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| Weems Bott Museum Dumfries VA |
Author: Lewis Leary
Title: “The Book-Peddling Parson”
Subtitle: “An account of the life and works of Mason
Locke Weems- patriot, pitchman. Author, and purveyor of morality to the
citizenry of early United States of America”
Publication: Chapel Hill, NC, Algonquin Press, 158
pages, hardcover, Introduction, 9 chapters, Appendix, Index.
Saturday, January 2, 2021 was a mild day in northern
Virginia, and given the circumstances of social distancing, I went on a short
day trip,.alone, to Dumfries, just off I-95, and visited the outdoor area of
the Weems Bott Museum.
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| discuss G W biography |
There is a sign that talks about the first biography
of George Washington, authored by a pastor Mason Locke Weems (which is an
expensive collectible on Amazon) who in turn gets a biography by Lewis Leary,
which is bookbound in colonial style. It’s
pretty easy to imagine it being assigned in an English class in high school in
eleventh grade (American literature). Maybe this year for online school.
The parson made bringing, selling and distributing
books to rural areas away from the coastal cities, which had few bookstores, a
life priority. That’s rather ironic for
me.
The book has a silly middle chapter “To all the
singles … the pleasures of the married state”, which in rather verbose flowery
manner preaches and lists family values, in an era when people needed to have
many children.
Blacks, who were usually slaves, are spoken about with
some deference in Weems’s own writings, as were native Americans, who were (incorrectly)
viewed as not well socialized.
This is a very curious little book.
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