The Writings of George Washington Being His Correspondence, Addresses, Messages, and Other Papers, Official and Private.

WASHINGTON, George; Jared Sparks.

Item Number: 82480

Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Metcalf, and Hilliard, Gray, and Co, 1834-37.

The complete writings of George Washington. Octavo, 12 volumes, uniformly bound in full contemporary calf. Mixed early editions. Frontispiece of Washington to volumes 1-3; engraved by J.W. Paradise from a painting by J.G. Chapman after a painting by C.W. Peale; frontispiece in volumes 2 and 3 engraved by A.B. Durand, the first from a painting by Gilbert Stuart; frontispiece in volume 12 of Martha Washington engraved by J. Cheney. Editor Jared Sparks was a noted early American historian and President of Harvard College. Sparks worked as editor of the North American Review and a Unitarian pastor in Baltimore. Sparks’ most notable work was his Writings of George Washington. He was an important early American Antiquarian and influential in his historical scholarship on the new nation. Bookplate, in very good condition. Desirable set bound in full contemporary calf.

George Washington served as the first President of the United States from 1789 to 1797 and was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. Washington served as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War against the British Crown and presided over the 1787 convention that drafted the United States Constitution. An international icon for liberation and nationalism, Washington left a legacy of documentary records throughout his lifetime. Historian Jared Sparks was the first to collect and publish these writings in the 1830's first with Life and Writings of George Washington (1834-1837), and later with The Writings of George Washington Being His Correspondence, Addresses, Messages, and Other Papers, Official and Private beginning in 1931.