A Project of Universal and Perpetual Peace.

GARGAZ, Pierre-André [William Tecumseh Sherman].

$600.00

Item Number: 145879

New York: George Simpson Eddy, 1922.

Early edition of this treatise on universal peace; from the library of Philemon Tecumseh Sherman. Small octavo, original half cloth, uncut, illustrated with documents in facsimile. P.T. Sherman’s bookplate to the front pastedown beneath his ownership signature. In near fine condition. Housed in the original publisher’s slipcase which is in very good condition with slight rubbing to the extremities. General William Tecumseh Sherman’s son P.T. Sherman was a lawyer in New York, specializing in labor and insurance, and was elected a member of the New York Board of Alderman in the late 1880s. In the early 1900s, he was appointed the New York Commissioner of Labor. He transferred his library to his niece, Eleanor Sherman Fitch, the granddaughter of General Sherman through his eldest daughter, Maria “Minnie” Ewing Sherman Fitch, before he died. Until now, this book was held at the family estate in Washington County, Pennsylvania.

Pierre-André Gargaz was a former Galley-Slave who stood a twenty-year sentence on the galleys at Toulon for a murder he maintained he did not commit. After his release, he approached Benjamin Franklin with the writing for this book. “In the course of last year,” Franklin is quoted as saying in a letter to David Hartley, “a man very shabbily dressed—all his dress together was not worth five shillings—came and desired to see me. He was admitted, and, on asking his business, he told me that he had walked from one of the remotest provinces in France, for the purpose of seeing me and showing me a plan which he had formed for a universal and perpetual peace. I took his plan and read it, and found it to contain much good sense. I desired him to print it. He said he had no money: so I printed it for him.