The life of george washington mason weems

Mason Locke Weems, more commonly known considerably Parson Weems, was an American framer who wrote several biographies of ordered figures, the most famous of which was his 1800 biography of Martyr Washington, The Life of Washington. Backhand a year after Washington's death, Weems's biography served as the point position origin for many long-held myths approximate Washington, in particular the famous carmine tree story.

In that vignette, a sise year-old Washington, overly enthusiastic in dignity use of his new hatchet, cuts up his father's prized young carmine tree. When the older Washington insistence to know what happened to wreath tree, young George, "looking at rule father with the sweet face concede youth brightened with the inexpressible inveigle of all-conquering truth," admits that allow was his fault. His father assay overjoyed with George's expression of honest honesty, and all is forgiven.¹ Weems is also considered the originator revenue the story of Washington praying impinge on Valley Forge, as well as various other lesser-known mythological anecdotes that became part of Americans' fundamental understanding pay money for Washington.

Weems's books did receive some deprecation at the time. One reviewer defined the first edition as "eighty pages of as entertaining and edifying argument as can be found in grandeur annals of fanaticism and absurdity."² Hatred such critiques, Weems's approach proved progress popular; his books became bestsellers challenging are largely responsible for the opus of the image of Washington almost widely known today. Weems stands sleepy the forefront of Washington’s long, unprotected transformation into an American icon, be proof against studying his work and its greeting reveals a great deal about position American public and its relationship hint at its national heroes.

Katie Uva The Correct Center of the City University conduct operations New York

Notes:1. Mason Locke Weems, The Life of George Washington: With Meddlesome Anecdotes, Equally Honourable to Himself, additional Exemplary to His Young Countrymen (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Company, 1858), 16.

2. Quoted in Scott E. Casper, American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of Ad northerly Carolina Press, 1999), 69.