[Rarebooks] fa: CIVIL WAR - UNION, DISUNION AND REUNION: A LETTER TO GEN. FRANKLIN PIERCE 1862

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auctions ending Sunday, March 23. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/pe9veeh

Thanks for looking,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.


John L. O'Sullivan: Union, Disunion, and Reunion: A Letter to General Franklin Pierce, Ex-President of the United States. London: Richard Bentley, 1862. FIRST EDITION. Original stiff green cloth wraps, titles in gilt; 122 + {2] pp.; leaf of publisher's adverts at the rear. Bumping to the corners and modest wear/fraying to the edges; ink stamp on the front paste-down and the reverse of the title-page (no other library markings); pages with some light dust-soiling to the top edges; some page-gatherings pulling slightly at the gutter; a few small spots; otherwise quite clean and sound, securely bound.

An uncommon work, sympathetic to the Confederate cause, written by a newspaperman and former ambassador to Portugal, and addressed to the President who had appointed him to the post. Both O'Sullivan and Pierce were Democrats and "doughfaces" (Northerners with Southern sympathies), as well as staunch proponents of "Manifest Destiny," a term that O'Sullivan first coined in an 1845 series of newspaper essays calling for the annexation of Texas and the Oregon Territory ("…our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us…"). With the Democrats' loss of the White House in 1860 and the collapse of his  scheme to annex Cuba, O'Sullivan found himself out of favor and went into self-imposed exile in Europe. Once one of the most influential newspaper columnists and editors in the country, he spent his final years promoting Spiritualism and died in impoverished obscurity in 1895, just as the concept of Manifest Destiny was enjoying a resurgence.