that they were not the personal collections of private individuals. They were public goods, and in an era when roads and bridges were provided by private means, it would seem natural that libraries should be as well. But libraries were easier to establish than to sustain over the years, and the support for many libraries proved shallow. In 1790 individual initiative appeared to be up to the challenge of providing shared reading to local communities. Within three decades it was clear it was not. This failure, which a wide variety of other initiatives and proposals hoped to remedy, is the central story of the period from 1790 to 1840. The voluntary associations aspiring to provide books to the public were from the very start often vehicles for the display of wealth and power by prominent individuals or small groups. Libraries could divide as well as unite. Enthusiasm for reading could founder on disagreements over which books to buy; collecting dues and fines could generate ill will. Even when harmony reigned, most institutions possessed only short-term and limited utility, because collections were small and easily read through. As a result, the libraries springing up in such large numbers also died in large numbers. Exacerbating the struggle for survival was competition from commercial circulating libraries, newspapers, and periodicals as well as an increasing number of widely available cheap and

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entertaining books. A strategy for meeting the challenge—adding popular fiction to attract readers—stirred new controversy, for, in the minds of some, that solution betrayed the very purpose of the social library as moral and intellectual force. Although only a handful of social libraries existed before 1776, they became ubiquitous in the Northeast after independence, following a trend evident in Great Britain as well. Thanks in large part to the economic prosperity of the 1790s, some 266 social libraries were founded between 1790 and 1840 in New England alone. This period has been dubbed the “golden age” of the social library. Actually, its greatest growth came before 1815.1 Most numerous in New England, social libraries moved west with Yankee migrants. Southerners, by contrast, supported few such institutions. None are recorded in antebellum Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, and Georgia, only six in Louisiana, seven in Virginia, eight in Tennessee, and thirteen in Mississippi. But North Carolina boasted thirty, South Carolina forty-two, and Kentucky fifty-three. Only the two lastnamed states have been thoroughly studied, so the actual number of libraries in the other southern states may be higher.2 It is likely that libraries have been undercounted elsewhere and not just below the Mason-Dixon Line. State governments in the North made it easy for libraries to obtain corporate charters. In the early republic, incorporation was a legal privilege enabling private groups to make contracts, hold title to property, and enforce regulations upon members.3 Libraries easily qualified. Believing that social libraries were, in the words of the Reverend Jeremy Belknap, founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the “easiest, the cheapest and most effectual mode of diffusing knowledge among the people,”4 one state after another—New York (1796), Massachusetts (1798), Vermont (1800), Connecticut (1818)—passed general laws under which libraries could freely incorporate. In so doing, northern lawmakers overcame long-standing fears that private associations armed with corporate privileges could become dangerous concentrations of power, especially in support of religious sectarianism or political factionalism. For just this reason, southern states were reluctant to make such grants.5 Typically, a library began with a small group of leading men calling a public meeting to launch the project. The founders are often identified in local histories as “prominent citizens”—usually, doctors, judges, or businessmen. In Massachusetts, as few as seven people (though often as many as twenty or thirty came together) might draft a constitution defining terms for membership, providing for officers, and setting times for annual meetings and elections. Organizers might also prescribe the price of shares and the cost of annual dues. So constituted, the local association would then seek official incorporation.6 In principle, social libraries were owned by their shareholders (fig. 6.1). But 274

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what rights did ownership confer? Could shares be bought and sold like any other stock, and did those owning more than one share deserve greater influence and more privileges? In the colonial period, voluntary libraries, which were largely gentlemen’s clubs, said no. Differential rights were banned for the sake of “preserving a just equality among the members.” That policy was as true for Benjamin Franklin’s Library Company of Philadelphia (1742) (fig. 6.2) as for the Charles Town Library Society in South Carolina (1750). But the commitment to equality among members during the colonial period did not carry over to the social libraries of the early republic. In its 1796 general incorporation act for libraries, New York State awarded rights to members according to their investment. The more shares one owned, the more votes one controlled. Elsewhere, from Portland, Maine, to Lexington, Kentucky, the same rule was adopted voluntarily. Some social libraries fudged or ignored the issue in their constitutions. Even so, the change in policy from the colonial era to the new republic was unmistakable. Money talked, and buying multiple shares became a way to claim distinction in institutions opening up to a wider range of members. Contrary to the idealized image of civic involvement in past times, the voluntary libraries of the early republic fostered minority rule.7 The content of the collections was the major arena for exerting control. The best-known struggle for power in a social library pitted the rogue gentleman Stephen Burroughs against the Presbyterian minister of Bridgehampton, New York. In 1793, Burroughs, a dropout from Dartmouth College, took up a post as schoolmaster in that Long Island town and soon after approached the Reverend Aaron Woolworth with a proposal to start a subscription library. The parson discouraged the effort, on the grounds that several previous attempts had failed. Undeterred, Burroughs pressed ahead and quickly gathered funds from

FIGURE 6.1. Library shares were documented with certificates, even if they were handwritten and membership was small. Share certificate, no. 21, issued to Dudley Hubbard, Berwick [Maine?]. Private Collection. LIBRARIES AND SCHOOLS

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FIGURE 6.2. A bookplate that bears an illustration is rare, but this example includes a simple engraving of Benjamin Franklin. Circulating Library of Lewisburg [West Virginia?], No. 47. Private Collection.

the townspeople, who were happy to support a library so long as the Reverend Mr. Woolworth did not insist on picking all the books—a condition that had doomed the earlier initiatives. The subscribers appointed a committee made up of Burroughs, Woolworth, and three other inhabitants. The clergyman drew up one list of books for consideration, the schoolmaster another. Woolworth’s consisted of religious titles, Burroughs’s of “histories and books of information on secular subjects,” including novels. The fight was intense, and it involved not just a choice of reading but a clash of egos. Early on, Burroughs reported, the parson made a conciliatory pledge: if the committee adopted his rival’s list, Woolworth would “become a member of your library.” Actually, each man wanted the library to be his, and in the struggle for control, each presumed the right to prescribe for the rest of the citizenry. Although Burroughs claimed to speak for the townspeople, he disdained them as “very illiterate.” Like Woolworth, he did not intend to collaborate with the neighbors but to decide on their behalf. Eventually, the two sides grudgingly reached a compromise incorporating Burroughs’s recommendations, and well after the trouble-making schoolmaster had left town, the Bridgehampton collection was known as the “Burroughs library.”8 Such conflicts were not uncommon. Sometimes a town’s leading man tried to take charge, as happened in Sterling, Massachusetts, where a local doctor, merchant, and colonel named Thomas H. Blood became the librarian of the First 276

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Library Society at its founding in 1804 and then the biggest subscriber to a separate Reading Room in 1812. When one library was not big enough to contain the ambitions of the local notables, others would spring up, as Massachusetts legislators anticipated in 1798 in making provision for incorporating the “second, third, fourth, &c. (as the case may be) Social Library in the town of ——.” No sooner did Beverly, Massachusetts, launch a Social Library in 1805 than a Second Social Library started the following year. It contained “no novels, romances, nor plays,” and the regulations stated its collection would “consist principally of the serious productions of Calvinistic Divines, and Baxter, Flavel, Henry, Watts, Doddridge, Edwards, Bellamy, Hopkins, and the like.”9 Books did, in fact, get bought and even placed on the shelves, only to be found offensive. Republican partisans in the Wilmington (Delaware) Library and Young Men’s Association objected to the acquisition of Charles Brockden Brown’s 1809 Address to the Congress denouncing Jefferson’s embargo as “incompatible with truth” and rather than return or sell the outrageous work, had it burned.10 Two decades later Jefferson met with objections in Concord, Massachusetts, where the social library physically excised from the former president’s collected correspondence two letters that cast doubt on the divinity of Christ and the infallibility of the Bible.11 Libraries generally sought to be neutral spaces—the Sterling Reading Room banned “unnecessary conversation” and “party disputes”—and, although they sometimes engaged in censorship, most institutions eschewed efforts at religious or political conversion. However, a few were established explicitly as tools of evangelization. In December 1814 the Nottingham (New Hampshire) Religious Library, sponsored by the local Congregational Church, held some forty-six titles, mostly tracts in multiple copies, which had been contributed by agents of the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The books were aimed at a broad audience; it had been the “intention of the Donors that these books should be loaned to people of every denomination who will use them carefully and read them with attention.”12 Similarly, in 1828, just as party lines were becoming more sharply etched, partisans started up reading rooms to inspire followers and win new adherents.13 Fiction could stir up censors as strongly as politics and religion. That was the fate of two little-known works from the eighteenth century acquired by the Vincennes (Indiana) Library Company in 1809. A local politician in the frontier community, General Washington Johnson, complained that neither work—Claude Quillet’s Callipaedia; or, the Art of Getting Beautiful Children (published in various early eighteenth-century editions in London) and the anonymous novel History of Peggy Black and Wilmot Bond (4 vols.; Dublin: Printed for Michael Mills, 1784)—was appropriate for the collection. This obLIBRARIES AND SCHOOLS

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jection from the future speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives brought a quick response. Agreeing that the two works “are by their immoral tendency, unfit to be found in the possession of an Institution the object of which is to diffuse usefull knowledge and correct moral principles,” a library committee recommended their removal. Twenty-five years later, the Vincennes group was again patrolling the shelves; in response to another member’s complaint, the directors ordered the librarian to sell the library’s copy of Byron’s Works.14 Such decisions were unexceptionable. If a member took issue with a book, the library got rid of it. In practice, the battle was seldom over particular titles; rather, it turned on whether to allow imaginative writing into the library at all. It took more than a collection of books to make a library. The new institutions had to find space for them, set hours of operation, devise rules for borrowing, and fix fines for overdue and nonreturned items. Few libraries had specialpurpose buildings, and more of these have survived. Notable examples are the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Boston Athenæum, and the Library Company of Burlington, New Jersey, which, thanks to a gift from a member in 1788, erected a structure that today serves as Burlington’s public library. For all its ambition to emulate the great libraries of Europe, the elite Charles Town Library Society led a peripatetic existence for decades; it started out in the librarian’s home, moved to a rented room, but ultimately found stable quarters in the Charleston Court House, where it was associated with civic life from 1790 to 1835.15 More often books were entrusted to the care of the librarian, who guarded them in his home or business. For just this reason, access to the collection was restricted. Members could not drop by the librarian’s home whenever they wanted a book. Most collections in small towns were open only once a week or, worse, once a month, usually on Saturday afternoons. City libraries offered more extended hours; the Boston Library Society operated on Thursday as well as Saturday afternoon, Charleston’s Library Society daily from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., and the Library Company of Philadelphia daily from 2 p.m. to sunset.16 Patrons must have spent a good part of that time standing in line and waiting. Most libraries lacked printed catalogs, so members had to consult a manuscript record one by one. After locating a desired title and identifying its catalog number, they submitted their requests to the librarian, who fetched the books. There were no open shelves. If two persons coveted the same title, in some libraries it went to the one willing to pay more for the privilege. Here, too, money talked. To meet all members’ demands, libraries had to limit both the number of books any individual could borrow at a time and how long the books could be kept out. Provisions varied widely. In the postrevolutionary decades, the terms of loans often depended on the format of the books. Folios had the longest due 278

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dates, octavos—the format for fiction—the shortest. From the 1820s on, with the expansion of American publishing, the premium was on novelty. The newer the book, the shorter the loan. The Boston Library Society normally lent out books for five weeks, but in 1830 it cut that term for titles that had been in the collection less than a year. As popular demand for new books surged, it became essential to keep them in circulation.17 With their exclusionary admissions policies, status consciousness, restrictive rules, and reliance on the initiative of a few individuals, social libraries had built-in limits to growth. Few outlasted their founders.18 Most institutions succumbed gradually, as collections became outdated and members stopped paying dues and attending annual meetings. The great “advantage” of libraries, as Jeremy Belknap put it in 1792, lay “in the social intercourse of persons who have read the same books by their conversing on the subjects which have occurred in their reading and communicating their observations one to another.”19 That benefit was greatest in a library’s early years, when its collection was new and limited in size, and every member wanted to read the books. But if the holdings remained virtually stagnant, decline was inevitable, because readers, having gotten through the small collection, had nothing new to enjoy. The problem was widespread. At first glance, Connecticut’s social libraries were flush with books; an 1819 gazetteer reported “more than 30,000 volumes” in the state’s 172 social libraries. But a single institution, the Hartford social library, possessed 2,550 of those volumes. The rest held an average of only 161.5 volumes, representing 125 to 150 separate titles.20 No wonder, then, that ambitious readers were soon frustrated. They could get through everything of interest in short order. Over the course of nine years in the 1780s, the aspiring William Cooper, the future founder of Cooperstown, New York, borrowed 319 of the 848 volumes in the Burlington Library Company.21 Around the same time, Judge John Pickering of the New Hampshire Supreme Court was making his way through the collection of the Portsmouth Library. After reading a work, Pickering took out his copy of the library’s 1785 catalog and next to its entry jotted down that it had been “read.” The printed catalog listed 141 titles, to which Pickering added another 62, which were evidently acquired over the subsequent decade.22 Many carried the notation “read.” Of those the judge skipped, some were reference books; others, such as Addison’s Works, were probably in his personal collection; and the Ladies’ Library never caught his interest. Even so, Pickering read assiduously through the original 141 titles, starting at the letter “A” and progressing all the way down to Moore’s Travels. In an era of book scarcity readers may have been content to plow through whatever was at hand, but some library officers in the first decade of the new LIBRARIES AND SCHOOLS

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republic took advantage of a 1793 guide to the “most esteemed publications” by Harvard College librarian Thaddeus Mason Harris.23 Later, with the growing abundance of books after 1820, Americans demanded more than a few standard works and whatever else was at hand. Some libraries charged annual dues high enough to fund new book purchases; a few came by windfalls in the form of gifts or bequests. But most institutions struggled to keep up in the face of intensifying competition from commercial circulating libraries and, later, from an expanding book trade. Commercial circulating libraries offered a wide range of reading beyond the entertaining fiction and travels with which they are usually associated. In fact, some operators of for-profit libraries were even defensive about their collections. The very names of the businesses—Washington, Franklin, Union—were chosen for patriotic appeal. In 1791 John Dabney advertised his Salem, Massachusetts, library as a “Repository of Rational Amusement” that would not only entertain readers but also provide “materials capable of forming the minds of individuals to solid virtue, true politeness, the noblest actions, and the purest benevolence.”24 Likewise, Hocquet Caritat, whose circulating library of thirty thousand volumes, located in Manhattan, was the biggest in the country in 1804, felt compelled to include “A general defence of modern novels” in his catalog.25 Yet, for all the talk of “useful reading,” circulating libraries were most popular as emporia of novels and romances. By 1820 fiction made up more than half of their holdings, dramatically up from the one-fourth share before the Revolution. Such collections were sometimes targeted for female readers— particularly when they were owned and operated by women.26 Social libraries tried to meet the competition, but their efforts were usually halfhearted. Fiction occupied a much smaller place in their collections than in the circulating libraries. In a sample of fifteen social libraries operating in New England from 1785 to 1841, Jesse Shera found that novels constituted more than 20 percent of the titles in only two (New Haven and Roxbury), 15 percent in another, and around 10 percent everywhere else. A similar pattern appears in the South, where novels and romances accounted for 15 percent of the Charles Town Library Society’s collection in 1826 and the same proportion of the Savannah Library Society’s acquisitions from 1809 to 1839.27 In such choices, the directors of library associations manifested a gendered bias. Though books were made available to their wives and daughters and, in some libraries, to women members as subscribers, the overseers of social libraries resisted any fundamental change in their collections—no matter that women flocked to the circulating libraries or that female patronage proved essential to the survival of later mercantile, mechanics’, and apprentices’ libraries. The men who ran the social libraries would not abandon their definition of “useful reading” or stop 280

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prescribing what patrons ought to read. Under such circumstances, they had small chances of surviving on the financial support of members.28 One strategy for survival was to imitate the circulating libraries and allow nonmembers to borrow books for a fee. The Lexington (Kentucky) Library Company made a cautious stab in that direction, when it voted in 1816 to lend books to nonresidents at twelve and a half cents per volume. The one catch was that borrowers had to put down the entire cost of the book as a security deposit.29 That was unlikely to be successful. The Concord (Massachusetts) Social Library worked far more strenuously to attract nonmembers, and its collections were transformed in the process. Eager for the revenue generated by loans of its books to the townspeople, the library managers regularly acquired “new and popular books” for the collection, without which “the number of volumes which shall be read will decrease and of the course the amount paid by nonproprietors will also diminish.” Crucial to this success were the many current novels, British and American alike, the library ordered annually; in the 1820s and early 1830s, the latest works of historical romance by Scott, Cooper, Irving, Sedgwick, and others accounted for nearly half of all purchases. The gambit worked; loans to nonmembers soared to half of the annual circulation in 1828. Thanks to its emulation of the circulating libraries, the Concord Social Library spread its influence in the town.30 The resourcefulness of a few institutions could not rescue the many. In 1790, 157 libraries were in existence, and some 2,033 others, mostly social libraries, were organized between 1791 and 1840, making a total of 2,190 that would have been in existence in 1840 if all had survived. About half (1,082) failed, however, because the number of libraries actually in existence in 1840 was 1,108 (table 6.1). The death rate fluctuated from 10 percent in 1790–95 to nearly a 25 percent in 1820–25. And those figures are an undercount, because the fate of many libraries is unknown.31 In the face of these difficulties, contemporaries devised various alternatives to the social library. In 1817 a philanthropic physician named Jesse Torrey from Ballston Spa, New York, called for the establishment of charitable libraries, made up of “well selected moral and philosophical” books, for the benefit of the young. The proposal—the first ever to envision free libraries in the United States—bore fruit a few years later, when the Philadelphia judge Roberts Vaux, a leader of benevolence in the Quaker City, was inspired by Torrey to promote libraries along with school reform.32 In February 1820 Vaux joined with four other gentlemen to launch the Apprentices’ Library of Philadelphia, with the goal of providing solid and moral reading for the many young men under twenty-one living in the city apart from their families and acquiring training in trades. A similar impulse inspired the formation of libraries for apprenLIBRARIES AND SCHOOLS

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TABLE 6.1. Survival Rates for Libraries, 1790–1840

Starting year

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1790 1795 1800 1895 1810 1815 1820 1825 1830 1835

Libraries at start of period

New libraries added over subsequent 5 years

157 286 413 472 538 590 633 743 829 936

157 177 143 157 152 167 222 263 286 309

Projected 5-year total 314 463 556 629 690 757 855 1,006 1,115 1,245

Actual 5-year total 286 413 472 538 590 633 743 829 936 1,108

Libraries died 28 50 84 91 100 124 112 177 179 137

Source: The data are taken from table 3.1 (Libraries Founded in the United States, 1786–1875), and from table 3.3 (Libraries in Existence in the United States, 1790–1875) in Haynes McMullen, American Libraries before 1876 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000). McMullen’s raw data are available online at the website of the Davies Project of the Princeton University library, 〈http://www.princeton .edu/~davpro/databases/index.html〉. Note: The “Projected” column shows the number of libraries one would expect to be in existence if all those in existence at the start of the five-year period had continued throughout the period. The “Actual” column shows the number recorded as in existence at the end of the five years, thus giving the number below for those that had died. It seems that McMullen constructed his table 3.3 by subtracting from the total of libraries founded the number that have data in his cessation date column, but, of course, the absence of information to put into that column does not mean the library continued to exist. (McMullen was conscious of this, so he provided for a “latest reference” field.) It is clear that the table greatly understates the number of libraries that ceased to exist in the period from 1790 to 1840. Even with the number of libraries that died being understated, the figures show that the number of libraries that died (1,082) is somewhat more than half the number founded between 1786 and 1840 (2,100).

tices and merchants’ clerks in New York and Boston around the same time. The free library movement quickly spread, propagated by such energetic figures as William Wood. Within a decade, apprentices’ and clerks’ libraries had been established in over a dozen cities from Boston to Charleston and New Orleans.33 Though the books were selected and purchased by their charitable sponsors, libraries for young men were not all the same. Those for apprentices were at first free, while merchants’ clerks had to pay small annual dues for access to the collections. For that payment, they got more than reading. Charged with 282

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running the libraries, the clerks acquired valuable administrative experience. Their dues were also a smart career investment, because membership certified a clerk’s industrious and moral character. Sponsored by prominent merchants, these enterprises served as reference bureaus for employers. To be on the membership rolls was a strong recommendation.34 Charitable libraries experienced the same ups and downs as the older social libraries. Some were accused of stocking bad books;35 others could not sustain the enthusiasm of readers. The Mechanic Apprentices’ Library in Boston counted 260 members in September 1832, plummeted to 60 six months later, and recovered to 140 in February 1835.36 The same fluctuations beset the Boston Mercantile Library, a charitable venture at its start.37 The primary difficulty was a lack of funds for new books. Young men, like their elders, wanted to be upto-date. Absent ever-greater contributions from employers, mercantile libraries sought additional revenue by opening up their ranks first to other men, then to women. Eventually, they resembled commercial circulating libraries, purveying general reading to the urban middle class. The formation of libraries for young men coincided with the popular movement to establish Sunday schools, an institution imported from Britain. No sooner was a Sabbath school launched in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1821 than its founders were assembling a collection of religious books for the young. The same was true elsewhere; Sunday schools and libraries were sponsored by Congregationalists, Unitarians, Episcopalians, Methodists, and other denominations. In May 1834, the Massachusetts Sabbath School proudly reported 36,386 volumes in Sunday school libraries throughout the state; six years later, that total had risen to 89,607, of which 300 were held by the “colored” church on Boston’s Belknap Street.38 Britain inspired yet another educational venture in the form of the lyceum, first started in America by Josiah Holbrook in 1826. Aimed at mechanics in the former mother country, lyceums developed into general associations for spreading knowledge. Not only did they sponsor public lectures for audiences of men and women, but they also maintained libraries for members. Indeed, a key purpose of lyceums, as envisioned by Holbrook, was “Calling into Use Neglected Libraries and Giving Occasion for Establishing New Ones.”39 So close was that connection that one reviewer of a pamphlet on lyceums saw nothing new in the scheme: “If Lyceums had been called ‘Library Societies,’ which they might as well, the people of New England, at least, would have felt quite familiar with them; for social libraries have always been known in almost all our villages and townships.”40 While all sorts of libraries arose in New England and in the booming cities of the Northeast and then spread elsewhere, one promoter of reading hoped to LIBRARIES AND SCHOOLS

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organize libraries on a national scale. Inspired by the Scottish system of “itinerating libraries”—collections of books that moved from place to place—the Reverend Luke Baker, a Congregational minister in Andover, Massachusetts, urged a parallel project in the United States. Such collections were well suited, in his view, to a people on the move. They were desperately needed in the West, which Baker thought was starved for books. And they could provide existing libraries in the East with a “perpetual success of new books.” A national committee would choose the titles and commission their publication in editions of ten thousand or more. The collections would then be sold to local communities at low prices made possible by the economies of scale.”41 Although it failed to materialize, Baker’s plan for an overarching organization to foster local libraries was unique. In the early republic, national organizations disseminated Bibles and religious tracts, spread Sunday schools, and promoted temperance and other reforms. No such body sprang up to sponsor libraries—another sign of the weakness of this movement. Governmental aid appeared necessary, as New York’s Governor DeWitt Clinton discerned. In 1825 the “Father of the Erie Canal” cast his sights on education and urged the creation of a network of libraries linked to local schools. It took nearly a decade of agitation, but in 1835, seven years after Clinton’s death, the New York legislature authorized the establishment of school-district libraries, financed by local taxes and overseen by a state superintendent of education. When few districts took up this option, the state bestowed $55,000 of its windfall from Western land sales to set the district libraries in motion.42 The collections began with the American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge; then in 1839 the state superintendent urged adoption of Harper’s Family Library, whose multiple volumes were packed up into wooden cases with shelves and shipped to local districts ready for use. A similar plan went into effect in nearby Massachusetts with one key difference. State education commissioner Horace Mann eschewed selection by commercial publishers and commissioned a special series of books appropriate for schools.43 But it was easier to prescribe books than to get them read. Those already engaged in sophisticated reading had needs of their own, which few libraries could satisfy. If Americans were to participate in learned culture, they required access to an ever-growing corpus of scholarly books, including the scientific publications of the Royal Society and its continental counterparts, the quarterly reviews from England and Scotland, annual registers, maps, atlases, statistical reports, dictionaries, encyclopedias, legal texts, newspapers from around the world, and other reference works. Few people could afford to amass learned libraries on their own or keep up with leading foreign periodicals, especially because such books and journals had to be im284

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ported from abroad, usually London and Paris. One bid to supply such reading on a commercial basis was conducted in New York. Following a model first tried in England, bookseller James Eastburn established a Literary Room, where people could gain access to periodicals and newspapers from all over the world for twelve dollars a year; the venture lasted from 1812 to 1823.44 A more enduring model, also imported from Britain, was the nonprofit athenaeum. The Boston Athenæum, founded in 1807, launched the movement; the institution quickly spread to nearby Newburyport (1809) and Salem (1810) and then to such faraway places as Natchez, Mississippi, on the southwestern frontier (1812), and Lexington, Kentucky (1818).45 All were elite institutions, none more than the Boston progenitor, which still exists today on Beacon Hill. Sponsored by the leading men of wealth and culture, the Boston Athenæum seemingly had the resources to become the Boston area’s major learned library, but proved inadequate to fulfilling the aspirations of the founders. Once again the voluntary association proved inadequate to the challenge. Nor did college libraries fill the bill. Harvard’s library, with about ten thousand volumes in 1790, was the largest in the country but tiny in comparison with European collections, even private ones; and Harvard, with its mission to instruct undergraduates, had little incentive to build major collections for the public. What learned culture existed in the early republic was outside the colleges, and this is reflected in attempts to collect foreign and learned publications. In 1826, as part of its attempt at renewal, the Boston Athenæum made arrangements to house the Boston Medical Library’s collection of two thousand modern medical texts; and that same year it joined with a newly formed Scientific Association in a project to raise funds for the transactions of the leading scientific societies in Europe. Altogether $36,090 was raised, along with contributions of numerous books. Nonetheless, that pace could not be sustained.46 No more successful was the initiative by the Pennsylvania Library of Foreign Literature and Science, started in 1831, to build international collections.47 Fortunately, Philadelphians had an alternative in the Library Company of Philadelphia, which, with some forty-four thousand volumes by 1838, more than in the Harvard College library, was the Quaker City’s center of research. In short, the social library, with its dependence on voluntary association, could neither sustain the enthusiasm nor provide the resources to meet the growing demand for books of all sorts. The future lay with the school-district library, supported by public taxes.48 That has been the standard view, first set forward by the historian Jesse Shera, who detected the “foundations of the public library” in the social library movement.49 But a different picture emerges when we concentrate on activities in the half century from 1790 to 1840 and not on later developments. Most institutions struggled for survival, and only a miLIBRARIES AND SCHOOLS

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nority succeeded. The formula for success—supplying the latest products of the popular press—was hardly what the founders of social libraries wanted. They were happy to leave that task to the commercial circulating libraries. To those who aspired to inform the citizenry of a self-governing republic and those who sought to save souls with books, success of the library as an institution could be purchased at too high a price. There was no way to make people read what educators and other monitors of morality prescribed for them. The first major public library, the Boston Public Library, was shaped by a rejection of the either-or assumption. As George Ticknor envisioned the institution in his famous 1851 letter, it would not only supply the materials of information and learning but also assume the mission of circulating the “pleasant literature of the day.”50 Far from being an evil, as earlier library promoters had claimed, this duty was a positive good, for once individuals started out on the reading ladder, they were bound to ascend to higher rungs. Here was the resolution of the decades-long debate dating back to the squabble over the little library at Bridgehampton sparked by Stephen Burroughs. No longer need a library choose between serious and light reading or between moral and entertaining books. It could embrace all sorts of reading, because its patrons, who paid for it with their taxes, would eventually require all. Even so, it would take another half century for the public library to be established broadly on an enduring foundation. No single financial source, then or now, was sufficient. Private philanthropy as well as public funds would prove critical to that end.

PA R T 2

Schools Gerald F. Moran and Maris A. Vinovskis . . . After the American Revolution the new nation experienced a gradual, but steady expansion of public and private elementary schools.51 By the 1840s these institutions helped most Americans learn to read and write—though parents and tutors continued to educate children in areas where schooling was still limited or unavailable. Elementary education was also provided through Sunday schools which were sponsored by national and local religious organizations. Some students were also provided with additional training at private academies or in public high schools which were created after the 1820s. 286

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Sizable regional variations in the provision of schooling as well as significant differences in literacy among certain subgroups of the population existed. New England led the nation in educating its young while the South continued to struggle to provide schooling for its children. And while, by 1840, most white children learned to read or write, free black children often were less fortunate; and most slave children were denied that opportunity altogether. Nevertheless, substantial pockets of illiteracy remained, especially in the South among lowerclass whites and African American slaves. While many studies of eighteenth-century colonial literacy and post-1840 schooling have been done, the period between 1790 and 1840 has been relatively neglected by scholars of literacy and education. This is unfortunate as these decades marked a crucial transition in U.S. educational development and laid the groundwork for the more systematic state educational reforms of the 1840s and 1850s. While parents were still viewed as responsible for the education of their children, increasingly they relied on public and private schools for assistance. Public and private school expansion in the early republic also enabled more children to learn to read and write and thus swelled the antebellum audience for printed matter. Rapid increases in the total number of children attending schools before 1840 provided a sizable book market supplied by the expanding antebellum publishing industry.52

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Expansion of Schooling and Literacy in the Early Nineteenth Century Debates on the nature and extent of literacy in colonial America continue among historians. Because of the lack of alternative sources, scholars have relied heavily upon mark signatures for crude estimates of literacy. Because reading was usually taught before writing in early America and Puritan religion emphasized the need for everyone to read the Bible, more people were able to read than to sign their own names—especially among women who were only expected to read.53 More than three decades ago, in his seminal work on colonial New England literacy, Kenneth Lockridge argued that while white male literacy was nearly universal in the late eighteenth century, more than half of the women in his sample of wills still could not sign their own names.54 A few historians sharply disagree with Lockridge’s low estimates of female reading literacy. David D. Hall, who has analyzed seventeenth-century New England men and women, for example, states that “though ordinary people were excluded from the world of Latin, they were comfortably acquainted with the language of their Bibles. To be sure, many wrote with difficulty, or not at all. But when defined as the LIBRARIES AND SCHOOLS

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skill of reading English, literacy was almost universal.”55 Many other scholars, however, are skeptical of that claim. While they agree that reading literacy was more common than the ability to sign one’s own name, they question whether almost everyone in seventeenth-century New England, including women, was able to read.56 Relying in large part upon the mark-signature work of Lockridge, some historians claim that the American Revolution was crucial for raising female literacy in the early nineteenth century.57 Other recent studies, based on analyses of deeds rather than wills or using age-cohort estimates from nineteenth-century censuses, report much higher rates of white female literacy by the 1790s than Lockridge had indicated.58 As a result, the direct impact of the American Revolution on raising the rates of white female reading and writing literacy is now being reconsidered. Everyone acknowledges that mark-signature literacy of both males and females trailed considerably in the Middle Atlantic colonies and the South in the late eighteenth century.59 Also debated is the relative role of the home versus the school in teaching children how to read or write in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.60 There is growing agreement and documentation, however, of the increasing availability of public and private schools in late eighteenth-century New England and the opening of many of those institutions to females—especially during the summer months.61 What is missing from much of the discussion, however, is a clear sense of the extent of schooling available in 1790 as well as the changes that occurred during the next fifty years. Following the Revolution, policy makers and the general public acknowledged the importance of education, especially in reading and writing the English language, in childhood as well as in youth. As Benjamin Rush argued in 1786, “Too much pains cannot be taken to teach our youth to read and write our American language with propriety and elegance.”62 With the rapid expansion of white male suffrage and the turmoil of politics during the first party system in the 1790s and 1800s, the need for an educated citizenry became more apparent.63 In fact, “the republican standard of a politically informed electorate within a generally educated, moral citizenry had become a national mandate.”64 Expanding educational opportunities for women might have been neglected as females were not allowed to vote. But the idea that mothers had the primary responsibility for educating and socializing young children reinforced the growing belief that girls should also attend elementary schools.65 The religious rationale for learning continued as schooling and public morality were closely linked and seen as an integral responsibility of all Protestants, especially with the advent and spread of the Second Great Awakening.66 A more secular and nationalistic view of the value of schooling gradu288

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ally emerged—although the idea that education also improved the productivity of individual workers as well as national economic well-being did not receive much discussion until the late 1840s.67 Not everyone benefited equally from the expansion of education. Schooling was mainly intended for whites. While free blacks in the North had some access to schools, those in the South had much less opportunity to attend. And usually slaves were forbidden to learn to read and write lest they use their literacy to plan their escape or to plot insurrections against their masters. On occasion, the ban on literacy was limited to writing lest a total prohibition interfere with the Christian instruction of slaves and their reading of the Bible. Nevertheless, some slaves did manage to learn the rudiments of literacy either from family and friends in the slave quarters or from a few of the more enlightened slave owners.68 Colonial Americans assumed that families and communities were responsible for educating their own children. The local community would intervene only when parents were unable or unwilling to fulfill that duty. At the same time, in some colonial communities, formal and informal schools were created. By the early nineteenth century, the responsibility of parents for their children’s education continued, but increasingly states and local communities assumed a larger share of that effort. Nor was there a clear division between public and private schooling in the early nineteenth century. In some states, for example, academies received public money, and their promoters pushed them as “public” institutions, to the extent that they provided the public with schooling and the children with republican values. As Theodore Dwight argued in 1834, Massachusetts academies could be viewed as an aspect of “the great machinery of public education.”69 Many communities supported public schools for several months, but then expected parents to supplement that education by personally paying for a continuation of those institutions after public funds were exhausted. And other communities used tax dollars to subsidize private schools in the area. While public and private schooling coexisted relatively harmoniously in the early nineteenth century, there was growing hostility to private elementary education by school reformers in the 1830s and 1840s.70 The availability and nature of primary schooling differed between urban and rural areas. In urban communities, where only a small minority of the total population lived in antebellum America, schools were kept open almost all year long. Providing a sufficient number of schools and adequate staff was a constant concern in these cities. While many younger children did attend these institutions, older children as well as those of immigrant backgrounds were less likely to enroll. Nineteenth-century school reformers constantly berated parents for failing to send their children to the newly created urban schools.71 LIBRARIES AND SCHOOLS

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Given the limited tax base as well as the dispersed populations in rural communities, it was difficult to provide adequate schooling. Rural education suffered from a shorter school year as well as inadequately trained teachers. And while a higher proportion of children often enrolled in rural rather than urban schools, they attended them less regularly as farm chores took precedence over educational needs.72 There has been little scholarly agreement on the extent of schooling available in the early nineteenth century. Previous historians, drawing upon the rhetoric of mid-nineteenth-century reformers, often characterized the years between 1800 and 1840 as a “sleepy” period or as a period of educational “decline” when school enrollments did not increase much before the later common school reforms.73 More recent work, however, has found higher rates of school attendance in the early nineteenth century as well as increases in enrollments in several sections of the country.74 It is important to note that both developments reflected a sharp rise in the supply of and the demand for schooling. While we do not have any reliable national estimates of overall school attendance in 1790, 38 percent of white children ages five to nineteen attended school in 1840; that percentage had increased to 51 percent in 1850, and a decade later it rose to 59 percent (fig. 6.3).75 Although there were major increases in school attendance in the two decades before the Civil War, even by 1840 a substantial proportion of white children were already enrolled in a public or private school. There was no opposition to the expansion of popular schooling in nineteenth-century America, as was the case in contemporary England and in parts of Europe. The reform rhetoric of educational decline masked the persistent, substantial growth in local schooling. During the period 1790 to 1840, the geographic size and population of the United States changed substantially. The nation doubled its land area (including territories) and tripled its total population. While the original thirteen states accounted for half of that population increase, the other thirteen new states entering the union by 1840 contributed the rest.76 Not surprisingly, there were large and persistent regional differences in schooling in antebellum America.77 The New England region led the rest of the nation in school attendance. Reflecting their colonial Puritan heritage of having everyone able to read the Bible, laws in states such as Massachusetts and Connecticut promoted education.78 Not surprisingly, by 1840 about 82 percent of New England white children ages five to nineteen were enrolled in school.79 While New England school reformers frequently criticized existing schools, they usually were more concerned with replacing private schools with public institutions, with improving classroom practices, or with centralizing school financing and curriculum rather than with expanding school attendance.80 290

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FIGURE 6.3. Rewards of merit were given by nineteenth-century teachers to their students to recognize school attendance, behavior, and accomplishment. Many of the surviving printed examples suggest that they were an outlet for the printer’s imagination and skill as well as the capacity of the type, cuts, borders, and even the shop’s printing press. These printed papers incorporate small illustrations of human figures, as well as birds, animals, flowers, fruit, and landscapes intended to appeal to children. Some of the cuts resemble those found in newspapers or children’s books; others resemble bank notes or bookplates. The example in the center of the group shows children studying in school. From the collection of Linda F. and Julian L. Lapides.

The Middle Atlantic region trailed far behind New England in providing schooling for its children. New York City did increase the proportion of children who attended public schools from the 1790s to the 1840s. But overall enrollments in New York City remained the same as the public schools simply replaced the private schools during those years.81 Cities like New York and Philadelphia experimented with special charity schools, infant schools, and Lancasterian monitorial institutions to reach disadvantaged and uneducated children.82 The percentage of whites ages five to nineteen attending schools in the Middle Atlantic states in 1840 was 50 percent—less than two-thirds of the comparable figure for New England. In the two decades after 1840, however, the Middle Atlantic states made substantial improvements in enrolling students and significantly narrowed the gap with New England.83 In the 1790s not much of the Midwest (also called the North Central Region) had been settled. Territories such as Ohio and Michigan at first had low rates of school enrollment, reflecting both their frontier conditions and the fact that the earlier French traders and settlers had not established many schools.84 As LIBRARIES AND SCHOOLS

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settlers and educational reformers from the Northeast migrated to the Midwest in the early nineteenth century, the proportion of white children ages five to nineteen attending school in the North Central states rose to 29 percent in 1840.85 Moreover, the Midwest experienced the greatest expansion of antebellum education so that by 1860 the proportion of whites ages five to nineteen in school was 70 percent—the second-highest in the nation and almost equal to the proportion enrolled in New England.86 The South trailed the rest of the nation in school attendance in both the colonial and antebellum periods.87 Despite the concerted efforts of prominent political leaders such as Thomas Jefferson to expand schooling in the early nineteenth century, only 13 percent of white children ages five to nineteen in the South Central, and 16 percent in the South Atlantic states, were in school in 1840. Moreover, while that percentage doubled over the next two decades, southern white children still had much less access to education than their northern or midwestern counterparts on the eve of the Civil War.88 To be sure, private academies spread rapidly in the South after 1820, providing educational opportunities to southern children where none might have existed before. But some of the growth of academies might actually have come at the expense of country schools, depleting them of students whose parents could pay the tuitions and leaving behind pupils whose families could ill afford to fund a teacher’s salary on their own. The problem was exacerbated by the shortage of teachers and also by the pervasive resistance in the South to any general tax support for schools. For the entirety of the antebellum period, most southern state legislators refused to provide public moneys for schools, preferring instead a purely localistic, voluntaristic approach to elementary education. But resistance to state action over education also flowed from some popular aversion to literacy per se. As one letter to the editor of the Raleigh Register of North Carolina put it in 1829, “Would it not redound as much to the advantage of young persons, and to the honour of the State, if they should pass their days in the cotton patch, or at the plow, or in the cornfield. Instead of being mewed up in a school house, where they are earning nothing?” Not “everybody should be able to read, write and cipher,” the writer argued. Such skills in literacy were necessary only “if one is to keep a store or a school, or . . . be a lawyer or physician . . . ; but if he is to be a plain farmer, or a mechanic, they are of no manner of use, but rather a detriment.”89 Indeed, as one historian has recently argued, southern politicians “viewed illiteracy by and large as a virtue because it conserved and maintained traditional values.”90 This does not mean, though, that the South went untouched by school reform.91 The expansion of public and private schools in the first half of the nineteenth century accounted for much of the increased literacy of the American popula292

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tion—especially in the Northeast and Midwest. When educational reformers encountered illiteracy, they blamed the common schools. A Connecticut investigation committee found in 1838 that “many children of the proper age to receive instruction, did not attend any school.” Thus, “it could no longer be said that a native of Connecticut, of mature age, who could not read or write, was not to be found.” In fact, “there was reason to believe that there were more than one thousand persons over 16 and under 21, in 1837, whose education had thus been neglected.”92 Public schools were particularly crucial in areas such as New England, but dame schools and private academies also played an important role throughout the nation, including the South, where academies might function like the common schools of the North, teaching boys and girls how to read and write (fig. 6.4).93 The numbers of children served in such instances could be substantial, especially in academies using the monitorial or Lancasterian system of instruction, which enabled a single master to teach as many as five hundred children at once.94 In more rural areas such as the South where formal schools were less available, families and tutors helped to provide much of the more limited education its citizens received, supplemented by more transient and less expensive institutions such as “old field schools”—schools temporarily set up in log cabins.95 Even where state law prohibited teaching slaves, “schooling,” as John Hardin Best has observed, “was carried on at least to the point of literacy on a number of farms and plantations.”96 Nevertheless, the South lagged well behind the North in formal schooling as well as in elementary literacy and reading and writing skills.97 The published 1840 aggregate census does not provide details about gender or racial categories in school attendance. Therefore, it is necessary to look at the 1850 census for this information. Because the overall level of school attendance had increased significantly for some of these regions, the data are not strictly comparable. Males were enrolled in school in larger numbers than females in 1850, but those differences were not striking. More significant, however, was the much smaller percentage of free blacks than whites attending school. In every region free blacks had less access to schooling than whites—though sizable numbers of free blacks did attend in the New England and Middle Atlantic states. Indeed, a higher percentage of free blacks ages five to nineteen attended school in 1850 in New England and Middle Atlantic than comparably aged whites did in the South.98 While information about the self-designated literacy provided in the 1840 census is only a crude and approximate indicator of reading and writing skills, 9 percent of whites older than twenty indicated they could not read and write. Moreover, the same regional pattern found earlier persisted—adults in the New England, Middle Atlantic, and North Central regions were far more literate LIBRARIES AND SCHOOLS

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FIGURE 6.4. “The Schoolmaster” instructing six attentive boys seated on a bench is one of seven vignettes in a book describing careers for boys. The inscription in an AAS copy of this booklet indicates that it was given to a student by his teacher. A Book of Trades, for Ingenious Boys (Providence: Geo. P. Daniels, 1839). American Antiquarian Society.

than those in the South (where nearly one out of five adults could not read and write). The percentages and relative regional distribution of those who were not literate remained roughly the same over the next two decades.99 At the same time that southern white adult women overall trailed their northern counterparts in literacy, a small, privileged group of southern white women attended elite academies where they were exposed to relatively high-quality academic training (roughly comparable to that elsewhere). Some white women in the Upper South (Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Virginia) could study advanced academic subjects similar to opportunities elsewhere.100 And a recent 294

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study of antebellum secondary education in the Deep South (Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi) concluded that “young women in these states received an education comparable to that of young men in the area and that of young women in the more established states on the East Coast. The core curricula required classical, philosophical, communication, mathematical, literature, and scientific courses. Ornamental courses were supplementary and cost extra.”101 The published 1840 aggregate census also does not provide any information on illiteracy by gender or race, but we can again look to the 1850 census for such data. Gender differences in illiteracy were larger than variations in enrollments; and free blacks were especially apt to be reported as illiterate.102 Thus, while schooling had spread throughout the nation by 1850 and most white Americans considered themselves as literate, significant regional, gender, and racial differences continued. During this time, there were also significant increases in the length of the average school year in rural America. While rural schools in 1840 operated for a shorter time than their urban counterparts did, the gap in the length of the school year between them narrowed in the five decades after 1790. As a result, not only were a higher proportion of children attending schools, but they were also receiving more days of education. Nevertheless, it is important to remind ourselves that for many children, especially those in the rural Midwest and South, school attendance was irregular and limited to only a few years overall.103 From 1790 to 1840, sizable segments of the population were not literate. Nearly 40 percent of merchant seamen registered in Philadelphia between 1798 and 1840 were unable to sign their names (28 percent of white and 74 percent of nonwhite sailors). The rate among U.S. Army enlistees dropped from 42 percent in 1799–1809 to 39 percent only in 1820–38 (but then fell to 25 percent in 1850– 59). Regional differences in the ability of army enlistees to sign their own name paralleled the patterns of literacy found in the nineteenth-century censuses.104

Schooling and Publishing The nature of the primary schools, the subjects taught in them, the qualifications of the teachers, and the availability of supplementary services such as school libraries all affected the education that children in the early nineteenth century received. Moreover, schoolbooks and other publications used in public and private schools influenced how children were taught. Despite the importance of understanding the evolving relationship between schooling and publishing after 1790, few scholars have provided any analyses or even preliminary suggestions for considering these developments.105 LIBRARIES AND SCHOOLS

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More than 90 percent of all students enrolled in any schools in 1840 were attending a primary or common school.106 Most primary or common schools in the first half of the nineteenth century were much the same as they had been in the late eighteenth century—small and poorly constructed buildings—especially in the more rural areas of America, where educational facilities were limited. They usually contained only a single classroom and brought children of all ages and abilities together—usually under the direction of a single teacher. Classes of forty to sixty students were not unusual—though high rates of daily absenteeism significantly reduced the numbers present on any particular day. Children were grouped informally for specific lessons by ability levels rather than by their chronological ages. Male and female children usually were taught in the same classroom. Larger school buildings with multiple classrooms existed in only a few cities. Over time, some specialization in teaching by classrooms was organized in these urban settings, but not on the basis of the strict age-grading prevalent in our society today.107 Even as late as the 1830s, Theodore Dwight, visiting a Connecticut school, could describe the classroom as a scene of confusion, with “the teacher . . . mending pens for one class, which was sitting idle; hearing another spell; calling a covey of small boys to be quiet, who had nothing to do but make mischief; watching a big rogue who had been placed standing on a bench in the middle of the room for punishment; and, to many little ones, passionately answering questions of ‘may I go out?’ ‘May I go home?’ ‘Shan’t Johnny be still?’ ‘May I drink?’ ”108 Given the heterogeneous age and ability composition of students in most classrooms in primary schools, teachers had to instruct pupils in a wide variety of subjects and at different skill levels. Publishers supplying texts for these diverse settings often found it useful to develop books, such as readers, that addressed the varied skill levels so that a single volume might be used by many individuals of different abilities within the same classroom. Varying the degree of difficulty of the reading material also allowed any particular student who owned that volume to continue to use it as he or she mastered the subject matter.109 After the Revolution and in the early decades of the nineteenth century, readers were among the most popular schoolbooks. They consisted of excerpts from various literary sources and were intended to promote cultural values as well as enhance reading skills.110 Male and female students were taught obedience, piety, and patriotism through these readers. As a content analysis of the eighteen most popular readers in the period 1785–1830 shows, Protestant values stressing virtue, humility, duty, and temperance suffused both Britishand American-compiled readers, except when the texts addressed questions of war and nationhood. Here the American books promoted the new national ideals of natural rights, democracy, and republicanism.111 The readers were de296

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signed more for teaching speech than assisting in developing writing skills; writing skills were developed more fully in special writing schoolbooks that became more commonplace in the nineteenth century.112 Girls usually shared the same basic reading and writing books as boys in the common schools. In elite female academies such as Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy, young women also were exposed to more academic studies, including the sciences. And in settings such as James Morris’s Coeducational Academy, both males and females often used the same books.113 There were some more specialized public and private schools. Monitorial or Lancasterian schools were developed in urban areas to provide low-cost training for poor children. Using older pupils to instruct younger ones, monitorial schools served large numbers of students without having to hire as many teachers.114 Infant schools were imported in the late 1820s and flourished for several decades before disappearing almost entirely by the eve of the Civil War. Many of these infant schools taught three- and four-year-olds the alphabet and the rudiments of reading.115 Boston established the first all-male English High School in 1821. High schools gradually came into being in areas such as New England and provided more specialized and advanced training. In 1840 approximately twenty-six Massachusetts communities had established high schools.116 By the eve of the Civil War, perhaps as many as one out of five children in Essex County, Massachusetts, attended a high school for part of his or her education.117 These educational institutions provided opportunities for authors and publishers to produce special manuals for instructors as well as more advanced textbooks for the students.118 Sunday schools appeared in the United States in the 1790s and provided additional training for children. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, many Sunday schools provided literacy training, but then left that task almost entirely to the regular common schools. Later they focused more on religious training, especially as many parents worried that the public schools were not focusing sufficiently on religious and moral instruction. The Bible was one of the basic Sunday school texts, but catechisms and question books also were supplied by organizations such as American Sunday School Union. Many of the Sunday schools also maintained their own libraries. The American Bible Society and the American Tract Society widely distributed religious publications, such as Bibles and religious tracts, directly to postrevolutionary homes where parents often shared them with their children.119 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries most primary schools taught children how to read, write, and do some simple calculations. Children learned the more basic elements of skills in the first few grades, and some then LIBRARIES AND SCHOOLS

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progressed to more complex or advanced topics. Gradually subjects such as geography, history, grammar, and rhetoric were introduced and utilized. Given the evolving structure of the curriculum, initially there was a great demand for books to teach students how to read or write but less need for advanced readers or more specialized texts in subjects such as geography or history.120 Most primary school teachers were poorly trained to teach students in antebellum America. At first, most schoolteachers were male. But as the need for schoolteachers grew and local communities decided they could not afford to pay the higher wages necessary to attract men, local districts experimented with using female teachers in the summer months to instruct younger children. Most teachers spent only a few years at their posts and received little formal training for their jobs. Many came to teaching almost immediately after completing their own elementary education and did not differ so much from some of their older pupils in age, knowledge, or size. Given the high turnover rate among teachers, it is estimated that about one out of five white native-born Massachusetts women taught school at some point in her life course.121 The limited teaching experience of most instructors as well as their poor preparation meant that many of them were forced to rely on books to show them how and what to teach—especially given the multiple skill levels that they were expected to address in a single classroom. Indeed, an analysis of the antebellum teaching of writing composition shows that local school committees, whose members were often better educated than the teachers they hired and supervised, were instrumental in recommending more progressive schoolbooks in this area than might have been adopted if decisions had been left mainly to the local teachers.122 Similarly, state school superintendents such as Henry Barnard and Horace Mann sometimes worked closely with publishers to make available inexpensive and pedagogically appropriate texts for the common schools.123 As a result, books contributed to the introduction of new ideas and pedagogical practices at a time when most teachers did not receive any professional training beyond a common school education.124 Most schools during these years did not provide books for the children but expected the parents to buy them. As there was no agreement on which texts should be purchased or which editions should be maintained, administrators and teachers continually complained about the great diversity of books in use and of the difficulties in grouping students in the classroom. Compounding the problems of different texts was the fact that there was little standardization in methods or approaches in specific subjects in the early nineteenth century. Pupils often had texts that advocated different ways of pronouncing words or doing arithmetic computations. Because teachers could not afford to own a copy of all of the texts themselves, they had difficulty in preparing 298

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lessons for such a diverse group and teaching classes that were applicable to everyone.125

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The growth of public schooling contributed to rising uniformity in texts for instruction. School committees and teachers in the 1830s and 1840s increasingly tried to ensure uniformity in classroom books.126 In this as in other post-1840 educational reforms, Massachusetts led the way. In 1826 the state legislature passed a law requiring school committees to prescribe books and to provide a supply sufficient for students. While local response to the law was often desultory, by the 1840s many school committees began to take an interest in the legislation. For example, a study of four rural Massachusetts communities in the two decades before the Civil War found that several of the town school committees in the 1840s issued recommended lists of books. The Taunton School Committee in 1842 issued a “list of books for use in the Schools,” while the Easton School Committee in 1848 even published a list of prescribed books. Yet even as late as 1861 the Taunton School Committee found it necessary to remind both parents and teachers that “the text-books for the whole town are selected by the school committee; and no new book can be introduced into any school except by the unanimous vote of this body.” As the committee noted in defense of its commitment to textbook uniformity, “One of the greatest obstacles to the progress of our schools for several years, has been the great variety of text-books and the unfitness of them for the purposes for which they were used.” Furthermore, the committee observed, “Uniformity in books is one of the essentials to the classification of scholars; and a thorough classification . . . is essential to the successful results of the school.”127 As communities moved from schools to school systems, the Taunton School Committee noted that textbook adoption and definitions of literacy moved inexorably toward uniformity, despite “a disposition on the part of book publishers, or their agents, to make frequent changes, which are not always beneficial.”128 School reformers also sought to improve primary schools by providing them with school libraries. Led by statewide initiatives in New York State in 1835 and Massachusetts in 1837, efforts were made to establish school libraries throughout the nation. Horace Mann, secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, believed that common-school libraries would stimulate improved student reading skills and encourage lifelong habits of reading. These libraries would be available not only to students but to their parents as well. The availability of high-quality nonfiction books would help to mitigate the “alarming amount of vain and pernicious reading in our community” (i.e., the problems due to reading novels).129 Special books were recommended or commissioned by many LIBRARIES AND SCHOOLS

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states for their school libraries, and these provided authors and publishers with a broad and lucrative market for more specialized publications than the ordinary textbooks.130 From the 1850 census, we learn that approximately 1.6 million volumes were in school libraries—more than in public libraries (1.4 million), Sunday school libraries (0.5 million), college libraries (0.9 million), or church libraries (0.06 million). Thus, more than one-third of all library books in 1850 may have been located in a school library. The distribution of these volumes, however, was badly skewed with 84 percent of all school library books located in just one state, New York.131 Given the large numbers of individuals who taught school at some time as well as their relative inexperience, there was a large market for instruction manuals.132 Similarly, special handbooks were prepared to help local school committees or school administrators carry out their duties.133 Special periodicals for schoolteachers and administrators were created and sometimes distributed by the state to every local school district.134 Given the large number of local school districts and the often rapid turnover in members of the school committees or school administrators, some publishers had a ready market for additional school-related work—including the increasingly large number of community and state annual school reports that were produced. Some of these annual reports were reprinted and widely circulated. For example, the New York legislature ordered the printing of eighteen thousand copies of Horace Mann’s Fifth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Board of Education (which discussed the economic productivity of education). This report was even translated into German and distributed abroad.135 Initially, many local publishers simply reprinted English books and distributed them. For example, Thomas Dilworth’s popular speller, A New Guide to the English Tongue, was first reprinted in America by Benjamin Franklin in 1747 and went through forty editions by 1785. Gradually, American authors displaced much of the work of these English writers—especially as growing nationalism after the Revolution and the War of 1812 persuaded many educators and parents to support the work of American authors.136 A few American schoolbooks sold spectacularly well in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Noah Webster wrote a best-selling elementary speller which served as one of the most popular texts for teaching children how to read. A conservative estimate suggests that approximately 12.7 million Webster spellers were sold between 1783 and 1843.137 The popularity of his speller reflected the quality of his book, his tireless and skillful promotion campaigns on its behalf, and the interest of much of the public in supporting an effort to promote a national language.138 300

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As the market for schoolbooks grew, the number of offerings increased rapidly. There was a great proliferation of different texts—many of which did not have widespread or continued sales. For example, local schools in Connecticut reported that there were more than 200 different schoolbooks used including “12 in spelling, 60 in reading, 34 in arithmetic, 21 in geography, 14 in history, 19 in grammar, 4 in natural philosophy, [and] 40 in other branches.”139 Moreover, local school committees sometimes complained that publishers deliberately issued new editions of older books simply so that parents and local school districts would be forced to buy new texts—even though the old ones still seemed serviceable.140 And while local printers and publishers continued to provide many of the schoolbooks, there was growing specialization by some of the larger firms that provided texts for a broader regional and national market. Authors such as Noah Webster increasingly turned to fewer publishers to print and distribute their works.141 And local and regional publishers expanded their book markets.142 As a result, by the beginning of the second quarter of the nineteenth century the publication of schoolbooks was more efficient and better organized as publishers began to specialize in providing textbooks for the growing school market.143 Schoolbooks were not only visible in classrooms but also in homes as parents collected and saved some of the books they had bought for their children. Most inexpensive texts such as primers and spelling books were shared by several children and then discarded. Some of the schoolbooks on more advanced subjects such as geography or world history may have been retained longer— serving in part as reference materials for other family members as they tried to digest the information in the increasing number of newspapers and periodicals available in the early nineteenth century.144 While most schoolbooks were considered disposable, increasingly they appeared in inventories of estates (though usually in very small numbers in any given household). In Windsor, Vermont, between 1780 and 1830 two-thirds of inventoried estates had books; and nearly a third of these personal libraries contained schoolbooks. Schoolbooks comprised about 8 percent of all of the inventoried books in the sample.145 In a study of 1,118 estates in two Ohio counties, almost half of the inventories contained books. The percentage of these book owners having schoolbooks increased from 31 percent in 1790–1829 to 54 percent from 1830–59 (overall, 46 percent of book owners during that period possessed school texts).146

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Conclusion The period 1790 to 1840 was an important transition period in the United States in terms of schooling, literacy, and schoolbooks. There was a continued shift in the relative responsibility of the home and the school in educating children. While parents continued to play an important role at home, public and private schools increasingly took over the functions of teaching most children how to read, write, and do arithmetic—especially outside of the South. As the regular schools became more widespread and effective, other institutions such as Sunday schools ceased teaching children the alphabet and reading and focused on providing religious and moral training. Whereas most girls had not usually received equal access to primary and common schools in 1790, five decades later females received the same opportunities for early education as males. The expansion of schooling contributed to the growth in literacy in the new republic. Although rates of literacy in colonial America already had been high in New England, they increased substantially in other regions from 1790 to 1840. Women continued to trail men in literacy in some areas, but the gap had narrowed over time. Substantial pockets of illiteracy continued to persist in 1840—especially in the South and among certain groups of the population such as African Americans, military recruits, and common laborers. At the same time that the availability of schools increased, the number and variety of texts for students grew as well. The pedagogical content of those schoolbooks improved as educators moved away from rote memorization. As the market for texts expanded and printing technology improved, the quality of printed schoolbooks improved and became more attractive for students. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century publishers also became more organized and specialized in providing books for the growing school market. While reprinting British books continued, American schoolbooks slowly gained a larger market share. The establishment of school libraries at the end of this period provided yet another outlet for antebellum book publishers. The impact of these changes in schooling, literacy, and schoolbooks on children and adults has not been carefully researched or analyzed. There was a substantial increase in the proportion and absolute numbers of individuals who were able to read and write. Undoubtedly, the overall quality of literacy improved because children now were exposed to more schooling and had more opportunities to practice reading and writing. Whether improvements in technical reading and writing skills encouraged children to read more as adults is still a contested issue. Certainly as books and other printed materials became more common in society, adults had more opportunities and need to use their literacy. On the other hand, some scholars caution us that the heavy moralistic 302

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and nationalistic overtones of schoolbooks may have discouraged some adult reading.147 Tying the acquisition of literacy to formal schooling may have had other effects as well. In the early nineteenth century, spelling became more regularized and the ordering of information alphabetically became more routine.148 The standardization of writing and pronunciation of the English language also contributed to minimizing local and regional dialects in the United States. And while the strong moralistic and nationalistic orientation may have made education less interesting and less useful for some students, others may have been influenced by the overtly quasi-religious and patriotic lessons. Identifying literacy with schooling and books also may have fostered the idea that reading and writing are particularly valued skills in America. Schooling set up a national network of policy makers, educators, and book publishers who frequently stressed the idea that literacy is an essential component of good citizenship as well as of economic well-being. By focusing the teaching of reading and writing within schools, it also may have encouraged educators to work harder to devise ways of making those educational experiences more effective and efficient—thereby spurring additional experimentation and improvements in reading and writing in the classroom. While the general religious emphasis on the need for schooling continued in the early republic, it was joined by political, economic, and social concerns that heightened the perceived importance of reading and writing skills. The uses and impact of reading and writing are determined in large part not only by technical skills but by the sociohistorical context in which they are practiced. Similarly, the effects and results of the shift from home learning to school learning are conditioned in large part by the characteristics of the society and historic period in which they evolved. While we may have been able to sketch some of the broad developments in schooling, literacy, and schoolbooks in the early republic, we are only beginning to appreciate and explore the larger questions about the impact of these changes on postrevolutionary and antebellum American society.

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PA R T 3

Schoolbooks

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Charles Monaghan and E. Jennifer Monaghan . . . The close of the American War of Independence left many young men looking for ways to channel their patriotic sentiments. Noah Webster (1758–1843), a Connecticut farmer’s son, Yale graduate, and teacher of a small classical school in Goshen, New York, saw in schoolbooks an opportunity to serve the new republic. No schoolbook, in his view, was more important than the spelling book, the text used to teach children to read. He used his own and borrowed money to issue in 1783 a five-thousand-copy edition of his own speller, designed to “diffuse an uniformity and purity of language” throughout a nation divided by the dialects of English spoken from one region to another and often between communities within single states. He had “too much pride,” he said, “to stand indebted to Great Britain for books to learn our children the letters of the alphabet.” The following year, Jedidiah Morse (1761–1826), like Webster a Yankee, Yale graduate, and nationalist, was also teaching when he issued his Geography Made Easy to fill a need in his classroom. He too discovered that money could be made from a schoolbook. By 1794, writing geography books was earning him five times the income provided by his minister’s salary in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Indeed, the time he spent on his geographies instead of his parishioners would eventually annoy his congregants so much that it was a major factor in their decision to dismiss him from the pulpit.149 The same wish to combine patriotism with personal gain animated others. Schoolbooks in the colonial period had been—with very few exceptions such as the New-England Primer—either imported British works or American reprints of those same texts. The latter afforded no payment to their authors. Only when national copyright legislation was passed in 1790 could American authors hope for an income from writing books. Schoolbooks had been among the steady sellers of the market ever since printers began to set type in America. In the newly independent United States, particularly from 1820 on, schoolbooks experienced steady increases in the variety of their subject matter, the frequency of publication, and the number and size of their editions (at a time when “edition” often meant simply “another printing”) (graphs 6.1–6.4). The real engine of schoolbook publication was the demand created by new schools and new pupils as the population increased dramatically. By the 1830s, some 304

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A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

regions boasted more schools than churches, a significant shift of community resources. By 1840, more than two million pupils were attending schools at all levels of education—some 38 percent of all white children from ages five to nineteen. Moreover, those not enrolled in schools, old as well as young, were purchasing schoolbooks. Samuel Griswold Goodrich (1793–1860), better known as the “Peter Parley” of children’s books, was also a publisher and editor and so in a good position to estimate the relationship of schoolbooks to all other publishing. He reckoned that the dollar value of textbook publishing rose steadily from 30 percent of the entire publishing business in 1820 to almost 40 percent in 1840. The message trumpeted by these huge numbers of schoolbooks was that Americans were self-consciously trying to educate themselves along with their children.150 For the years from 1790 to 1840, two features of schoolbook publication stand out. (The term “textbook” in its modern sense did not come into use until the early twentieth century.) The first feature was the expansion of what we will anachronistically call the elementary school curriculum. The second was the Pestalozzian movement. Underlying both of these was the red-hot competition for a larger share of the market unflaggingly contested by rival authors and printers.

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Expansion of the Elementary School Curriculum The foundation of education continued to be reading instruction and its accompanying instructional texts, initially primers and spelling books. During the colonial period, children had learned to read in a sequence that progressed from the hornbook to the primer (most often the New-England Primer), moved on to the psalm book, and culminated in the New Testament and the entire Bible. In the 1730s, spelling books imported from Britain and reprinted on American presses had entered the sequence after the primer and effectively became the text used in schools for introducing reading. The leading speller was British schoolmaster Thomas Dilworth’s New Guide to the English Tongue, first published in London in 1740; by 1785, with some forty editions in print, it was being used from New Hampshire to North Carolina. Spelling books taught reading by means of the alphabet method, which, as its name suggests, first introduced the shapes and names of the letters, then called for spelling words aloud, syllable by syllable, in order to “read” them as wholes. Few instructions were given for pronunciation and writing played no role in this process.151 The first American-authored spelling book to achieve a national impact was that of Webster, who after publishing his speller in 1783 followed it by a grammar in 1784 and a reader in 1785, the three works constituting what Webster LIBRARIES AND SCHOOLS

A History of the Book in America : Volume 2: an Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation,

305

60

EDITIONS

50 40 30 20 10 6

0

1

02

1

06 18

0

6

1 18 18 18 20 18 22 18 24 18 26 18 28 18 3 18 32 18 34 18 36 18 38

7

18 08 18 10 18 12 18 14

17 9

1

80 4

2

0 79 17 94 1 9 79 8 18 0 18

0

18

40 18

GRAPH 6.1. Editions of schoolbooks per year, 1790–1840 (see “Bibliography and the AAS Catalog: A Note on Tables” in this volume)

Music 1% (49) Natural History 1% (33)

Non–English language 7% (250)

Primers 18% (630)

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History 4% (143) Geography 8% (272)

Arithmetic 10% (357) Readers 20% (691)

Composition