Published in 1800, mere months after the death of our nation’s first president, A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington by author and bookseller Parson Weems was the first complete biography of Washington’s life and would soon become one of America’s most influential and bestselling biographical works. Various popular anecdotes about the life of Washington originated in the pages of this book and are remembered to this day–yet many of them have little or no definitive evidence proving their legitimacy. This raises the question: just how believable is the biography? To answer this question, we must look into the contextual background and the intentions of the author and his book, as well as specifics regarding some of the biography’s most influential tales.

Mason Locke Weems, or Parson Weems, as he was more commonly known, was born in 1759 in the state of Maryland to David and Esther Hill Weems. The youngest of 19 children, his ministerial pursuits early in life were eventually followed by waning financial prosperity. Weems tried his hand at the book industry, through which he ultimately found success–both as a travelling salesman, as well as in his own book shop.

Weems’ expertise in the sales perspective of the literary field provided him advantageous insight into the minds of the reading population. This assisted him in determining what types of books would sell the best so that he could in turn write them. His unique position of being both an author and a seller of books enabled him to combine these skill sets to write the aforementioned biography that he published within a year after Washington’s death.

Knowing that a book on the venerable Washington would be more timely than ever and quite well-received by the masses, Weems wasted no time in crafting his narrative on the deceased president. A fair amount of pages were spent on the childhood of the future founding father, among which one of the most famous and enduring stories of the book is presented. Many even today are familiar with the story of Washington and the cherry tree, which emphasizes his perceived virtuous honesty even as a young child. This tale is often repeated to further promote his image as a very honest role model. The story goes that at the age of six, young George had sliced one of his father’s cherry trees with a hatchet; when questioned about it, he confessed to his wrongdoing, stating that he “can’t tell a lie.” This story found its way into William McGuffey’s very popular series of eclectic readers in the mid-1830s, leading the myth to further exposure as millions more readers continued to discover it.

While Weems claims in the pages of the biography that this and other anecdotes in the book were told him by an unnamed “distant relative” of Washington’s, there is little evidence to prove that Weems actually had any sources beyond his own imagination for some of these stories. Even so, readers of the book did not seem to care awfully much; dozens of editions of the book were subsequently published in the decades following, and it remained in print even after its author’s death, indicative of its high demand. Despite the fact that stories such as the cherry tree incident, as well as Washington’s praying at Valley Forge, have since been widely dispelled by historians as myths, we still remember them to this day, much to the credit of this book.

When the lack of credibility of famous anecdotes in Life of Washington is taken into consideration, in addition to the conveniently timed publication just months after the death of the man in question, it is reasonable to conclude that Weems’ over-sensationalized and highly exaggerated novel, albeit very profitable and highly influential, should be taken with a grain of salt. While there certainly were true events recounted in the book, the specific conversations and once obscure anecdotes contained therein are highly likely to have been fabrications of the author. Weems understood that the book need not be entirely factual to accomplish his goal–that is, to make money by selling copies of a book people would want to read–and in fact, he realized that embellishing the truth and portraying Washington in an almost messianic light that relied on more than verifiable sources would make for a book all the more memorable and entertaining to its readers.🔹