A History of the Book in America: Volume 2: An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840

By Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley

Volume Two of A History of the Book in America documents the development of a distinctive culture of print in the new American republic.

Between 1790 and 1840 printing and publishing expanded, and literate publics provided a ready market for novels, almanacs, newspapers, tracts, and periodicals. Government, business, and reform drove the dissemination of print. Through laws and subsidies, state and federal authorities promoted an informed citizenry. Entrepreneurs responded to rising demand by investing in new technologies and altering the conduct of publishing. Voluntary societies launched libraries, lyceums, and schools, and relied on print to spread religion, redeem morals, and advance benevolent goals. Out of all this ferment emerged new and diverse communities of citizens linked together in a decentralized print culture where citizenship meant literacy and print meant power. Yet in a diverse and far-flung nation, regional differences persisted, and older forms of oral and handwritten communication offered alternatives to print. The early republic was a world of mixed media.

Contributors:
Elizabeth Barnes, College of William and Mary
Georgia B. Barnhill, American Antiquarian Society
John L. Brooke, The Ohio State University
Dona Brown, University of Vermont
Richard D. Brown, University of Connecticut
Kenneth E. Carpenter, Harvard University Libraries
Scott E. Casper, University of Nevada, Reno
Mary Kupiec Cayton, Miami University
Joanne Dobson, Brewster, New York
James N. Green, Library Company of Philadelphia
Dean Grodzins, Massachusetts Historical Society
Robert A. Gross, University of Connecticut
Grey Gundaker, College of William and Mary
Leon Jackson, University of South Carolina
Richard R. John, Columbia University
Mary Kelley, University of Michigan
Jack Larkin, Clark University
David Leverenz, University of Florida
Meredith L. McGill, Rutgers University
Charles Monaghan, Charlottesville, Virginia
E. Jennifer Monaghan, Brooklyn College of The City University of New York
Gerald F. Moran, University of Michigan-Dearborn
Karen Nipps, Harvard University
David Paul Nord, Indiana University
Barry O'Connell, Amherst College
Jeffrey L. Pasley, University of Missouri-Columbia
William S. Pretzer, Central Michigan University
A. Gregg Roeber, Pennsylvania State University
David S. Shields, University of South Carolina
Andie Tucher, Columbia University
Maris A. Vinovskis, University of Michigan
Sandra A. Zagarell, Oberlin College

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9780807895689

Book preview

A History of the Book in America

VOLUME 2

An Extensive Republic

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

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

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, 1790–1840

EDITED BY

Robert A.Gross and Mary Kelley

Published in Association with

the American Antiquarian Society

by The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

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.

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

Contents

Contributors

Editors’ and Authors’ Acknowledgments

Introduction: An Extensive Republic

Robert A. Gross

Section I. A Republic in Print: Ideologies and Institutions

Introduction

Mary Kelley

CHAPTER 1

The Revolution’s Legacy for the History of the Book

Richard D. Brown

CHAPTER 2

The Book Trades in the New Nation

Part 1. The Rise of Book Publishing

James N. Green

Part 2. Case Study: Harper & Brothers

Scott E. Casper

Part 3. Case Study: Urban Printing

Karen Nipps

Part 4. Printing is something every village has in it: Rural Printing and Publishing

Jack Larkin

Part 5. Of the paper cap and inky apron: Journeymen Printers

William S. Pretzer

Section II. Spreading the Word in Print

Introduction

Mary Kelley

CHAPTER 3

Government and Law

Part 1. Print and Politics

John L. Brooke

Part 2. Have Pen, Will Travel: The Times and Life of John Norvell, Political Journalist

Jeffrey L. Pasley

Part 3. Copyright

Meredith L. McGill

Part 4. Expanding the Realm of Communications

Richard R. John

CHAPTER 4

Benevolent Books: Printing, Religion, and Reform

David Paul Nord

CHAPTER 5

The Learned World

David S. Shields

Section III. Educating the Citizenry

Introduction

Mary Kelley

CHAPTER 6

Libraries and Schools

Part 1. Libraries

Kenneth E. Carpenter

Part 2. Schools

Gerald F. Moran and Maris A. Vinovskis

Part 3. Schoolbooks

Charles Monaghan and E. Jennifer Monaghan

Part 4. Colleges and Print Culture

Dean Grodzins and Leon Jackson

Part 5. Female Academies and Seminaries and Print Culture

Mary Kelley

Section IV. Gendering Authorship and Audiences

Introduction

Mary Kelley

CHAPTER 7

Men Writing in the Early Republic

David Leverenz

CHAPTER 8

Women Writing in the Early Republic

Joanne Dobson and Sandra A. Zagarell

Section V. Genres of Print

Introduction

Mary Kelley

CHAPTER 9

Periodical Press: Newspapers, Magazines, and Reviews

Part 1. Newspapers and Periodicals

Andie Tucher

Part 2. Harriet Newell’s Story: Women, the Evangelical Press, and the Foreign Mission Movement

Mary Kupiec Cayton

Part 3. Making Friends at the Southern Literary Messenger

Leon Jackson

CHAPTER 10

Word and Image

Part 1. Transformations in Pictorial Printing

Georgia B. Barnhill

Part 2. Novels

Elizabeth Barnes

Part 3. Travel Books

Dona Brown

Part 4. Biography

Scott E. Casper

Section VI. New Reading and Writing Publics

Introduction

Mary Kelley

CHAPTER 11

Making Communities in Print

Part 1. Readers and Writers of German

A. Gregg Roeber

Part 2. Give Me a Sign: African Americans, Print, and Practice

Grey Gundaker

Part 3. Literacy and Colonization: The Case of the Cherokees

Barry O’Connell

CHAPTER 12

Reading for an Extensive Republic

Robert A. Gross

Bibliography and the AAS Catalog: A Note on Tables

Robert A. Gross

Notes

Index

Figures, Tables, and Graphs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contributors

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 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 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 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.

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 face-to-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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

A History of the Book in America

VOLUME 2

An Extensive Republic

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

Introduction

An Extensive Republic

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 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), 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

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.

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 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 partnerships 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 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, self-sustaining 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 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 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: 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 mid-1830s 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, civic-minded 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 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

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

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 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 im-bodying 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.

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 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