Good morning, it's Tuesday Feb. 21, 2023. I hope you had a nice Presidents Day weekend. Once upon a time, at least in California where I grew up, that federal holiday did not exist. Feb. 12 was a day celebrated as Abraham Lincoln's birthday, and tomorrow's date (Feb. 22) was a separate deal -- for George Washington.
I won't on this occasion go into all the machinations that combined their birthdays (as well as a generalized tip of the cap the Office of the Presidency) into one generic Monday when you don't have to go to work.
What I will do, in a doomed attempt to set the record straight, is reprise up the same February column I write nearly every year. It concerns the infamous story of a youthful George Washington fessing up to cutting down a cherry tree. I've long believed that the fable is true. The incomparable historian Garry Wills agrees with me, as you'll see (again) in a moment.
Two iconic vignettes of George Washington's life before manhood come down through the ages. They are often credited to an admiring book produced quickly after the great man's death. Washington's first biographer was Mason L. Weems, a parson and man of letters. In it, Weems writes about an episode at Ferry Farm, the plantation owned by Augustine Washington, the future president's father.
The first story, and the subject of our attention this morning, has been altered somewhat as it has been told through the ages: It is said that young George chopped down a cherry sapling, and when confronted by his dad, confessed to the deed with some version of "I cannot tell a lie."
This is not an incidental legend in the American canon. As a boy, Abraham Lincoln devoured Parson Weems' biography -- and internalized its lessons about the first president's high moral character.
"Away back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read," Lincoln once recalled, "I got hold of a small book … Weems's ‘Life of Washington.'"
Lincoln took what he read to heart. His "Honest Abe" appellation predates his presidency. In the fullness of time, however, Weems' history became discredited. Even the official website at Mount Vernon trivializes his book, notwithstanding its status as the first presidential biography in history. The cherry tree yarn is dismissed as a concoction. "Only a story," add the curators at Ferry Farm.
Encyclopedia Britannica's very description of Mason Weems describes him as "an American clergyman, itinerant book agent, and fabricator of the story of George Washington's chopping down the cherry tree."
Modern biographers of George Washington are so disdainful of Weems' work that they don't seem to have even read it. In his widely acclaimed "Washington, a Life," author Ron Chernow dismisses Weems as the man "who manufactured enduring myths about Washington refusing to lie about chopping down a cherry tree [and] hurling a silver dollar across the Rappahannock."
But just as we must be careful not to pass along hagiographic hokum when writing about politicians, so must we take care in our debunkings. There are several problems with dismissing these two accounts as fabrications.
First of all, Mason Weems didn't write about young George "chopping down" any tree. Weems wrote that the 6-year-old boy "barks … a beautiful young English cherry tree." Although the verb "barks" eludes modern historians, what it means is that the boy idly swung his hatchet and gouged the tree. Although such a wound could compromise the health of a sapling, this is obviously a lesser offense -- one suggesting carelessness, not malice.
Second, Weems cites a source, although he doesn't name her, which is more than his detractors do when claiming the story is false. Weems says the story was related to him by an "aged lady," presumably an aunt or other relation who lived on the farm.
(In terms of assessing who is more careful with the facts, I'd point out that it was George Washington's step-grandson George Washington Parke Custis, not Mason Weems, who reported that Washington once threw something across the Rappahannock River. And it was a rock, not a silver dollar. In his memoirs, George Parke Custis describes the rock as a piece of slate "about the size and shape of a dollar." I've fished for smallmouth bass in that river, and paddled sections of it. Depending on where on the Rappahannock this took place, it's something young GW could certainly have done.)
In any event, modern scholars miss the entire point of Weems' cherry tree allegory. It wasn't primarily about young George's innate honesty. The protagonist and hero of this yarn was Augustine Washington -- for his leniency and intelligence as a parent. It was passed along by Weems as a window into the enlightened home in which George Washington was raised: a home where little boys weren't whipped for absent-mindedly gashing a tree.
Here is how Weems put it:
"Some idea of Mr. Washington's plan of education in this respect, may be collected from the following anecdote, related to me twenty years ago by an aged lady who was a distant relative, and when a girl spent much of her time in the family."
The "Mr. Washington" referred to is George Washington's father, and the cherry tree story is really about him. One of the few modern historians who expounded on this point was the always-perceptive Garry Wills. Wills gives Weems his due as a storyteller and as a reformer: Weems opposed slavery, alcohol, gambling, dueling, and tobacco, and advocated education for children. This, in the end, is what the cherry tree story concerns: Parson Weems abhorred "the rod," which is how corporal punishment was then described.
The underlying message of the vignette is clear: Parents who beat their children are essentially forcing them to lie.
"Weems was a natural educator," Wills wrote. "The most famous tale -- that of the cherry tree -- is almost always printed in a severely truncated form, which destroys its point. The moral, aimed at children, becomes: Never tell a lie. But that was not Weems's moral."
Wills notes that young George Washington can tell his father that he gashed the tree, perhaps fatally, because he is not terrified at the consequences of the truth. "The conclusion of the tale makes it clear," Wills noted, "that the hero is Washington's father, who teaches a lesson to parents."
To that conclusion, a 21st century observer feels obliged to add a sobering aside: If only Augustine Washington had been even more enlightened -- compassionate and broadminded enough to instill in his son a hatred of slavery and a determination to get rid of it. That would have been worth all the cherry trees on this continent -- and so much more.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
