In 1789, amid difficulties publishing the American Museum, Carey took on a new partner, James Stewart. Concerned that bankruptcy was imminent, Carey sought a new source of income. Carey entered the fray to publish an American made Bible, but he shrewdly found a market niche publishing the Douai Version for Roman Catholics.

After the Constitution was ratified in 1789, the Roman Catholic Church established the first diocese in the United States.[1] With the support of America’s first Catholic bishop, John Carroll, Carey solicited American Roman Catholics for subscriptions to the Douai Version. British Catholics exiled in France originally translated the Douai Bible into English in 1609. [2] Dublin was in effect the center for printing and manufacture of the Douai Bible in the British Empire.

Bishop Carroll supported the project. He worried Carey would not complete it. Several years earlier, Carey’s old partner from the Pennsylvania Evening Herald and Columbian Magazine, Christopher Talbot, tried to print the Douai Bible, but failed to get the 750 subscriptions he thought necessary.[3] Carey optimistically decided to print a large family Bible instead of a smaller version in multiple volumes.

On August 15, 1789, Carey printed a prospectus advertising the Douai Bible, with the names of prominent citizens who had already subscribed. Three had signed the Declaration of Independence: Dr. Benjamin Rush, Thomas Fitzsimmons and Charles Carroll.   His list included Bishop Carroll and most Catholic priests in America.[4] To garner subscriptions he approached printers and booksellers from Massachusetts to South Carolina. He estimated he needed 400 subscriptions and he collected 471.[5]

He offered his customers the opportunity to buy his Bible in weekly editions or parts, but later ended the practice. Carey’s Douai Bible is among the rarest Bibles printed in America, and the partial sections, called “twenty sheets” are even rarer.[6]

Carey’s Douai Bible. Mathew Carey published the first Douai Bible in the United States in 1790. Courtesy of the Library  Company of Philadelphia

 

The population of the United States in 1790 was less than four million people. Of those, an estimated 35,000 were Roman Catholics living in Maryland, Philadelphia and French settlements further west. Carroll had just been installed as America’s first Catholic bishop in 1790. The year before the First Amendment was enacted, allowing Catholics to worship publicly. Before the Revolution, most colonies forbade the open practice of Catholicism. Protestants accused Catholics of “popery,” a pejorative term implying their faith was a blend of idolatry and superstition. Catholics soon found that while the Constitution assured religious toleration, discrimination persisted in the states. [7]

Carey met with difficulties in having his Bibles bound by Craig and Lea, a noted firm in Wilmington, Delaware. Carey later recalled that the binders manufactured the books with so many errors that he could not attribute the results to accident. Carey considered the impropriety as prejudice against Roman Catholics.[8]

Carey boldly introduced both the Douai Bible and several devotional works by Richard Challoner to American Catholics, following the ratification of the Constitution. As the new republic embraced the ideal of religious tolerance, Carey introduced Catholic works challenging entrenched European attitudes against popery.[9]

Bishop John Carroll (1735-1815) supported Mathew Carey’s efforts to print the Douai Bible for Catholics.

TRANSITION TO PUBLISHER | The Beginning of Newspaper Politics

[1] Michael S. Carter, “Under the Benign Sun of Toleration, Mathew Carey, the Douai Bible, and Catholic Print Culture, 1789-1791,” Journal of the Early Republic, V. 27 N. 3 (Fall, 2007) 447.

[2] Carter, “Under the Benign Sun of Toleration,” 440.

[3] Carter, “Under the Benign Sun of Toleration,” 448-9.

[4] Carter, “Under the Benign Sun of Toleration,” 457.

[5] Carter, “Under the Benign Sun of Toleration,” 457.

[6] William Clarkin, Mathew Carey: A Bibliography of His Publications 1785-1824 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1984) 9.

[7] Carter, “Under the Benign Sun of Toleration,” 442, 437-8.

[8] Mathew Carey, Miscellanies I, ms. ( c. 1834) Library Company of Philadelphia, 280.

[9] Carter, “Under the Benign Sun of Toleration,” 437-8.