Give My Kind Regards To The Ladies: The Life of Littleton Quinton Washington

This new biography from David Scott Turk is intended to reclaim the life of Littleton Quinton Washington from the shadows of history. In his lifetime, L. Q. Washington had been a young adventurer in gold rush-era San Francisco, a powerful political insider and outspoken advocate of Southern interests in Antebellum Washington, D.C., chief clerk of the State Department of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, a booster for southern Reconstruction, and an outspoken journalist. He was well acquainted with many of the prominent men of his time, and could claim the nation’s first president as an ancestor.

Despite a prestigious birthright and a career in the public eye, Littleton Quinton Washington is a virtual unknown today. The substance of this text is drawn primarily from Washington’s surviving correspondence and from public records in the collections of the Library of Congress and the National Archives. “L.Q. Washington stands out as a figure who described politics in a particularly Southern view and nothing remains hidden: disgust, jealousy, joys, all are here.” The text is augmented by two genealogical charts (showing the relationship between George Washington and L. Q. Washington), an extensive bibliography and an index of full names.