"It is not then in the glare of public, but in the shade of private life, that we are to look for the man. Private life is always real life."

Part I | II | III | IV | Bibliographic essay

II

Parson Weems never tried to have it both ways. Like Morris, he may have invented his sources. Did "the aged lady, who was a distant relative" of George Washington, really exist? Or the "very aged gentleman, formerly a school-mate of his" (Cunliffe 1962, 9, 19)? Like Morris, Weems claimed unprecedented access: his title page announced him (falsely) as "rector of Mount Vernon parish." Unlike Morris, however, Weems knew that his life of Washington would not satisfy critics of a literary bent.

To join America's foremost promoters of patriotism, Mason Locke Weems (1759-1825) traveled far from his early education. Born to wealthy parents in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, Weems received an elite education in England--first medicine, then the ministry--while the Revolution raged in America. He was ordained by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1784, just when many patriots in the newly independent United States came to shun Anglican ministers. (His ordination was permitted without the customary oath of allegiance to the crown, thanks to a 1784 parliamentary act dispensing "persons intending to serve in foreign lands" from taking the oath.) Weems returned to serve as a rector in several churches in Maryland. After he married Frances Ewell of Belle Air, Virginia, in 1795, he relocated to nearby Dumfries in Prince William County, on the Potomac eighteen miles below Mount Vernon.

Sometime before 1791, Weems started selling books for Philadelphia's Mathew Carey and other publishers. This new career took him into towns and countryside from New York to Georgia, where he met the American common reader: the farmer or tradesman whose books might include little besides a Bible, a book of hymns or psalms, and the latest almanac. A full-time book peddler by 1793, Weems often preached in the towns where he brought his wares. Much of this preaching was melodramatic. So were the twenty-five-cent religious tracts he started writing and selling in the 1790s, the decade when revivalism took hold in America's backcountry. Full of lurid tales of sin and excess, these included Hymen's Recruiting Sergeant (1799), God's Revenge Against Murder (1807), God's Revenge Against Gambling (1810), The Drunkard's Looking Glass (1812), God's Revenge Against Adultery (1815), and The Bad Wife's Looking Glass (1823). Weems the parson stood at the vanguard of a new evangelical culture and a newly democratic ethos. Weems the traveling salesman was also at the forefront of a new American capitalism. Ever the promoter of himself and his work, he exclaimed to Carey in 1807 that "I am sure--very sure--morally & positively sure that I have it in my power (from my universal acquaintance, Industry, & Health) to make you the most Thriving Book-seller in America. I can secure to you almost exclusively the whole of the business in the middle & western parts of all these Southern states from Maryland to Georgia inclusive" (Skeel 1929, 2:362).

When George Washington died on December 14, 1799, Weems had been working on a biography for six months. Just weeks later, he wrote to Carey, "Washington, you know is gone! Millions are gaping to read something about him. I am very nearly prim'd & cock'd for 'em" (Skeel 1929, 2:126). Weems's first edition (not published by Carey, who soon regretted the mistake) ran just eighty pages. A memorial volume not unlike dozens of other tributes to Washington, Weems's little book consoled Martha Washington on her loss of "that best of husbands." It also used Washington's death to plead for national unity during the 1800 presidential election between President John Adams and Vice President Thomas Jefferson--a contest that had really begun with Adams's 1796 victory over Jefferson (Weems 1800, dedication page). Washington may have been the father of his country, but by the middle of his presidency partisan conflict roiled the nation, with Washington identified with the Federalists. Adams's Federalist presidency was more bitter still, and the 1800 rematch produced charges of atheism and libertinism against Jefferson, and of monarchism against Adams.

In 1800, Weems envisioned his book as "a feast of true Washington Entertainment and Improvement, both to ourselves and our children." By 1808, the book was in its sixth edition--now published by Carey. It had a new title, The Life of George Washington: With Curious Anecdotes, Equally Honorable to Himself, and Exemplary to His Young Countrymen. It contained many of the anecdotes that would become American legend: not just the cherry tree, but also the story of Mary Washington's dream, in which little George's mother dreams that her son extinguishes a rooftop fire on the family's home (a homespun metaphor for the Revolution). For the first time, this edition identified Weems as "formerly rector of Mount-Vernon Parish." In fact, he had preached for several months at Pohick Church in Washington's family parish of Fairfax.

Frontispiece and Title Page to Weems, M. L., Life of Washington Baltimore: George Keatinge, c. 1800. Image courtesy American Antiquarian Society

How did this celebration of Washington become fodder for the culture wars of the Jeffersonian era? In one letter to Carey, Weems called his little book "moralizing & Republican" (Skeel 129, 2:362). He meant that it wasn't something else: Chief Justice John Marshall's historical, five-volume, Federalist biography of Washington. Weems knew Marshall's work well, because he was one of its traveling salesmen for the publisher C. P. Wayne. He also knew that Marshall's work was a tough sell. It was expensive. Its volumes came out slowly: the first in 1804, the last not until 1807. Its fifth volume, on Washington's presidency, was so contentiously Federalist that Jefferson considered writing a rebuttal. Marshall and the Federalists had made Washington one of their own. Weems told a different story: of a Washington above parties, a Washington whose successor could easily be the Republican Jefferson. In Chapter 13, "Character of Washington," Weems contrasted Washington's spotless character with the errant ways of four other men: Benedict Arnold, Charles Lee (the general who envied Washington), Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr. The last two, of course, were Jefferson's great antagonists, a fact that could not have been lost on contemporary readers (Onuf 1996, xvii-xviii).

At the same time, Weems's Life of Washington participated in a conflict over biography itself. In the new United States, two concepts of biography vied for supremacy. One derived from England--specifically, from the literary essays of Samuel Johnson, the great English lexicographer. Johnson and his disciples argued that biography ought to reveal its subjects in their "domestic privacies": how they appeared off the public stage. Their purpose was not to tear down the reputations of great men (and occasionally women), but to get behind the "vulgar greatness" of public appearance. Presenting the "invisible circumstances" of a subject's life would offer readers "natural and moral knowledge" and enhanced "virtue." Johnsonian theory, in other words, made biography into a branch of moral education.

So did the other concept of biography: a republican vision that other critics championed as uniquely American. If American republicanism focused on individuals' role as citizens--and if biography ought to offer examples for the next generation to follow--should not republican biographies present America's heroes astride the public stage? Most early American biographers believed so. Their subjects rarely appeared outside their places on the battlefield or in the councils of state. This concept of biography virtually ensured women's absence: indeed, the classical republican notion of "virtue"--the word itself derived from vir, Latin for "man"--emphasized masculine civic virtue (even if a concept of republican womanhood also emerged after the Revolution). For the most part, Johnsonian ideas about biography appeared only in literary magazines, some of which took their cues from British quarterlies, while republican ideas dominated biographies themselves.

Weems declared in the introduction to his life of Washington, "It is not then in the glare of public, but in the shade of private life, that we are to look for the man. Private life is always real life. Behind the curtain, where the eyes of the million are not upon him, and where a man can have no motive but inclination, no excitement but honest nature, there he will always be sure to act himself; consequently, if he act greatly, he must be great indeed." Nobody had ever told Washington's private life before, Weems wrote. His story wouldn't offer "domestic privacies" in the Johnsonian sense: it would not reveal the foibles that made Washington human and thus familiar to the ordinary reader. Instead, Weems's story would display Washington's glorious traits outside the political and military realms: "the dutiful son--the affectionate brother--the cheerful school-boy--the diligent surveyor--the neat draftsman--the laborious farmer--and widow's husband--the orphan's father--the poor man's friend" (Cunliffe 1962, 1-3). Nevertheless, it would teach a rising generation of Americans the private virtues needed to sustain a democratic republic (though surely not to lead revolutions of their own).

The key distinction here was between private virtues and privacy. In the introduction, Weems wrote that he would not discuss details of Washington's marriage or of Martha Washington's life. It was "contrary to the rules of biography," he explained, "to begin with the husband and end with the wife." Weems meant that there were bounds of propriety that biographers were obliged to respect. These boundaries would keep women--the wives of male subjects--out of most biographies for the next fifty years. These were not the familiar republican boundaries, in which women vanished because they weren't citizens in the classical sense. Instead, Weems helped lay the groundwork for the idea of "separate spheres," in which domestic privacy would be a hallmark of a new middle class.

Mason Locke Weems hailed from the Maryland elite--perhaps even Tories, depending on which account one reads (Onuf 1996, xix). George Washington was a scion and leader of Virginia's landed, slaveowning gentry. Their bloodlines and birthrights suggested eighteenth-century men. Yet in his own professional life, Weems seemed to mark America's future: evangelical, capitalistic, even hucksterish. In depicting Washington's character, he helped delineate the virtues of the nineteenth-century middle class: duty, religion, benevolence, industry, patriotism. Even in whom he left out--Martha--he offered a glimpse into the future. And his books sold.

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