A Biographical Sketch of the Life of the Late Capt. Michael Cresap.
Cumberland, MD: Printed for the Author, by J.M. Buchanan, 1826.
Price: $2,750.00
About the item
First edition. 8vo. Contemporary half roan and marbled boards, spine lettered in gilt. Covers scuffed and worn, small semicircular portion of rear cover fire damaged with loss, wear extending into final 25 pages at top margin touching a few letters, text foxed and faintly dampstained, some contemporary pen annotations, 1839 ownership inscription on front free endpaper. Streeter Sale 1335; Howes J32; Graff 2185; Sabin 35488; Siebert Sale 379.
Item #316088
First edition of this defense of colonial frontiersman Captain Cresap (1742-1775), whom Jefferson, echoing others, blamed for the murder of the family of the Mingo war chief James Logan during Lord Dunmore's War. Cresap has since been exonerated and the Virginian Daniel Greathouse is now blamed for the massacre of Logan's family.
"This biography of Cresap was written to refute Jefferson's account in NOTES ON VIRGINIA....The immediate occasion for this now rare book, written by the revolutionary officer, later clergyman, who had married Cresap's widow, was the reopening of old sores by [Joseph] Doddridge in his then recently published NOTES [ON THE SETTLEMENT AND INDIAN WARS, OF THE WESTERN PARTS OF VIRGINIA & PENNSYLVANIA, FROM THE YEAR 1763 UNTIL THE YEAR 1783 INCLUSIVE] of 1824. The defense is complete and the biography is of absorbing interest" (Streeter).
