Rollo, or How to Raise an American Boy

George Washington first chopped down the cherry tree in 1806, seven years after his death. There is no mention of that incident in the first edition of The Life of Washington, by Parson Mason L. Weems, published in 1800, the year after Washington’s death. But, as Weems subsequently wrote to his publisher, Mathew Carey, “You have a great deal of money lying in the bones of old George,” and he arranged an enlarged edition of the Life which appeared in 1806. In this and all subsequent editions young George wielded his hatchet. Henry Cabot Lodge, who in 1889 published a scholarly biography of Washington, observed that nine-tenths of the content of Weems’s book was drawn from the newssheets of the day and was known to everybody, while the remaining tenth, which described Washington’s boyhood, was the exclusive product of Weems’s imagination. But this tenth, of course, is the part that has lived on in American legend. Weems was from Maryland and knew the Mount Vernon region and its inhabitants well. Accordingly, at those places in which he exercised his imagination in order to describe Washington’s childhood he said that he was repeating what old people who had known Washington as a boy had told him.

Ordained an Episcopal priest in 1784, Parson Weems served successively in two Maryland parishes until 1792, after which time he never again became attached to a single living although he continued to preach in one or another church along the border between Maryland and Virginia. But after marrying in 1795 he sought to support his family by working as a traveling book agent for Mathew Carey of Philadelphia, in which occupation he sold Bibles, and books, and tracts, some of which he himself had written. Weems knew his potential buyers needed assurance that they were contributing to the moral and spiritual betterment of their families before they invested in a commodity so apart from their material needs as a book, and in the early pages of his Washington he emphasized the uplifting moral influence the book would have upon children. The title page exhorted:

Lisp, lisp his name, ye children yet unborn! And with like deeds your own great names adorn.

And in the opening chapter he explained, “Since then it is the private virtues that lay the foundations of all human excellence—since it was these that exalted Washington to be ‘Columbia’s first and greatest Son,’ be it our first care to present these, in all their lustre, before the admiring eyes of our children.”

When dealing with his publisher, however, Weems assumed another tone. Pressing Carey to follow up the Life with a collection he would prepare, to be called “Beauties of Washington,” he said that a panegyric on the title page would read:

George Washington Esqr. The Guardian Angel of his Country Go thy way old George. Die when thou wilt We shall never look upon thy like again.

Perhaps Carey’s reluctance to go through with that project stemmed from his recollecting the speech in Part One of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, in which Falstaff, unaware that his cowardice at Gadshill had been witnessed by Prince Hal, apostrophized himself as the last, living exemplar of true manhood: “Go thy ways, old Jack, die when thou wilt; if manhood, good manhood be not forgot upon the face of the earth, then am I a shotten herring.” Placing Washington in even veiled proximity to Falstaff might have been too much for Carey. At any rate, the “Beauties” never appeared. As Marcus Cunliffe wrote of Weems, “There is a touch of the confidence man in him. That he sincerely loved Washington did not preclude his love for the profit in him, and in melding patriotism with profit he demonstrated his own Americanism.” And, to be sure, there is actually something engaging in that!

Visiting the United States in 1836–37, Alexis de Tocqueville noted the rapidity with which sons in a democratic society became independent of their fathers in contrast to their continued dependency in aristocratic societies where primogeniture played...