Did Washington Chop Down That Cherry Tree?

As a student of history, I frequently get questions about historical "myths" that have found their way into the collective memory of Americans. For instance, a few days ago someone asked me if George Washington really did chop down a cherry tree. I confidently answered "no," but was unsure of how the story originated in the first place. As it turns out, the most recent issue of Commonplace, an interactive journal of the American Antiquarian Society, has an article dealing with this very topic. I copied sections of the article below, but to read the whole version go to http://www.common-place.org/vol-06/no-04/biel/. The article includes a bibliography of additional sources.

"The cherry-tree story first appeared in 1806, in the fifth edition of Mason Locke Weems’s A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington, originally published as an eighty-page pamphlet in 1800. By 1808, the sixth edition had swollen into a book of over two hundred pages. Twenty-three more editions followed by the time Weems died in 1825.... Weems explained his motives to the Philadelphia publisher Mathew Carey: 'This country is large and numerous are its inhabitants[.] [T]o cultivate among these a taste for reading, and by the reflection of proper books, to throw far and wide the rays of useful arts and sciences, were at once the work of a true Philanthropist and a prudent speculator.' The Life of Washington, as it came to be known, epitomized this happy combination of moral instruction and steady profits....

...As far as moral instruction goes, it’s worth noting the context in which the cherry-tree story appears in Weems’s book. Young George is prepared for his legendary truth-telling episode by a particularly strong dose of his father’s didacticism. Unprompted by any bad behavior on George’s part, Augustine tells the boy that he’d rather see him dead than 'a common liar.' 'Oh George! my son!' he exclaims, 'rather than see you come to this pass, dear as you are to my heart, gladly would I assist to nail you up in your little coffin, and follow you to your grave. Hard, indeed, would it be to me to give up my son, whose little feet are always ready to run about with me, and whose fondly looking eyes, and sweet prattle make so large a part of my happiness.' Thereupon follows the anecdote: 'George,' said his father, 'do you know who killed that beautiful little cherry tree yonder in the garden?' This was a tough question; and George staggered under it for a moment; but quickly recovered himself: and looking at his father, with the sweet face of youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-conquering truth, he bravely cried out, 'I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet....'

...A tough question, indeed, given that the alternative to a truthful answer was death. Thanks to Weems’s itinerancy and salesmanship, the fable circulated nationwide even before McGuffey’s Readers picked it up and succeeding Washington biographers canonized it.... But by the 1930s, it had also been thoroughly debunked. Historians and critics in the 1910s and 1920s delighted in outdoing one another’s dismissals of the Parson’s work: 'grotesque and wholly imaginary stories,' 'pernicious drivel,' 'a mass of absurdities and deliberate false inventions,' a 'slush of plagiarism and piety,' 'beneath contempt or criticism.' The editor’s note to a 1927 reprinting of The Life of Washington pointed out that after having run through almost seventy editions and having successfully instilled 'the popular legend of Washington' in 'millions of American minds,' the book had 'died a natural and deserved death.' The modest aim of the reprinting, he said, was simply to preserve 'one of the most interesting, if absurd, contributions ever made to the rich body of American legend.'"