The American Gardener; or, a Treatise on the Situation, Soil, Fencing and Laying-out of Gardens by COBBETT, William

London: C. Clement, 1821. Small 8vo., (7 4/8 x 4 4/8 inches). 4 fine engraved plates (a little browned throughout). Original drab paper boards (rebacked with blue paper, a bit worn). First published in New Hampshire in 1819. Cobbett, considered by most a very English writer, in fact spent many years in North America: first as a soldier stationed in New Brunswick from 1785 and 1791, then in exile between 1792 and 1800. “For the first eighteen months of his American residence Cobbett was employed tutoring French émigrés in the English language, but in the summer of 1794 he ventured into the American public press by authoring a pamphlet that vehemently denounced the scientist and democrat Dr Joseph Priestley, who had recently fled Britain and been jubilantly received by republican and democratic supporters at New York. For the next five years, usually under the pen-name of Peter Porcupine, Cobbett wrote numerous pamphlets and newspapers articles (he subsequently collected and reprinted his American writings in Porcupine's Works, 12 vols., 1801) which vigorously condemned the French Revolution as well as other expressions of democratic and republican thought—he characterized Thomas Paine, for example, as ‘an unconscionable dog’, ‘a wretched traitor and apostate’, and ‘a man famous for nothing but his blasphemy and his hatred of England’ (Porcupine's Works, 4.79, 4.87; 5.165; Political Register, 8 Jan 1803, 2) . As an anti-Jacobin polemicist, Cobbett identified his politics most closely with the federalists—the pro-British and anti-French faction under the leadership of Alexander Hamilton—while taking angry aim at the pro-French, Jacobin-sympathizing democratic faction led by Thomas Jefferson. Yet despite his high profile in the United States, Cobbett always remained ambivalent towards American culture and society, and when pressed by a severe libel case in 1800, he and his family, which now included a daughter, Anne, and a son, William, packed their belongings and set sail for England. Cobbett's farewell message to Americans observed that ‘when people care not two straws for each other, ceremony at parting is mere grimace’ (Porcupine's Works, 12.109–10)” (DNB online)..