Keeping all of February’s presidential birthdays straight is a headache. Ronald Reagan was born on Feb. 6, William Henry Harrison on Feb. 9, Abraham Lincoln on Feb. 12, and the first president, George Washington, was born on Feb. 22. Congress washed its hands of the mess by lumping them all together on Presidents Day.
Chances are you grew up hearing Washington chopped down a cherry tree as a 6-year-old boy. When his dad asked who was responsible, the future father of our country “fessed up and said, ‘I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little hatchet.'” It’s a story that inspired countless generations of kids always to tell the truth.
Yet, it didn’t happen.
That’s right. The tale extolling the virtues of honesty is a lie, and, get this: It was spun by a man of the cloth!
Back in our country’s infancy, people hungered for heroes. We’d just broken free from Britain, so England’s history no longer appealed on this side of the pond.
Washington perfectly fit the bill. He held the Continental Army together by sheer force of will, saving the patriot cause along with it. Tall and imposing, he looked and acted like a successful general. He added to his reputation by getting one of the world’s first republics since ancient Greece up and running. Then, most astonishingly of all, at the very summit of his career, when he could have been anything he wanted, king, emperor, or dictator, he did the unthinkable: He walked away from power and went home. In doing so, he left a legacy that’s still practiced nearly 225 years later.
But all that wasn’t good enough for Parson Mason Locke Weems.
To say Weems was a fan of Washington is an understatement. His adoration for the first president bordered on obsession. He was, in modern sports terms, a superfan.
Born and raised in Maryland, Weems was ordained in the Protestant Episcopal Church just after the Revolutionary War. Needing a sideline to supplement his meager income, he first sold and then wrote books. He eventually settled down as pastor of a parish in Lorton, Virginia, not far from Washington’s home. Weems later padded his resume by claiming he had served as rector of the Mount Vernon parish, which wasn’t true.
After Washington’s death in December 1799, people craved information about that remarkable man’s life. Weems happily filled the void. Unfortunately, he couldn’t resist the temptation to make a good story better. Like a fisherman’s yarn about the one that got away, his tales kept getting bigger and bigger. His crowning jewel was the cherry tree incident, which he claimed to have heard from an elderly woman who had known the young Washington’s family.
(Full disclosure: My Powell ancestors’ small farm bordered the Washingtons’ big plantation in Stafford County, Virginia, where the cherry tree incident allegedly occurred, but I won’t let that family connection obscure my journalistic objectivity.)
Young George, his little hatchet, the downed cherry tree, and the famous “I cannot tell a lie” line first appeared in the fifth edition of Weems’s book, The Life of George Washington. The passage was a show-stealer. It was the part everyone talked about. So much so, other writers accepted it as fact and included it in their Washington biographies. Even the legendary McGuffey Reader passed it on to hundreds of thousands of young students for decades.
By the end of the 19th century, historians began expressing doubts. Woodrow Wilson’s 1896 biography of Washington came right out and called the tale a fabrication. There has been exhaustive research into it ever since, and the most charitable conclusion that can be drawn is there’s no way of proving it happened. That’s a far cry from saying it did.
I’m a traditionalist and am usually inclined to give questionable historic incidents the benefit of the doubt, but not this time. Weems seems to have had a very casual relationship with intellectual honesty. He wrote several books about America’s early leaders and stretched the truth in all of them — a lot.
Go ahead and eat a cherry pie on Washington’s birthday if you wish. Regardless of what may or may not have happened when Washington was a child, one thing is certain: Cherry pies are delicious, and I cannot tell a lie.
J. Mark Powell (@JMarkPowell) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He’s vice president of communications at Ivory Tusk Consulting, a South Carolina-based agency. A former broadcast journalist and government communicator, his “Holy Cow! History” column is available at jmarkpowell.com.
