Writings of George Washington

[WASHINGTON, George] SPARKS, Jared. ed. Writings of George Washington; being his Correspondence, Addresses, Messages, and Other Papers, Official and Private, Selected and Published from the Original Manuscripts, with a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations. Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Metcalf, and Hilliard, Gray, and Co., 1834-1837. Twelve volumes bound in twenty-four. Extra illustrated with twenty-two frontispieces, 360 total plates, and sixty-eight original contemporary documents. 20th-century crushed navy morocco, boards ruled in gilt and with gilt turn-ins, spine gilt in six compartments, silk pastedowns and free endpapers, t.e.g. Occasional offsetting from plates, a number of largely skillful repairs to marginal tears and defects scattered throughout the volumes, but on the whole internally in clean and bright condition. Dedication and ownership inscriptions on half title of first volume. All bindings in fine condition and the set in near fine condition overall, fore edges and lower edges untrimmed. An elaborately extra-illustrated set of historian and one-time Harvard President Jared Sparks's most important work, with presentation inscription to the mother of notable American landscape architect Horace W.S. Cleveland and his ownership inscription and provenance note. Accompanying the more than three hundred plates bound into this set are sixty-eight original contemporary documents, including letters from Jared Sparks himself, as well as letters or documents signed by Bushrod Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, Revolutionary theorist John Dickinson, James McHenry (the third Secretary of War and Revolutionary War aide to George Washington), Continental Congress Secretary Charles Thomson, and Declaration of Independence signers George Clymer and Thomas McKean. In the early 1820s, Sparks was asked to recommend an editor for the collected works of George Washington. As an academic and admirer of Washington himself, Sparks chose to do the work on his own and, after some negotiating, acquired permission to use Washington's papers from the first President's nephew and inheritor, Bushrod Washington. He brought most of the documents back with him from Mt. Vernon to Boston, and visited repositories across the United States and Europe to augment his scholarship. The work was rather well received at the time, and despite some cr.