INTRODUCTION

THE REAL WASHINGTON, BOY AND MAN

Al

"I AM not surprised at what George has done, for he was always a good boy," is the remark that General Washington's mother made when she was told that her "boy" had been elected the first President of the United States. though he was the greatest man in America, and one of the grandest men that ever lived; George Washington was always her "boy." It is as a boy-for he was "a real boy”—and as a kind, unselfish, brave, true man, that we are to consider him.

This is not easy to do, because most people have mistaken ideas about Washington. Those who knew him best, and could have told just what he did and said, were possessed of strange notions as to what ought to be told about him.

So, instead of letting others see him as he really was, they managed to keep people from

knowing the true George Washington. They tried hard to make him "show off" like a hero, instead of telling simply what he did and how he did it, so that everybody could see what a hero he was. In their vain attempts to make him appear more than human, they did not show him to have been the live, warm-hearted man he was. It was almost as if they had patted and packed together a snow man and set it up, putting an old sword in its clumsy, cold hand, and exclaimed:

"Behold General George Washington!"

To make him talk and act "big" all the time, as a demi-god or a fabled hero, like Hercules or Alexander the Great, they succeeded only in making him behave like an ridiculous little prig, as a boy, and appear pompous and self-conceited after he grew up. The author of the first life of Washington for young people was a wandering preacher named Weems. It was he who first told about little George and his hatchet. He made the story sound quite silly because of the high-flown preachments he put into the mouths of little George and his "Pa." But this was not

entirely Mr. Weems's fault. In the best books for children of that time, written by Maria Edgeworth, Jane Taylor, and others, even down to fifty years after Washington's day, the fathers, tutors, and "Uncle Georges" were always "lecturing" the unnatural children under their charge. Yet boys and girls- -and their older relatives, too eagerly read those highly moral and entertaining tales for "the young," and pronounced them "instructive and edifying.'

Indeed, the eccentric parson was not the only offender, in this respect, against the Father of his Country, for Washington's namesake and adopted son, George Washington Parke Custis, seemed sometimes to be trying too hard to make his immortal step-grandfather show off like a hero. His story of the boy Washington breaking a certain colt sounds, if possible, even more foolish that Mr. Weems's account of little George and his little hatchet. In Mr. Custis's description the sorrel colt is referred to as a "steed," a "courser," with other "heroic" phrases, and the story sounds as if the writer had tried to make his foster father outshine young Alexander the Great in taming the fabu

lous horse, Bucephalus, as described by Plutarch.

You shall read this story of George's desperate ride on an unbroken horse, and several of Mr. Weems's moral tales in "The Story of Young George Washington," and decide for yourselves whether a boy would ever use such absurd language in talking with his father or mother. A few of these stilted stories will show also what our parents and grandparents enjoyed when there was nothing better to read. And those old-fashioned tales may help explain how such mistaken ideas of Washington began to prevail.

Still others besides inexperienced writers of children's stories and personal recollections are at fault for spreading wrong impressions of Washington. An eminent historian, the Rev. Dr. Jared Sparks, president of Harvard College, spent many years in painstaking research, collecting Washington's letters, journals, speeches, accounts, and so forth, and published them, in twelve exhaustive volumes, as "The Writings of Washington." But whenever Dr. Sparks thought he could improve on what was actually written, he deemed it his duty to change

the words of Washington so they would sound better. Then he published his "Writings of Washington" without explaining that they were erased, corrected and improved, as if Washington were a schoolboy and Dr. Sparks his teacher, printing only what he thought his pupil ought to have written!

But that teacher did all this with the best intentions: he meant to give people only what was "good for them." For instance, wherever Washington referred to General Putnam as "Old Put," as that doughty general was called by everybody, Dr. Sparks changed it to the more respectful title; and once, on receiving a very small sum of money for a very large outlay, Washington wrote that the extremely small amount was "but a flea-bite at present," and Dr. Sparks changed this to read that the amount was "totally inadequate to our demands at this time!"

Of course, "Old Put" and "flea-bite" do not sound very elegant, but Washington was so dignified as a rule, that it is a relief to know that he could unbend and say things that prove that he was much more like Abraham Lincoln than people imagine. Although, none of these