The Rise of General Bonaparte.

WILKINSON, Spenser [Napoleon and William Tecumseh Sherman].

$600.00

Item Number: 145726

Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1930.

First edition of this history of French military and political leader Napoleon Bonaparte. Octavo, original navy blue cloth, frontispiece of General Bonaparte at Arcole, illustrated with several maps; from the library of Philemon Tecumseh Sherman with his bookplate adhered to the front pastedown, gift inscription to Sherman on the title page, “P. T. S. from G. D. March 1931.” In very good condition with toning to the rear panel, front and rear pastedown, front and rear free endpaper. 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, the book was held at the family estate in Washington County, Pennsylvania.

Henry Spenser Wilkinson was an extremely perceptive military historian and the first Chichele Professor of Military History at Oxford University. From 1882 to 1892 he was on the staff of the Manchester Guardian, for which he wrote occasional pieces on military subjects and was sent on a short-term assignment to cover Lord Wolseley's campaign in Egypt in 1883. Convinced as early as 1874 that Great Britain was inadequately armed, he increasingly devoted his attention to the subject of the national defence. A key figure in the founding of the Navy League of Great Britain in 1894 and a serious student of the German military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz, Wilkinson's remarkably accurate forecasts of military movements carved a space for his voice in English militarism until his death in 1937.