In the Trustees’ Room of the Boston Athenaeum, around 230 books once belonging to President George Washington rest in a glass and wooden bookcase.
Among the volumes: Masonic sermons, agricultural periodicals, and the former president’s original copy of “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine.
But how these books — and more than a hundred others kept elsewhere in the library — ended up in Boston is a story in its own right.
Boston Athenaeum head of special collections John Buchtel said because George Washington died without children, he willed the books to his nephew. They were later split among the president’s great-nephews. And one of those great-nephews, George Corbin Washington, was “always hard up for cash,” Buchtel noted.
In 1848, George C. Washington sold his collection to Vermonter Henry Stevens, one of America’s earliest antiquarian booksellers. Stevens also happened to be an acquisitions agent for the British Museum.
And even though Stevens was willing to sell his Washington collection to the highest bidder, some of the United States’ premiere libraries passed on the opportunity.
“The Library of Congress already had Thomas Jefferson’s books; who needs Washington’s books?” explained Buchtel. “Harvard had the biggest library in the country. So they weren’t prepared to take this on.”
Stevens declared that the books were likely to end up in the British Museum. But in Boston, when word got out that George Washington’s books were destined for the collection of their British cousins, a bidding war erupted.
The asking price? Five thousand dollars — or about the equivalent of $180,000 today. Locals engaged in a fury of fundraising, and the Athenaeum itself gave $500 toward the cause, Buchtel said.
Even though the American contingent came up short of the asking price, they managed to luck out: To pay his debts, Stevens had already borrowed against the anticipated funds and was forced to accept a lesser sum.
“And so they secured the collection. And because most of these Bostonians were members of the Boston Atheneum, they gave the collection here,” Buchtel said.
The shelves are lined with rows of books on English Parliamentary debate, and at least one manual on order and discipline of Continental troops. Several issues of the Arminian Magazine are bound in leather calfskin.
The collection also reveals Washington’s appreciation of poetry. It contains at least one work by internationally renowned poet Phillis Wheatley, with whom he shared some correspondence.
“Phillis Wheatley was a much better known person than he is in 1776, and she writes him this poem,” said Robert Allison, a history professor at Suffolk University. “He’s a bit embarrassed by this. She is an international celebrity. She’s been received at court in London. Her book of poetry was a bestseller. So he writes this note about how touched he was ... and then he signs it, ‘Your obedient servant George Washington.’”
Washington owned the sprawling Mount Vernon plantation, and at the time of his death, 317 enslaved people were considered part of his estate. Among the collection is at least one work of anti-slavery philosophy, which Allison believes illustrates the conflicting feelings many founding founders held toward the institution.
The books at the Boston Athenaeum reveal a self-educated man who relied on his personal library to teach, guide and entertain himself. Many of them still bear his personal autograph on the title page.
