No Life of George Washington should fail to warn the reader at the start that the biographer labors under the disadvantage of having to counteract the errors and absurdities which the Reverend Mason L. Weems made current in the Life he published the year after Washington died.  No one, not even Washington himself, could live down the reputation of a goody-goody prig with which the officious Scotch divine smothered him.  The cherry-tree story has had few rivals in publicity and has probably done more than anything else to implant an instinctive contempt of its hero in the hearts of four generations of readers.  “Why couldn’t George Washington lie?” was the comment of a little boy I knew, “Couldn’t he talk?”

Weems pretended to an intimacy at Mount Vernon which it appears he never had.  In “Blackwood’s Magazine” John Neal said of the book, “Not one word of which we believe.  It is full of ridiculous exaggerations.”  And yet neither this criticism nor any other stemmed the outpouring of editions of it which must now number more than seventy.  Weems doubtless thought that he was helping God and doing good to Washington by his offensive and effusive support of rudimentary morals.

Weems had been dead a dozen years when another enemy sprang up.  This was the worthy Jared Sparks, an historian, a professor of history, who collected with much care the correspondence of George Washington and edited it in a monumental work.  Sparks, however, suffered under the delusion that something other than fact can be the best substance of history.  According to his tastes, many of Washington’s letters were not sufficiently dignified; they were too colloquial, they even let slip expressions which no man conscious that he was the model of propriety, the embodiment of the dignity of history, could have used.  So Mr. Sparks without blushing went through Washington’s letters and substituted for the originals words which he decided were more seemly.  Again the public came to know George Washington, not by his own words, but by those attributed to him by an overzealous stylist-pedant.  Well might the Father of his Country pray to be delivered from the parsons.

One of the earliest records of Washington’s youth is the copy, written in his beautiful, almost copper-plate hand, of “Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior, In Company and Conversation.”  These maxims were taken from an English book called “The Young Man’s Companion,” by W. Mather.  It had passed through thirteen editions and contained information upon many matters besides conduct Perhaps Washington copied the maxims as a school exercise; perhaps he learned them by heart.

They are for the most part the didactic aphorisms which greatly pleased our worthy ancestors during the middle of the eighteenth century and later.  Some of the entries referred to simple matters of deportment:  you must not turn your back on persons to whom you talk.  Others touch morals rather than manners.  One imagines that the parson or elderly uncles allowed themselves to bestow this indisputably correct advice upon the youths whom they were interested in.  A boy brought up rigidly on these doctrines could hardly fail to become a prig unless he succeeded in following the last injunction of all:  “Labor to keep alive in your heart, that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.”