"Would fanciful tales turn readers' heads away from practical duty and virtue?"

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III

The literary elite generally scorned Weems's Life of Washington. As would be the case with Edmund Morris's Dutch nearly two centuries later, some reviewers probably had political objections: they wished for a more Federalist treatment. But also like the controversy of 1999, another issue was at stake: the line between fact and fiction. The problem here wasn't postmodernism perverting history. Rather, fiction itself was suspect in the early republic. Would fanciful tales turn readers' heads away from practical duty and virtue? Would fiction, particularly of the sentimental variety that allowed readers into the hearts and inner thoughts of (often female) protagonists, displace more useful reading? Or could trappings of fiction help sell messages of morality?

To Weems, the boundaries between genres were permeable. Different genres could be complementary, not contradictory. As his sensational sermon-tracts revealed, he never refrained from adding romance to enhance appeal. At least one reviewer appreciated Weems's Life of Washington for its romantic dimensions: "the Writer makes us alternately weep and laugh. . . . There is a kind of poetic fire running through every sentence of this History, that irresistibly fixes the Attention, warms the Heart, and brings to the Eyes those delicious Waters which flow from Piety, Love, and Admiration" (Skeel 1929, 1:28-29). In 1809, Weems accepted Brigadier General Peter Horry's invitation to write a biography of General Francis Marion, Horry's commander in the Revolution. Horry had tried but failed to write the book himself, so he sent his reminiscences to Weems. The parson promised to "polish and colour it in a style that will, I hope, sometimes excite a smile, and sometimes call forth the tear." When The Life of Francis Marion was done, Weems told Horry, "knowing the passion of the times for novels, I have endeavoured to throw your facts and ideas about Gen. Marion into the garb and dress of a military romance" (Skeel 1929, 1:100-01, 2:427).

To others, the boundaries mattered. Hence Dr. Bigelow complained in the Monthly Anthology, and Boston Review that he couldn't decide whether Weems's life of Washington was "a biography, or a novel, founded on fact" (Skeel 1929, 1:55). That last phrase referred to contemporary novelists' professions that their stories had real-life bases: thus Susanna Rowson's best-selling Charlotte Temple was originally called Charlotte: A Tale of Truth. Peter Horry was indignant at Weems's Life of Marion: "A history of realities turned into a romance! The idea alone, militates against the work. . . . Most certainly 'tis not my history, but your romance." Except for Horry, who had a personal stake in Marion's story, Weems's critics tended to be the literati of northern cities and southern plantations. Virginia writer and jurist St. George Tucker wrote to his friend William Wirt, also a Virginia statesman, that he had barely been able to stomach Weems's first paragraph--after which "I shut the book . . . and have no desire to see it again" (Kennedy, 1:352-353). New York's Monthly Magazine and American Review called Weems's original edition "eighty pages of as entertaining and edifying matter as can be found in the annals of fanaticism and absurdity" (Skeel 1929, 1:14).

But Weems was a traveling bookseller in America's backcountry. Hawking books and preaching in western Pennsylvania or North Carolina, he did the closest thing in the new United States to book tours and appearances on "Larry King Live." Weems's customers were his audience, and he knew just what they wanted to read.

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