The prayer story, as historian François Furstenberg notes, “almost certainly sprung from Weems’s imagination.”30 But Weems was not writing to capture Washington’s true character.31 He wanted to capitalize on the name and death of a greater man, to write about what people wanted to buy. But the story survives for reasons other than Weems’s initial pecuniary interest: by imbuing Washington’s hard-won character with the kind of ostentatious piety he shunned, it dragged the incomparable leader down to an imitable level. “Perhaps sensing something too stern and difficult about the real Washington,
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