GREENE, George Washington. Historical View of the American Revolution.

Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865.

Small 8vo.; brown cloth stamped in gilt and blind; brown endpapers.

First edition. Sabin 28598. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front free endpaper, “To Lieutenant General Grant with the respects of the Author.”

The grandson of General Nathanael Greene, George Washington Greene (1811-1883) was a graduate of Brown and from 1837 to 1845 served as the United States consul at Rome. A meeting in the south of France with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow inaugurated a life-long friendship, and inspired him to pursue a literary career of his own. He wrote for North American Review and collected many of his articles in Biographical Studies (1860). Five years later he published this study of the Revolution, which he first presented in a series of popular lectures at the Lowell Institute. Critics dismissed his multi-volume study of his grandfather’s life as an exercise in ancestor worship, but that did not stop him from winning an appointment to Cornell University, where he held the first endowed chair ever established in the United Stets devoted to the study of American history.