There is nothing intrinsically impossible in either the cherry-tree or the colt incident, nor would there be in a hundred others which might be readily invented.  The real point is that these stories, as told by Weems and Mr. Custis, are on their face hopelessly and ridiculously false.  They are so, not merely because they have no vestige of evidence to support them, but because they are in every word and line the offspring of a period more than fifty years later.  No English-speaking people, certainly no Virginians, ever thought or behaved or talked in 1740 like the personages in Weems’s stories, whatever they may have done in 1790, or at the beginning of the next century.  These precious anecdotes belong to the age of Miss Edgeworth and Hannah More and Jane Taylor.  They are engaging specimens of the “Harry and Lucy” and “Purple Jar” morality, and accurately reflect the pale didacticism which became fashionable in England at the close of the last century.  They are as untrue to nature and to fact at the period to which they are assigned as would be efforts to depict Augustine Washington and his wife in the dress of the French revolution discussing the propriety of worshiping the Goddess of Reason.

To enter into any serious historical criticism of these stories would be to break a butterfly.  So much as this even has been said only because these wretched fables have gone throughout the world, and it is time that they were swept away into the dust-heaps of history.  They represent Mr. and Mrs. Washington as affected and priggish people, given to cheap moralizing, and, what is far worse, they have served to place Washington himself in a ridiculous light to an age which has outgrown the educational foibles of seventy-five years ago.  Augustine Washington and his wife were a gentleman and lady of the eighteenth century, living in Virginia.  So far as we know without guessing or conjecture, they were simple, honest, and straight-forward, devoted to the care of their family and estate, and doing their duty sensibly and after the fashion of their time.  Their son, to whom the greatest wrong has been done, not only never did anything common or mean, but from the beginning to the end of his life he was never for an instant ridiculous or affected, and he was as utterly removed from canting or priggishness as any human being could well be.  Let us therefore consign the Weems stories and their offspring to the limbo of historical rubbish, and try to learn what the plain facts tell us of the boy Washington.

Unfortunately these same facts are at first very few, so few that they tell us hardly anything.  We know when and where Washington was born; and how, when he was little more than three years old,[1] he was taken from Bridges Creek to the banks of the Rappahannock.  There he was placed under the charge of one Hobby, the sexton of the parish, to learn his alphabet and his pothooks; and when that worthy man’s store of learning was exhausted he was sent back to Bridges Creek, soon after his father’s death, to live with his half-brother Augustine, and obtain the benefits of a school kept by a Mr. Williams.  There he received what would now be called a fair common-school education, wholly destitute of any instruction in languages, ancient or modern, but apparently with some mathematical training.