![]() ![]() Many biographies that tended to deify him followed, including a five-volume mausoleum by John Marshall in 1804–1807 and single-volume studies by Aaron Bancroft and David Ramsay in 1807. Shortly after Washington’s death, Mason Weems in his Life of Washington (1800) tried to humanize him by making up anecdotes about his youth, including his cutting down his father’s cherry tree, but his adoration of Washington was so great that his book, which is still in print, became an apotheosis of the man. He…was born with his clothes on, and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world.” “Did anybody ever see Washington nude?” asked Nathaniel Hawthorne. How many books on George Washington do we need before the monument finally becomes a man, before the remote and impenetrable statue is at last brought down to earth and made into an accessible human being? Right from the beginning Washington seems to have been a distant and unapproachable figure. George Washington painting by Charles Willson Peale, 1776 ![]()
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