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SPECIAL SERIES:America Turns 250

When I was growing up in the ’60s in California, Presidents Day wasn’t a thing – though we did honor our two greatest presidents. Feb. 12 was celebrated as Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Ten days later, we observed George Washington’s birthday.

A word about the second date: When young George came into the world on a Virginia estate in Westmoreland County, the calendar would have said it was Feb. 11, 1731.When he was 20 years old, however, Great Britain (and its colonies) switched from the old Julian calendar to the more exact Gregorian calendar, throwing the exact date of various historic happenings – not to mention highly personal milestones like weddings anniversaries and holidays – into uncertainty.

The switch moved George Washington’s birthday ahead a full year and 11 days. Close enough for government work, we’d quip today, but I’m mentioning this to show you that I try to be meticulous with the facts. Not everyone is so careful, even when it comes to America’s most indispensable Founding Father.

For years I have embarked on a lonely mission to set the record straight about two famous fables regarding George Washington. The first, the most important one, has been altered somewhat through the ages. It’s the one about young George confessing to “chopping down” a cherry tree, with some version of “I cannot tell a lie.”

The second is that he tossed a silver dollar across a wide unnamed river.

These two iconic vignettes of George Washington’s life before manhood are usually credited to “The Life of Washington,” an admiring book produced quickly after the great man’s death. The author was Mason Locke Weems, an itinerant pastor and man of letters generally known as “Parson Weems.” It’s one of the first biographies published in America.

The book is hagiography, characterized both by florid prose and the occasional factual error. The two famous anecdotes in question, however, are ones I will defend. The first concerns a time when George Washington would have been living on Ferry Farm, a plantation owned by his father Augustine Washington, across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg.

Parson Weems begins his illustration of George Washington’s innate honesty thusly:

“The following anecdote is a case in point. It is too valuable to be lost and too true to be doubted; for it was communicated to me by the same excellent lady” [whom Weems had previously described as a woman “who was a distant relative, and when a girl spent much of her time in the family”].

In any event, when young George was about six years old, he was given a hatchet “of which, like most boys, he was inordinately proud.”

“One day, in the gardens, where he often amused himself hacking his mother’s pea-sticks, he unluckily tried the edge of his hatchet on the body of a beautiful young English cherry-tree, which he barked so terribly, that I don’t believe the tree ever got the better of it.”

The following morning his father noticed the gash in the sapling trunk – one that he feared as fatal – and his asked his young son whether he’d done it.

“This was a tough question,” Weems wrote, “and George staggered under it for a moment; but quickly recovered himself: and looking at his father…he bravely cried out, ‘I can’t tell a lie, Pa…I did cut it with my hatchet.’”

(The moral of the cherry tree is so well-traveled that by the late 19th century, Mark Twain had fun with it. Twain biographer Archibald Henderson has Twain telling audiences, “I am different from Washington; I have a higher, grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won’t.”)

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 moral fiber. “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, with its own illustrative anecdote: As a store clerk, Lincoln walks miles to return pennies to a customer he’d inadvertently short-changed.

Debunkers or Revisionists?

With the passage of time, however, Parson Weems’ chronicle became dated and then discredited. Even the website at Mount Vernon trivializes his book and rejects his reporting: The cherry tree legend is dismissed as a concoction. Ferry Farm’s curators are equally dismissive. “Only a story,” they say.

Encyclopedia Britannica’s 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.” Even Google’s AI will tell you, unprompted, that Weems is “known for fabricating the cherry tree story.”

Modern biographers of George Washington are programmed to be so disdainful of Weems’ account they don’t seem to have even read it. In his widely lauded book, “Washington, a Life,” 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.”

For starters, although Mason Weems did tout the strength of George Washington’s throwing arm, he never said anything about a “silver dollar.” Let’s explore this example in detail:

Parson Weems cites a direct and credible source for Washington’s pitching feats. It comes from Lewis Willis, a first cousin of George Washington who also grew up at Ferry Farm and later served in the Continental Army under Gen. Washington. Here’s the passage in question: “Col. Lewis Willis, his play-mate and kinsman, has been heard to say, that he has often seen him throw a stone across Rappahannock, at the lower ferry of Fredericksburg.”

One salient point about this attribution is that Willis was alive and well when Weems’ biography was published – and never questioned this account. And the writer who did even more to popularize the strength of George Washington’s throwing arm was none other than Washington’s step-grandson George Washington Parke Custis. In his memoirs, Parke Custis describes three similar displays, though he doesn’t claim to have witnessed any of them.

The first has George Washington hurling a rock from the streambed below Natural Bridge in Virginia; the second is tossing one over the Palisades cliffs into the Hudson River; the third – the most famous – was throwing a piece of slate “about the size and shape of a dollar” across the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg and clearing it by some 30 yards.

“Numbers [of people] have since tried this feat, but none have cleared the water,” he wrote.

So that’s where the “silver dollar” detail originates. More on that in a moment. As for the Hudson River claim, it’s too vague to check (Parke Custis doesn’t say where on the cliffs Washington was standing.) The Natural Bridge example is intriguing because one can go there today and see it. The stream that flows below it is Cedar Creek. If you stood in the riverbed and threw a rock at National Bridge, it would be a toss of more than 200 feet. Difficult for a seasoned ball player, but not unattainable.

Over the years, however, these feats of prowess morphed into a single episode, sometimes garbled to the point that it supposedly took place on the Potomac River, which would be impossible.

In any event, George Washington Parke Custis couldn’t have known this, but on Feb. 22, 1936, (Washington’s 204th birthday) thousands of Americans gathered at Ferry Farm to take Washington’s grandson up on his historic dare: Could someone throw a stone across the Rappahannock River?

The right man was chosen to take the challenge. It was former Washington Senators ace Walter Johnson, who earlier that year was elected into the inaugural class of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Although the “Big Train” was retired, at 48 years of age, he was still in terrific physical shape in 1936. Johnson also had a longstanding interest in the subject matter, which he’d discussed four years earlier with the Washington Post.

“The famous story of throwing a silver dollar across the Potomac, true or fiction,” the pitcher told a reporter, “indicates that Washington as a boy was highly respected as an athlete.” (This gem of a quote – and the context – was unearthed two years ago by Scott Allen, a contemporary Post writer.)

As George Washington appreciation day approached in February 1936, a New York congressman made a brash statement ensuring that attention on the Virginia celebration would reverberate far beyond the boundaries of Ferry Farm. It came when Rep. Sol Bloom, chairman of the George Washington Bicentennial Commission, offered 20-1 odds that it couldn’t be done. The president of the Fredericksburg Chamber of Commerce took Bloom up on his offer and deposited $5,000 in a local bank.

“Maybe I can’t throw that far,” Johnson had said ominously, “but there’s one thing certain, if George Washington did it, I can.”

He was right. Using silver dollars, instead of rocks, Walter Johnson threw his first warm-up toss in the river. The next two cleared it easily, as a national audience listening on CBS News could tell by the excited shouts of the people amassed on both sides of the river. He was congratulated warmly by Bloom, who – nervous when he heard who the hurler was – had unilaterally altered the parameters of the bet. Nobody seemed to mind the welch as the event did what it was intended to do, which was to venerate the Father of our Country.

But George Washington has never needed a public relations man, even one as talented as Sol Bloom, who was a character in his own right. Born in Illinois in 1870, his family moved to San Francisco when he was a small boy. He was bright, but too poor and impatient to attend school. He worked in a factory and then gravitated to the theater. As a teenager, he became a precocious impresario, staging everything from grand opera performances in San Francisco to prize fights.

In his 20s, Bloom gravitated back to the Midwest where he made money at the Chicago World’s Fair and then on to New York, where he amassed a fortune building everything from theaters to apartment buildings. He ran for Congress in 1922, serving 14 terms, rising to the chairmanship of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and becoming a confidant of Franklin Roosevelt.

Perhaps to make up for his lack of formal education, Sol Bloom became a self-appointed debunker of George Washington “myths” – apparently thinking they detracted from GW’s reputation rather than enhancing it. Naturally, he authored a pamphlet disparaging Mason Weems. But on Feb. 22, 1936, the joke was on him.

Walter Johnson understood something about George Washington that seemingly sophisticated historians miss: In real life, Washington was an imposing physical presence. It was integral to his persona. It impressed people, whether he was mounted on the battlefield – he was considered one of the best horsemen of his age – or throwing iron bars for sport further than anyone else on the lawn at Mount Vernon.

Americans in Washington’s time also knew that he had expended this great physical vigor in the cause of creating a nation – and they loved him for it. In 1783, while delivering a speech to restive officers in the Continental Army, Washington quelled the dissension building in the ranks with a gesture. Reaching into his pocket for his reading glasses, he paused and said: “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have grown not only gray, but almost blind in the service of my country.” Many of the men there fought back tears.

The efforts to discredit Parson Weems’ cherry tree story miss the point by an even wider margin – by the distance across the Rappahannock.

Again, the specifics of the story are important. Contrary to what Ron Chernow and others have maintained so dismissively, Weems didn’t document George “chopping down” a tree. He wrote that the 6-year-old boy “barked” his father’s prized cherry tree.

Although the verb “barks” apparently eludes present-day 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 – and Weems suggests that George’s father feared as much – this is a lesser offense than “chopping down” a tree. The first suggesting carelessness; the second, premeditated malice.

Second, the good parson again cites a source for this incident, albeit unnamed, which is more than his detractors ever do. They just assert flatly that the story is false. Weems says the story was related to him by an aunt or other relation who had spent much time in the house. If the would-be debunkers are saying that Weems or his “excellent lady” source are lying, what is their evidence?

Modern scholars miss the entire point of Weems’ cherry tree allegory anyway. It wasn’t primarily about young George’s innate honesty. The protagonist of this yarn was Augustine Washington – for his leniency and intelligence as a parent. And it’s no coincidence that it was passed along to Weems not by a male cousin who grew up to be a fellow fighting man of George Washington’s, but by a female relative who’s offering an intimate glimpse into a home in which little boys weren’t whipped for absent-mindedly gashing a tree.

The only modern historian I know who expounded on this point was the uncommonly insightful Garry Wills. To start with, 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 telling 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.”

Looking back all these years later, one only wishes that Mason Weems had had a similar impact on Washington. Or perhaps he did set an example.

In 1779, Weems’ own father died – and he promptly freed the slaves that were part of his inheritance. George Washington didn’t follow suit until 1799 years later, the year of his death, when he left instructions for the emancipation of the slaves he owned – upon Martha Washington’s death.

It was too little, too late, and the second half of the American Revolution – the fight for freedom shepherded by Washington at Valley Forge and Trenton and Yorktown would have to be fought again. This time the struggle would unfold on much bloodier ground in places like Gettysburg, Shiloh, and Antietam. But Mason Weems did his part, or tried to, and his last words on Earth were simple, not flowery. On his deathbed, he said, “God is love.”

In between his publication of “Life of Washington” and his death in 1825, Parson Weems produced biographies of Benjamin Franklin, William Penn, and Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion.

Writing in 1911, Weems’ own biographer, colonial-era historian Lawrence C. Wroth, predicted in tones more hopeful than confident that Weems’ biographies “will continue to be read as long as people are interested in the beginnings of this nation.”

Even if Parson Weems’ books were “utterly forgotten,” Wroth added, he still would have made his mark on the new country. “A great number of the stories of the Revolution which today are the heritage of the American child were, if not actually first told by Weems, at least preserved from oblivion and [enshrined] in the hearts of memories of the people by means of his writings.”

Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics and executive editor of RealClearMedia Group. Reach him at ccannon@realclearpolitics.com or on X @CarlCannon.

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