In short, their design was--as Mr. Wister has happily put it, "to leave
out any facts which spoil the political picture of the Revolution they
chose to paint for our edification; a ferocious, blood-shot tyrant on
the one side, and on the other a compact band of 'Fathers,' downtrodden
and martyred, yet with impeccable linen and bland legs."

In view of this state of affairs, it is not strange that Washington
should have shared in the general misrepresentation. Like Franklin's,
his writings, too, were altered by villainous editors. In his letters,
for example, such a natural phrase as "one hundred thousand dollars will
be but a flea-bite" was changed to "one hundred thousand dollars will be
totally inadequate."

The editors were aided in their refrigerating enterprise by a throng of
partisan biographers, first among whom was the Rev. Mr. Weems, that
arch-manipulator of facts for moral purposes. They were helped also by
many of our old sculptors and painters, who were evidently more
concerned to portray a grand American hero in a wig than to give us a
real man of flesh and blood.

"By such devices," writes Owen Wister,[2] "was a frozen image of George
Washington held up for Americans to admire, rigid with congealed virtue,
ungenial, unreal, to whom from our school-days up we have been paying a
sincere and respectful regard, but a regard without interest, sympathy,
heart--or, indeed, belief. It thrills a true American to the marrow to
learn at last that this far-off figure, this George Washington, this man
of patriotic splendor, the captain and savior of our Revolution, the
self-sacrificing and devoted President, was a man also with a hearty
laugh, with a love of the theater, with a white-hot temper ... a
constant sportsman, fox-hunter, and host...."