Hatchets and Cherry Trees

Lies, myth-making, and one boy's journey to the truth

Sometimes with this newsletter you will get thoroughly researched, highly specific examinations of moments of historical significance. Other times you'll get feverish, half-baked ramblings about something that is painfully lodged in my brain and I can only excise it by forcing it on to you, dear reader.

This newsletter is of the second kind.

I was a very impressionable child, and I took most of the moral lessons imparted on me quite seriously. This has caused me no end of misery in my adult life, but that's a personal problem and somewhat beside the point, which we will come to in a moment.

One particular lesson that I was exposed to at a very young age was the story of George Washington and the cherry tree.

Maybe you're familiar with this one, maybe not — I grew up in what I have always understood to be “middle America” and attended public school, so for a long time I assumed that my education was fairly standard, but it’s honestly hard to know. Since then I have learned that things that I thought were foundational to an American education were in fact more regional or specific to a certain cultural context.

In any case, the story goes like this:

A young George Washington recieves a shiny new hatchet for his birthday (in some tellings, his sixth) and immediately uses it to chop down his father’s prized cherry tree. His father discovers the crime and confronts the young boy, demanding to know if it was young George who had chopped it down. George bravely confesses to his father: “I cannot tell a lie…I did chop down the cherry tree”. This so impresses his father that he tell him that his honesty is worth more than a thousand trees. A fine lesson about honesty and taking responsibility isn’t it?

I have to confess though that this story really confused me as a child. Firstly, I didn’t really know what a cherry tree looked like, or how hard it was to chop one down. Is this something that little George might have done accidentally? Or easily? Why was he going around chopping stuff with his hatchet? Just for fun? What was he supposed to chop with it? Was his father really confused about who might have chopped down the tree, or was he just trying to get George to fess up to it? Truthfully, I still have trouble understanding any of the motives of any of the people involved, but maybe it made more sense in an 18th century context.

Anyway, even though I didn’t really understand the details of the incident, I fully understood the lesson: you should tell the truth, no matter how painful or unpleasant it might be (this lesson was also repeatedly reinforced by Veggie Tales tapes and Saturday morning cartoons). I won’t bore you with the details, but let’s just say that I have followed young George’s example to this day almost without exception, and that unlike in the parable, it has frequently been to my detriment. I am not a complete naïf, I am capable of understanding that are times when you should be strategic about the truth, but whenever there is a matter of true significance, it’s as if I am possessed by the spirit of little George Washington and The Truth comes spilling out. The story stamped on my mind the critical importance of these behaviors if you wanted to be a good person.

Except, of course, as many of you probably know or have guessed by now, this never happened.

I don’t mean that this we don’t have specific evidence of this story, which would be one thing, I mean that it was made up whole cloth by one of Washington’s biographers after his death.

The minister Mason Locke Weems set out after Washington’s passing in 1799 to write a biography that exemplified his “Great Virtues”, coming up with The Life of George Washington, which was subtitled: “equally honorable to himself and exemplary to his countrymen”. This book was a massive success and national bestseller, and became the foundation of much of the historical curriculum that emerged in the 19th century.

Unfortunately for Weems, almost nothing is known about Washington’s relationship with his father, who died when he was just eleven, and he believed this to be an important part of his life to include. So he made some stuff up! The cherry tree story itself doesn’t even appear in the first edition, it was added by Weems in an 1806 reprint.

Here’s the thing about all this: it is not new information. I am fairly certain that historians have known for decades that the cherry tree story was apocryphal. If you Google any combination of the words “George Washington” and “cherry tree”, almost every result tells you that it’s a myth. Unfortunately, I only discovered this obvious truth in the last few years (this is a pattern in my life).

I can see the utility of a story about one of the nation’s founders being a paragon of honesty — but the thing is, it wasn’t presented to me (that I can remember, anyway), as being a legend, or fable. I understood it to be true historical fact.

In a sense, it doesn’t matter. It’s not especially important that this story be precisely factual. There are lots of things I learned as a child, of course, that turned out to not be true, or to be extremely truncated or obscured versions of the truth, but it hit me especially hard that this story about telling the truth that made such an impression on me turned out to not be true at all.

All of that being said, if you’ve ever wanted to understand why I am like a dog with a bone when it comes to digging up the ugly truths about American history (and why I sometimes get annoyed when people accuse me of being un-American), it probably starts with George Washington and the cherry tree.

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Sources:

https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/cherry-tree-myth

Harris, Christopher. “Mason Locke Weems’s Life of Washington: The Making of a Bestseller.” The Southern Literary Journal 19, no. 2 (1987): 92–101. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20077837.

Schwartz, Barry. “George Washington and the Whig Conception of Heroic Leadership.” American Sociological Review 48, no. 1 (1983): 18–33. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095142.