THE LIFE OF HARMAN BLENNERHASSETT. COMPRISING AN AUTHENTIC NARRATIVE OF THE BURR EXPEDITION: AND CONTAINING MANY ADDITIONAL FACTS NOT HERETOFORE PUBLISHED

Chillicothe, Ohio: Ely, Allen & Looker, 1850. FIRST EDITION. 197 x 120 mm. (7 3/4 x 4 3/4"). 239, [1] pp.
Publisher's deep brown blind-stamped cloth, upper cover gilt-stamped with Blennerhassett's coat of arms, smooth spine lettered in gilt.

Frontispiece depicting Blennerhassett's mansion. Howes S-13; Sabin 74878. Head of spine slightly bumped, corners a little rubbed, minute loss to front joint, frontispiece lightly mottled, but all these imperfections trivial--A VERY FINE COPY, the cloth especially clean and fresh, and the text nearly flawless.

This is an extremely attractive copy of the biography of British-born Virginia lawyer and landowner Harman Blennerhassett (1765-1831), whose involvement in the Aaron Burr Conspiracy of 1805-07--one of the strangest escapades of ambitious personal usurpation in American history--made him notorious. In the present work, our author William Harrison Safford (1821-1903) provides a detailed account of Blennerhassett's life, with a particular focus on the years of the Burr Conspiracy, intending to separate the fact of his life from the legend. Safford wrote in the introduction that "we hope to strip the subject of that mysteriousness which ignorance, wilful prejudice, or a love of the marvellous has thrown around it, and reveal to the inquiring reader the acts and character of the man." There was good reason for Blennerhassett's story to become legendary: he had been jailed for no less a crime than treason, since he had funded and volunteered his mansion, on an island in the Ohio river, as headquarters for Burr's westward expedition. The exact aim of Burr's expedition remains unknown; it was allegedly intended to be an invasion of the Louisiana Territory, possibly with the aim of establishing his own country in the region. It is thought that his plans of conquest might have been even geographically more extensive, envisioning the subjugation of Mexico. In any case, the plot was half-baked and came to nothing beyond temporary arrests. Burr was acquitted because treason could not be proven, and Blennerhassett was likewise freed from arrest, but his reputation as a traitor had been settled, and after a few short-lived attempts at cotton farming and law practice, he returned to the British Isles, where he died. Safford, who later produced the first critical edition of Blennerhassett's jailhouse journals, here takes a largely sympathetic approach to Blennerhassett and this weirdly sordid episode in American history..