Duplicate Letters, the Fisheries
Item #84078
ADAMS, John Quincy. The Duplicate Letters, the Fisheries and the Mississippi. Documents Relating to Transactions at the Negotiation of Ghent. Collected and Published by [sic], One of the Commissioners of the United States at that Negotiation. Louisville, KY: S. Penn, Jr., 1823. Second edition. 8vo, 224pp. Original printed wraps. Some chipping to spine of the fragile outer wraps, but a very nice, untrimmed copy of a fragile publication in a custom quarter morocco backed box. SABIN 276 (Washington edition, with no mention of the Louisville edition). American Imprints, 11531 (locates three copies). Very rare Louisville edition of Adams' response to political attacks preceding the 1824 election. Jonathan Russell, a Congressman from Massachusetts, seeking to further the political aspirations of Henry Clay in advance of the 1824 election, published a slanderous account of the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Ghent which ended the War of 1812, in which he accused John Quincy Adams of treasonably favoring British interests relating to navigation on the Mississippi River. In response, Adams in 1822 published the present work, (first printed in Washington, D.C.), which includes the texts of the actual documents which had been purposefully mis-quoted or taken out of context by Russell. Thomas Jefferson wrote to Adams in a letter from Monticello dated October 23, offering "his thanks to Mr. Adams for the copy of the Ghent Documents which he has been so kind as to send him. So far as concerns Mr. Adams personally, the respect and esteem of the public for him was too firmly and justly fixed to need this appeal to them. But the volume is a valuable gift to his fellow citizens generally, and especially to the future historian whom it will enable to give correct ideas of the views of that treaty and to do justice to the abilities with which it was negotiated." The present Louisville edition, evidently published by local Adams supporters, would seem to have been aimed at the voters along the Mississippi River most swayed by Russell's false claims, i.e. that Adams had sold out Kentucky by permitting British navigation of the Mississippi for the purpose of firearm sales to Indians which in turn resulted in border atrocities. This edition, an early Kentucky imprint, is overlooked by most.
Price: $6,000.00