Hume's works continued to enjoy wide circulation in the United States during the early years of the nineteenth century — despite Jefferson's ardent wishes and best efforts to the contrary. The number of Hume references in American book catalogues, for instance, kept pace with the large number of book catalogues that survive for the period 1800–1830. Social libraries, circulating libraries, and college libraries of the period, held Hume's History of England and his Essays and Treatises in large numbers. Many of those libraries had acquired Hume's books as early as the 1760s, but they remained available to patrons who wished to read them in the 1800s. Hume's books were also in libraries newly created in the nineteenth century. College student society libraries, for instance, showed a marked preference for Hume. Hume's popularity in early nineteenth-century American book catalogues was not only a residual effect from earlier days. That point is confirmed by references to Hume in nineteenth-century bookseller catalogues. These lists of “new books for sale” show that Hume's books continued to be current. Often it was the newest editions of Hume that American readers sought.

That Hume's writings were reprinted in early nineteenth-century America, then, is not surprising. Selections and entire essays from Hume's moral, political, and literary essays were published in nineteenth-century periodicals whose readership was general, such as the Saturday Magazine: National Recorder. They also reached specialized audiences through periodicals such as the Theatrical Censor and Critical Miscellany and the Ladies' Literary Cabinet, one of the first magazines devoted primarily to female readers, where Hume's essay “Of Love and Marriage” was reprinted.