The Life of Washington

If you have ever encountered the legendary anecdote concerning the youthful George Washington - who "could not tell a lie," and thus confessed to chopping down the cherry tree - and wondered where it came from, then look no further. Parson Weems' "biography" of George Washington, first distributed as a pamphlet in 1800, seems to the modern eye to be more in the way of historical fiction than legitimate history. Full of apocryphal stories that historians have long discounted, Weems' work was wildly popular in the nineteenth century, when adulation of the "Father of Our Nation" was rampant.

But in spite of its historical "fabrications", The Life of Washington still has value as an example of the nineteenth-century mythologizing of American show more history, and should be of interest to scholars of that period. I myself might never have stumbled across this book if it had not been assigned reading for a college course I took on the intellectual history of nineteenth-century America. (Thank you, Professor Ponce de Leon!) I’m glad that I did, as founding-father “worship” seems once again to be in vogue, making this nineteenth-century hagiography rather interesting. show less

This volume, originally printed in 1800, was found at garage sale was missing Washington Fly Leaf portrait, title page, dedication to Martha Washington, first 4 pages of biography (to page 6) by me in circa 1967. Many years later, Ernest R Tufft discovered the volume and was able to determine the original source at UC Berkeley, and replace these missing pages on acid-free paper from the original photo images. Then, the volume was restored using original coverboards and binding. According to Wikipedia, Author Parson Weems was the source of apocryphal stories about Washington, however, this copy precedes the tale of the cherry tree with was in 1809 edition.