YOUTH

Zealous biographers of George Washington have traced for him 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