George Washington and the Cherry Tree

Author: Mason Locke Weems

Time Period: 1701 CE–1850 CE

Country or Culture: North America

Genre: Legend

PLOT SUMMARY

Mason Locke Weems’s famous tale of George Washington and the cherry tree appears in chapter 2 of his narrative The Life of Washington. After briefly introducing Washington’s childhood, Weems presents truth as a theme in the boy’s history. He praises at length the boy’s honesty, as testified by his father, who delivers a speech in which he praises honesty and then declaims its opposite. He describes truth as the best quality of youth and swears that he would ride fifty miles to see a boy who is so honest that every word he speaks is dependable. Everyone loves such a boy: parents and relatives exalt him endlessly and beg his peers to follow his angelic example. In contrast, a dishonest boy has no credibility and is actively shunned by other parents.

Mr. Washington assures the young George of his affection but declares, “Gladly would I assist to nail you up in your little coffin, and follow you to your grave” rather than know that his son is a liar (Weems 9). To this, George asks whether he has ever told lies. The father replies with great relief that George is impeccably honest, and he condemns parents who inadvertently encourage lying by beating their children for the offense, which then encourages further lying to avoid additional abuse. He urges young George that when he errs, he should come to his father “like a little man” (9) and confess the deed, and he promises to honor rather than punish the boy.

As evidence of George’s honesty and his father’s sound parenting, Weems then offers the famous anecdote. At six years old, George receives a hatchet as a gift. “Like most little boys,” Weems notes, George is “immoderately fond” of the tool, so he proceeds to chop “every thing that came in his way” (9–10). In the family garden, where he is accustomed to cutting his mother’s pea stalks, he turns his hatchet on an English cherry tree. When his father discovers that one of his favorite trees has been irreparably damaged, he enters the house to determine who is responsible.

At first, no one comes forward with information about the deed, but then George presents himself, and his father asks him directly whether he knows who has destroyed the tree. George does not answer immediately as he struggles with the question, but then he looks squarely at his father and admits, “I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet” (10). The father’s elation at his son’s honesty is immediate and unequivocal. “Such an act of heroism in my son,” he proclaims, “is more worth than a thousand trees though blossomed with silver, and their fruits of purest gold” (10).

SIGNIFICANCE

The tone of Weems’s language in the story of Washington and the cherry tree is exultant and, along with other elements of the tale, serves to mythologize the first US president as a man of flawless virtue from the time of his boyhood. The intent to mythologize evolved over several years; Weems’s 1806 work The Life of Washington the Great, in which the tale first appeared, was the fifth edition of an earlier, modestly successful biography that he had first published in 1800. The earlier edition was less enticingly titled The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington and did not feature the legend of the cherry tree. This late addition is one sign that Weems invented the cherry tree anecdote. However, Robert G. Miner explains in his preface to the work that Weems sought to exalt and mythologize George Washington just as other nations had done with their national heroes. Weems saw an opportunity to create in Washington a virtuous hero specifically for young people to emulate. Miner describes Weems’s objective clearly: “Weems was not concerned with reality. His ‘mishandling’ of the facts of Washington’s early life is a myth-handling, a journey beyond mere history to the collective unconscious of the nation” (ix).

Interestingly, Weems constructs Washington’s heroism by underscoring the meaning of his virtue not in public but in private terms, which he claims have special meaning, particularly for his target audience of children. In chapter 1, Weems forcefully makes the argument that it is not the public life of military exploits and statesmanship that matter but private life, because “private life is always real life” (4). His biography is necessary, he claims, because nothing has been written of the private roles that Washington played: “the dutiful son; the affectionate brother; the cheerful school-boy; the diligent surveyor; the neat draftsman; the laborious farmer; the widow’s husband; the orphan’s father . . . and poor man’s friend” (4). He argues that these private virtues are important because they form the basis of strong character and all the achievements that stem from it. Moreover, Washington’s private virtues are relevant to children because they generally care most about character, and although the vast majority of young people cannot hope to aspire to Washington’s great deeds, they can aspire to match his personal virtue. This claim to represent Washington’s private virtue via true childhood anecdotes reveals Weems’s rhetorical effectiveness and explains some historians’ objections to the semifictional nature of this biography.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cornog, Evan. The Power and the Story: How the Crafted Presidential Narrative Has Determined Political Success from George Washington to George W. Bush. New York: Penguin, 2004. Print.

Leary, Lewis. The Book-Peddling Parson: An Account of the Life and Works of Mason Locke Weems Patriot, Pitchman, Author and Purveyor of Morality to the Citizenry. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 1984. Print.

Levy, Philip. Where the Cherry Tree Grew: The Story of Ferry Farm, George Washington’s Boyhood Home. New York: St. Martin’s, 2013. Print.

Lewis, Thomas A. For King and Country: The Maturing of George Washington, 1748–1760. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Print.

Miner, Robert G. Preface. The Life of Washington the Great. By Mason L. Weems. New York: Garland, 1977. iii–x. Print.

Rejai, Mostafa. The Young George Washington in Psychobiographical Perspective. Lewiston: Mellen, 2000. Print.

Weems, Mason L. The Life of Washington. 1800. Introd. Peter S. Onuf. Armonk: Sharpe, 1996. Print.