Dictionary of Literary Biography on Mason Locke Weems
Parson Weems's claim to a small place in American literary history has often seemed to rest on his having retailed the fabulous story of George Washington and the cherry tree. He is more justly regarded as a writer whose The Life of George Washington (1808) transcends its subgenre. Although this edifying biography's starchy simplicity has drawn the derision of generations, critics who have looked beneath its didactic idiom have found revealing testimony to the needs of a society in transition.
Very little is known of Weems's youth. He was born 11 October 1759 at Marshes Seat, Herring Bay, in Maryland's Anne Arundel County, the son of a Scottish farmer who had fathered eighteen earlier children, eleven of them by his second wife, the former Esther Hill. After receiving his early schooling in Maryland, Weems studied medicine in London and possibly in Edinburgh between 1773 and 1776. By one report he was a surgeon in the British navy at the outbreak of the Revolution, but by 1779 he had returned to Maryland. He was again in England from 1781 to 1784, this time preparing for the Anglican priesthood. Following his ordination by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1784, he returned to America to serve as pastor of a series of parishes in the Chesapeake area. Weems held fixed clerical appointments for less than a decade, and then, after 1792, while remaining a minister, he traveled the Eastern seaboard as an itinerant book salesman. On 2 July 1795 he married Frances Sewall, the daughter of Colonel Jesse Sewall of Bel Air, near Drumfries, in Prince William County, Virginia. The young couple, who would become the parents of ten children, made their home at Drumfries until moving to the Bel Air plantation Mrs. Weems inherited from her father in 1806.
Weems, however, was only occasionally at home. Book-peddling had become his livelihood, and he became the author of many of his wares; besides moralistic pamphlets and The Life of George Washington , he wrote exemplary lives of Francis Marion (1809), Benjamin Franklin (1815), and William Penn (1822). He died in Beaufort, South Carolina, on 23 May 1825.
Weems the minister and Weems the peddler were ever at work in Weems the biographer. In his travels as a book purveyor, he saw that the religious and patriotic reading tastes of the new nation might be drawn together and addressed as one. His biographies of the early American heroes became, for Protestant and unchurched readers, equivalents of the sentimental saints' lives popular among some Catholics. His sources were many and varied. He borrowed freely, as in his biography of Franklin, for which he drew heavily on his subject's autobiography. What was new and correct in the life of Marion seems chiefly to have been contributed by the book's intended coauthor, Peter Horry, who withdrew his name when he saw the "romance" that Weems was fashioning. Some of what the biographies tell may be uncritically collected hearsay gathered as his salesman's travels brought Weems into contact with people offering accurate, embellished, or invented memories of his subjects. Much, however, such as the story of the dying Franklin contemplating a picture of Christ, was but his own contrivance. Certainly it was Weems's shameless improvement of history that gave his The Life of George Washington its singular appeal. Begun as one of the many tributes that appeared after the venerated hero's death in December of 1799, the biography was expanded as a corrective to the inadequacies Weems perceived in John Marshall's five-volume biography of Washington (1804-1807), which gave only a page to its subject's growing years. The popularity of his own biography was again and again a spur to Weems the imaginative writer. The eighty-page first edition that appeared in 1800 more than tripled in length as the book grew through more than thirty editions--three of them translations into German--by the year of his death. The stories of the cherry tree and the elder Washington's cabbage garden, in which the father plants seeds that come up in the pattern of George's name to teach the Heavenly Father's design in creation, first appeared in the 1806 edition. That such instruction--the first a tale invented by the author, the second a moral lesson cribbed from James Beattie--became enshrined in the American folk consciousness was largely due to the prim earnestness of Weems's telling the "low hortatory" or "juvenilehomiletic" rhetoric that was employed to persuade the young but has earned the scorn of critics.
The continuing interest of Weems's writings resides not in any intrinsic merit but in their reflection of the widespread American concern with public and private virtue in the decades following the Revolution. An increasingly secular age was more receptive to instructional writings than doctrinal sermons, and in inscribing his The Life of George Washington to Thomas Jefferson, Weems expressed his hope that the book would serve as a school text. It came to influence countless readers--Lincoln would tell of its impact on him--especially when its moral anecdotes were mined for McGuffey's readers. The theme of rebellion that runs through the biography of Washington has been read as a transposition of the Revolution and the subsequent intergenerational tensions felt by a society still unsure of itself. Weems's exemplary teachings have been found to incorporate important post-Lockian insights into the nature and improvement of children. Thus young George's disobedience to his father is represented in terms of filial incapacity rather than of moral failure. The accounts of the boy's lapses and his father's corrections are free of the terrifying analogies with original sin so familiar in earlier instruction. Instead Weems presents an understanding father whose admonitions are accompanied by reassurances of parental solicitude. The Life of Washington thus mirrors a change from Americans' backward-looking obsession with guilt to the confidence that attended their advance into the nineteenth century.
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