What Mathew Carey Carried Across the Atlantic — Mathew Carey

The air on Market Street smells of vinegar and burning tar. Every fourth house flies a yellow flag. The wagons move slowly. The city has been emptying for six weeks and the man at the press has not left. The type is set. The paper is damp. The account of the dying city is being printed by a man still living in it.

It is 1793.

He does not just flee Ireland with a pamphlet that made him a fugitive. He crosses to France, sets type in Benjamin Franklin’s private press at Passy, borrows twenty-five pounds from Lafayette, and lands in Philadelphia with nothing but what he knows how to do.

He does not just start a newspaper. He publishes the debates of the Pennsylvania Assembly when no one else will print them, founds a magazine that George Washington calls essential, and builds the press that will publish the first American Catholic Bible, the first American bestselling novel, and the first systematic account of an American epidemic.

He does not just document the yellow fever. He organizes the relief, stays in the city when the government has fled, sets the type himself, and publishes a pamphlet that three thousand Philadelphians will read before the bodies stop coming.

He does not just make accusations he will later regret. He prints charges against the Black nurses and gravediggers that Absalom Jones and Richard Allen answer in their own pamphlet the following year, a rebuttal that becomes the first Black-authored public refutation of white defamation in American print. Both documents are his legacy.

His Spark of Liberty was the press as instrument of record.

He believed that what was not printed did not exist, and he printed everything — the epidemic, the argument, the Bible, the novel, the economic case for a nation that made its own things — because someone had to be the one who stayed at the press.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”

Born in Dublin on January 28, 1760, he fled Ireland in 1779 after a pamphlet attacking the British Penal Laws made him a wanted man. He worked briefly in Benjamin Franklin’s printing house at Passy, France, then returned to Dublin, then fled again to Philadelphia in 1784. A gift of twenty-five pounds from the Marquis de Lafayette funded his first venture, the Pennsylvania Evening Herald. Over the next fifty years he built what became the largest publishing house in the early Republic, printed the first American Catholic Douay Bible in 1790, published Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple in 1794, and wrote The Olive Branch in 1814, the bestselling American political pamphlet of the War of 1812. His economic writing on protective tariffs prefigured the American System that Henry Clay would champion and Abraham Lincoln would enact. His son Henry Charles Carey became the most influential American economist of the nineteenth century. He died in Philadelphia on September 16, 1839.

His name was Mathew Carey.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

Some names keep the watch while the world sleeps.

Night Watch is a wordsearch collection built for quiet hands and long evenings.

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