George Washington | Page 2

a most
respectable, not to say distinguished, ancestry. They go back to the time

of Queen Elizabeth, and find Washingtons then who were "gentlemen."
A family of the name existed in Northumberland and Durham, but
modern investigation points to Sulgrave, in Northamptonshire, as the
English home of his stock. Here was born, probably during the reign of
Charles I, his great-grandfather, John Washington, who was a
sea-going man, and settled in Virginia in 1657. His eldest son,
Lawrence, had three children--John, Augustine, and Mildred. Of these,
Augustine married twice, and by his second wife, Mary Ball, whom he
married on March 17, 1730, there were six children--George, Betty,
Samuel, John Augustine, Charles, and Mildred. The family home at
Bridges Creek, near the Potomac, in Westmoreland County, was
Washington's birthplace, and (February 11, Old Style) February 22,
New Style, 1732, was the date. We hear little about his childhood, he
being a wholesomely unprecocious boy. Rumors have it that George
was coddled and even spoiled by his mother. He had very little formal
education, mathematics being the only subject in which he excelled,
and that he learned chiefly by himself. But he lived abundantly an
out-of-door life, hunting and fishing much, and playing on the
plantation. His family, although not rich, lived in easy fashion, and
ranked among the gentry.
No Life of George Washington should fail to warn the reader at the
start that the biographer labors under the disadvantage of having to
counteract the errors and absurdities which the Reverend Mason L.
Weems made current in the Life he published the year after
Washington died. No one, not even Washington himself, could live
down the reputation of a goody-goody prig with which the officious
Scotch divine smothered him. The cherry-tree story has had few rivals
in publicity and has probably done more than anything else to implant
an instinctive contempt of its hero in the hearts of four generations of
readers. "Why couldn't George Washington lie?" was the comment of a
little boy I knew, "Couldn't he talk?"
Weems pretended to an intimacy at Mount Vernon which it appears he
never had. In "Blackwood's Magazine" John Neal said of the book,
"Not one word of which we believe. It is full of ridiculous
exaggerations." And yet neither this criticism nor any other stemmed

the outpouring of editions of it which must now number more than
seventy. Weems doubtless thought that he was helping God and doing
good to Washington by his offensive and effusive support of
rudimentary morals.
Weems had been dead a dozen years when another enemy sprang up.
This was the worthy Jared Sparks, an historian, a professor of history,
who collected with much care the correspondence of George
Washington and edited it in a monumental work. Sparks, however,
suffered under the delusion that something other than fact can be the
best substance of history. According to his tastes, many of
Washington's letters were not sufficiently dignified; they were too
colloquial, they even let slip expressions which no man conscious that
he was the model of propriety, the embodiment of the dignity of history,
could have used. So Mr. Sparks without blushing went through
Washington's letters and substituted for the originals words which he
decided were more seemly. Again the public came to know George
Washington, not by his own words, but by those attributed to him by an
overzealous stylist-pedant. Well might the Father of his Country pray
to be delivered from the parsons.
One of the earliest records of Washington's youth is the copy, written in
his beautiful, almost copper-plate hand, of "Rules of Civility & Decent
Behavior, In Company and Conversation." These maxims were taken
from an English book called "The Young Man's Companion," by W.
Mather. It had passed through thirteen editions and contained
information upon many matters besides conduct Perhaps Washington
copied the maxims as a school exercise; perhaps he learned them by
heart.
They are for the most part the didactic aphorisms which greatly pleased
our worthy ancestors during the middle of the eighteenth century and
later. Some of the entries referred to simple matters of deportment: you
must not turn your back on persons to whom you talk. Others touch
morals rather than manners. One imagines that the parson or elderly
uncles allowed themselves to bestow this indisputably correct advice
upon the youths whom they were interested in. A boy brought up

rigidly on these doctrines could hardly fail to become a prig unless he
succeeded in following the last injunction of all: "Labor to keep alive in
your heart, that little spark of celestial fire called conscience."
When he was eleven years old, Washington's father died, and his older
half-brother, Lawrence, who inherited the estate now known as Mount
Vernon, became his guardian. Lawrence had married the daughter of a
neighbor, William