Made In America - Bill Bryson [41]
After this encouraging start, Columbus’s life was given a kick into the higher realms of myth by Washington Irving’s ambitious, if resplendently inaccurate, History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, which came out in 1828 and was a phenomenal best-seller in America, Europe and Latin America throughout the nineteenth century.
Irving later wrote a life of George Washington that was just as successful and no less indebted to his fictive powers. But it is Mason Locke Weems – or Parson Weems as history knows him – to whom we must turn for many of the most treasured misconceptions about the Father of the Country. His hugely successful Life of George Washington: With Curious Anecdotes, Equally Honourable to Himself and Exemplary to His Young Countrymen, first printed in book form in 1806, proved Weems to be not just a fictionalizer of rare gifts but a consummate liar.
Even for the time, the style of the book was more than a little saccharine. Consider the well-known story of Washington cutting down the cherry tree. We join the action at the point where George’s father has asked him if by any chance he can explain how a productive fruit tree has come to be horizontal, and whether the hatchet in his hand might have something to do with it.
‘I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.’
‘Run to my arms, you dearest boy,’ cried his father in transports, ‘run to my arms; glad am I, George, that you killed my tree; for you have paid me for it a thousand fold. Such an act of heroism in my son, is more worth than a thousand trees ...‘34
Weems of course made the whole thing up. Almost everything in the book beyond the hero’s name and place of residence was made up or lavishly embellished. Even the title-page included a brazen falsehood. Weems advertised himself as the former ‘Rector of Mount-Vernon Parish’. There was no such parish and never had been. None the less, the work went through some twenty editions and was the greatest seller of its age.
Washington was in fact more flawed and human than Weems or many subsequent chroniclers would have us believe. He was moody, remote and vain (he encouraged his fellow officers in the Revolutionary War to address him as ‘Your Excellency’), he detested being touched by strangers and had an embarrassing proclivity to weep like a babe in public – for instance, when things weren’t going well during the Revolution or when parting from his officers at the war’s conclusion. He was not a gifted military commander. Far from being a hero of the French and Indian War, as Weems and others have suggested, he actually helped to provoke it. In 1754, while an inexperienced lieutenant-colonel with the Virginia Regiment, he led an unnecessary and essentially irrational attack on a party of Frenchman encamped in the Ohio valley, killing ten of them. This and other such incidents so outraged the French that they went to war with the British. To compound his haplessness, Washington shortly after was routed in battle and naively signed a document in which he apologized for the ‘assassination’ of the Frenchmen, thereby outraging his own masters.35
But there was about him an unquestionable greatness. He was brave, resolute and absolutely incorruptible. No one gave more time or endured greater risks or hardships to secure America’s independence and democracy. For eight years he doggedly prosecuted a war in which neither the Continental Congress nor the people gave him anything like the support his valour deserved. During one long march across New Jersey, he watched in dismay as his army evaporated from 30,000 men to barely 3,400. To add to his problems, he often discovered he was being served by traitors. Benedict Arnold is the best-known example, but there were others, such as Major General Charles Lee, who while serving as one of Washington’s aides-de-camp was simultaneously supplying the British with advice on how to beat the Americans.36 It is no wonder that Washington sometimes wept.
He genuinely and nobly