Don’t Print the Legend

Myths encrust George Washington like barnacles on a boat hull, and historian John Rhodehamel crisply explains why it is time to scrape them away. “The most successful statesman in American history is often best remembered as a boy with a hatchet or as a simpleminded prig kneeling in the snow to pray,” the former Mount Vernon archivist writes in his 2017 book, George Washington: The Wonder of the Age. “A tawdry mythological excrescence oozing Victorian pieties and wooden teeth has gained a greater hold on our national imagination than the epic of Washington’s indispensable leadership in the making of the great nation that probably would not have come to be without him.”

The two most iconic images of Washington are of boy George hacking down his father’s precious cherry tree and of him praying on his knees in the snow at Valley Forge. Both come from the pen of Parson Mason Locke Weems, author of The Life of Washington, a work first published in 1800 that has gone through more editions than any other book on the great man, profoundly influencing multiple generations’ views of Washington, even though Weems was much more preacher than historian.

Intent on making Washington a model for American youngsters, Weems emphasized truisms over truth. For example, he has George’s half-brother Lawrence weeping with joy to learn of George’s valor in the French and Indian War. Lawrence died in 1752, two years before that war began. Weems portrays a dying Washington in 1799 wanting to commune with his God and so asking all present to leave the room—then tells readers what Washington said to the Almighty.

Cherry, Cherry

The cherry tree incident, which debuted in the Weems book’s sixth edition, has young George coming clean over a bad move. “I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I . “The evidence for this is a vase made in Germany around the time of the American Revolution (between the 1770s and 1790) honoring its leader, by depicting George as a young boy with a hatchet and bearing the initials, ‘GW.’”