February 17, 2025

Today is Presidents Day, a somewhat vague holiday placed in 1968 on the third Monday in February, near the date of George Washington’s birthday on February 22, 1732, but also traditionally including Abraham Lincoln, who was born on February 12, 1809. Some states celebrate Washington’s birthday, some celebrate Washington’s and Lincoln’s, some celebrate all presidents, some celebrate none.

Washington looms large in our understanding of what it means to lead a democratic country, in large part because in the early years of the republic no one knew how a democratically elected leader should act. Washington knew that anything he did would become the standard for anyone who came after him. “I walk on untrodden ground,” he wrote in 1790, the year after he assumed the office of the presidency. “There is scarcely any part of my conduct w[hi]ch may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.”

Famously, minister and writer Mason Locke Weems, more commonly known as Parson Weems, wrote down for the citizens of this new nation the qualities they should require in a leader. His The Life of Washington, published in 1800, the year after Washington’s death, was written not to reflect the facts of Washington’s life—biographies would not focus on facts for almost a century—but to show virtues the nation’s youth should imitate and to establish a set of attributes against which future voters could judge those vying to lead the nation.

Weems’s Washington was generous, reverent, studious, athletic, martial, hardworking, and beloved by his comrades. To be a good citizen and a good leader meant living a moral and industrious life. Notably, though, the story that generations of Americans remembered and repeated to their children, the story of a young George Washington and the cherry tree, was not in the 1800 incarnation of Weems’s biography. It didn’t show up until a new edition appeared in 1806.

The story is only about a page long. Weems—who clearly made up many of the scenes in the text—wrote that he heard the story “twenty years ago” from “an aged lady, who was a distant relative, and, when a girl, spent much of her time in the family.” Weems claimed it was “too valuable to be lost, and too true to be doubted.”

According to the account, when George was about six years old “he was made the wealthy master of a hatchet, of which, like most little boys, he was immoderately fond, and was constantly going about chopping every thing that came in his way. One day, in the garden…he unluckily tried the edge of his hatchet on the body of a beautiful young English cherry-tree…. The next morning the old gentleman finding out what had befallen his tree…, came into the House; and with much warmth asked for the mischievous author…. Nobody could tell him anything about it. Presently George and his hatchet made their appearance. ‘George,’ said his father, ‘do you know who killed that beautiful little cherry tree yonder in the garden?’

“This was a tough question; and George staggered under it for a moment; but quickly recovered himself: and looking at his father, with the sweet face of youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-conquering truth, he bravely cried out, ‘I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.’

“‘Run to my arms, you dearest boy,’ cried his father in transports, ‘run to my arms; glad am I, George, that you killed my tree; for you have paid me for it a thousand fold. Such an act of heroism in my son is more worth than a thousand trees, though blossomed with silver, and their fruits of purest gold.’”

The years between the first appearance of The Life of Washington in 1800 and the edition with the cherry tree story in 1806 had seen a dramatic change in the nation’s political fortunes. The Jeffersonian Republican Party had risen to stand against Washington’s Federalist Party. (The Jeffersonian Republicans, also known as the Democratic-Republicans, were something entirely different from the modern-day Republican Party, which formed in the 1850s.) Federalists distrusted Thomas Jefferson, the party’s leader, who was elected president in 1800 after a bitter and vicious campaign. Federalists thought Jefferson was sneaky and underhanded—a liar, even—and they worried desperately about what would become of the new nation under such a president.

Parson Weems was a Federalist who believed that public greatness depended on private virtues. The insertion of the cherry tree story in the 1806 version of his life of Washington highlighted that honesty was a key virtue for a democratic leader.

In the 1830s, William Holmes McGuffey reproduced the story of Washington and the cherry tree in his wildly popular McGuffey’s Reader series used across the country as textbooks. The story’s message of guilelessness and honesty as a central virtue for a president served Abraham Lincoln in the 1850s after more than a decade in which northern voters felt they had been repeatedly sold out by presidents who abandoned campaign promises and caved to the demands of southern elites. Lincoln brought his reputation as “Honest Abe” into his political career, and his supporters, who had grown up on McGuffey’s Readers, highlighted it.

For all that presidents hid things from the American public—especially information about their health—and spun things to their advantage, there was an expectation that the president wouldn’t lie brazenly to the people. It came as a shock when, in 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower publicly supported a complicated story that a U2 spy plane shot down over the Soviet Union was a weather research aircraft only to have the Soviets produce the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, and state they had captured the remains of the craft, along with a camera and footage of Soviet military installations. The embarrassment of the lie reportedly led Eisenhower to tell an aide: “I would like to resign.”

President Richard Nixon did resign after recordings proved he was lying about his role in the coverup of the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Washington, D.C., Watergate complex.

When given the opportunity to paint any scenes he wished in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda as it was being rebuilt after the War of 1812, fine artist John Trumbull chose to portray the moment when Washington resigned his wartime commission after negotiators had signed the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War. Trumbull told President James Madison he had chosen that moment because “I have thought that one of the highest moral lessons ever given to the world, was that presented by the conduct of the commander-in-chief, in resigning his power and commission as he did, when the army, perhaps, would have been unanimously with him, and few of the people disposed to resist his retaining the power which he had used with such happy success.”

The portrait of our first president voluntarily giving up power rather than becoming a dictator will always be foundational to the true principles of the United States of America and is certainly reason enough to celebrate him. But in 2025, as we navigate an ocean of disinformation under a president who won office thanks to what is actually called the “Big Lie” that he won the 2020 presidential election, there is also reason to honor the idea that a democracy depends upon citizens’ ability to make informed decisions about their leaders and their policies. That ability, in turn, depends on leaders’ honesty—a lesson taught more than 200 years ago by a parson who wrote about a future president, a hatchet, and a cherry tree.

Happy Presidents Day.

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Notes:

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-04-02-0363

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xhtml

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Life_of_Washington/GJsVo9RvEs4C

https://archive.org/details/lifeofgeorgewashweem/page/16/mode/2up

https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/cherry-tree-myth

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/u-2-incident.htm

John Trumbull, Autobiography, Reminiscences and Letters of J. Trumbull, from 1756 to 1841, p. 263, at https://archive.org/details/autobiographyre01trumgoog/page/262/mode/2up