Mason Locke Weems was a minister, book agent, traveling salesman, and author. He was born near Herring Bay, Anne Arundel County, Maryland, in 1759, and little is known about his childhood. It is believed that around the age of 14 he traveled abroad for an EDUCATION in London and at the University of Edinburgh. With the onset of the REVOLUTIONARY War (1775-83), Weems returned to Maryland. There is some evidence that he and his brother became blockade-runners to supply the revolutionary effort during the war, but this is not firmly established.
Weems’s life after the war is better documented. He studied theology, hoping eventually to be ordained into the ministry. He initially encountered difficulty in securing ordination in the Anglican Church, but once Parliament relaxed the allegiance requirements for ordination, Weems was able to enter the ministry in 1784. He served for seven years as rector in Anne Arundel County.
Parson Weems soon began moving beyond the confined life of a parish and entered the wider world of writing, publishing, and bookselling. By 1792 Weems had become a traveling bookseller for publisher Mathew Carey of Philadelphia. He continued selling books and Bibles for three decades, bringing the written word to cities and farm communities along the Atlantic seaboard. Weems also began to write his own stories. In 1800 he wrote and published his most influential work, a biography of George Washington, which included the fabricated cherry tree story. Since Weems occasionally preached at the Pohick Church, he could advertise himself as Parson Weems, “Formerly Rector of Mt. Vernon Parish,” thus lending an air of credibility to his book. The Life of Washington is hardly an objective biography of Washington. On the contrary, it is a fictionalized tale of heroism, portraying Washington as just a regular buckskin and an average man who, Moses-like, was sent from God to deliver his people from the bondage of the British Empire. Weems’s “biography” was widely successful, achieving publication in more than 70 editions and in a variety of languages. The book told the story of the Revolutionary War in an exciting, dramatic, and personal way that appealed to readers of all ages.
Weems wrote several other books about “heroes of the revolutionary and colonial past,” including books
About Benjamin Franklin, General Francis Marion, and William Penn. His Franklin biography even outsold the “lightning tamer’s” own autobiography. Weems saw himself on a mission—bringing inexpensive knowledge to the masses. As he explained to Carey, “I deem it a great glory to circulate valuable books. I would circulate millions. This cannot be effected without the character of cheapness.”
Although money was important to Weems, the moral component of his work was also crucial. He penned one of the first TEMPERANCE books published in the United States, The Drunkard’s Looking Glass: Reflecting a Faithful Likeness of the Drunkard (1812). He turned his attention to other sins as well, including God’s Revenge Against Murder (ca. 1807), God’s Revenge Against Gambling (ca. 1810), God’s Revenge Against Adultery (1815), God’s Revenge Against Dueling (1820), and The Bad Wife’s Looking Glass (1823).
These books sold and appealed to a certain audience, though none reached the success of the Washington biography. Weems died in Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1825. His version of the Revolutionary War lived on, shaping the myths and collective memory of countless readers.
Further reading: Lewis Leary, The Book-Peddling Parson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
West, Benjamin (1738-1820) portrait and history painter
Beginning as a provincial artist in British North America, Benjamin West ended up as the court painter of King George III and president of the Royal Academy in London. Along the way he completed more than 700 paintings and his London studio became the center of influence and training for the generation of aspiring American artists in the revolutionary era who returned to the new nation; West, however, remained in Europe.
West was born in 1738 in the Quaker community of Springfield, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia. His training came from a series of the European and American itinerant artists who traveled through the colonies painting portraits of the local gentry. West’s early work in portraiture drew upon English mezzotints for models; he also expanded into history paintings and landscapes. Several significant Pennsylvanians provided patronage to the young artist. One, the Reverend William Smith, provost of the University of Pennsylvania, made possible a trip to Italy to study the Old Masters and immerse himself in the contemporary European art world. These European travels to Italy, France, and eventually Great Britain took West to London in 1763, where exhibitions of his work brought him notice and success. His fiancee Elizabeth Shewell joined him there along with her cousin Matthew Pratt, who became the first of West’s pupils from North America. West would correspond with John Singleton Copley and welcomed to his studio Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, Ralph Earle, John Trumbull, and Washington Allston.
Increasingly, West turned toward history paintings after the 1760s. He used neoclassical style and topics from Roman antiquity for his works such as Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Gemanicus (1768, Yale University Art Gallery). This painting brought West his first commission from George III of an eventual 60 portraits and history paintings for the British monarch along with an ambitious and uncompleted project to decorate the royal chapel at Windsor with religious paintings. By 1780 West was receiving a royal stipend of ?1,000 a year and took for himself the title of “Historical Painter to the King of England.”
See also art.
Further reading: Robert C. Alberts, Benjamin West: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978); Dorinda Evans, Benjamin West and His American Students (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980); Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986).
—David Jaffe
World History
