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Hard cover, 8vo in publisher's blue cloth , stamped in blind with banding and publisher's logo to front boards, and blocked with titles in gold to the spines, tope edge gilt, 2 volume set, First Edition, xi, 454pp and vii, 442pp. includes index. CONDITION: Near Fine, clean, sound with a few light marks to covers. Largely unopened. One of Newburyport's most famous sons, the Harvard-educated lawyer, politician and diplomat Caleb Cushing (1800-1879) is best known for his appointment as the first as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to China under President John Tyler, negotiating the first American trade treaty with the Celestial Kingdom during the clipper ship era in 1843. Again, in the Post Civil War era, he was appointed Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Spain under President Ulysses S. Grant, where he managed a diplomatic crisis, the Virginius Affair, in which a group of American citizens had been caught in the cross-hairs of the warring Cubans and Spanish in the 1870's. Other diplomatic missions saw him conducting agreement for the building of the Panama Canal. His views as a "copperhead" Democrat (anti-war) made his controversial during the Civil War era, thwarting his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Fuess's biography is based upon Cushing's hitherto unexamined papers and correspondence, which highlights the wide influence of this sometimes controversial, but nonetheless hugely significant, figure of nineteenth-century America.
Ref: NBPT 9450
$90.00