Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Myelt from

Aaron Manky. Listener discretion is advised.

The first three fun facts that you learn about George Washington are wrong. Before

or even out of elementary school in the United States of America, we learn plenty

of myths about our first president George Washington. Take, for instance, the famous

anecdote about George Washington cutting down a cherry tree. If you haven't heard it or

haven't heard it in a while, the basic story goes like this. At six years old, George

Washington gets a brand new hatchet and excited to try it out. He sets about swinging it at

his father's prize cherry tree in their front yard. When George's father gets home, furious

about either the hatchet marks in the tree or the fact that it had been cut down all together,

Mr. Washington asks his son if he was the responsible party. Ever the paradigm of moral virtue,

even as a kindergartener, George Washington admits what he did right away with the phrase,

I cannot tell a lie. If you didn't already know that story, endearing as it is simply isn't true.

It first appeared in a biography written by Mason Locke Weems who published his book

trying to cash in immediately after Washington's death. Although the cherry tree anecdote didn't

actually appear until the book's fifth edition published six years later. That story just

detailed enough to be memorable and vague enough to apply as a life lesson for all children,

immediately caught on. In 1836, a Presbyterian minister and professor named William Holmes

McGuffey included it as a lesson on morality in a children's grammar school textbook,

sort of a 19th century equivalent of a Highlight magazine goofess and gallant.

McGuffey's textbook stayed in print for almost 100 years. The year before the textbook came out,

Circus Ringleader and Conman P.T. Barnum purchased an elderly enslaved woman named Joyce Heff

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