Washington’s act of arborcide is another fabrication, but this time we know who is responsible for it: Mason L. Weems, a broke itinerant parson bookseller with impeccable timing.6 Weems decided to write a biography a year before Washington died and promised Philadelphia printer Matthew Carey that The Life of George Washington, crammed with the apocryphal stories that we still tell today, would “sell like flax seed.” And Weems was right.
