 dinner invitations.
In some small details of protocol, Washington erred on the side of royalty. No harm done; Adams and Jefferson tilted the balance carefully the other way. The danger of having no dignity at the top, no noblesse oblige, was the greater danger, and Washington made sure we had enough noblesse to realize the oblige.
Washington stood for generations as a living example of American virtues, a monument in flesh before he became one in granite or marble. The nation chose him to bear the mantle of the American way, and he accepted the role.
Washington modeled himself on Cato the Younger. His favorite play was Joseph Addison's "Cato," which was based closely on the Cato section in Plutarch's "Lives." Washington ordered "Cato" performed at Valley Forge for the soldiers; he often quoted Cato (or his speeches from the play) at key moments. Historians who have studied his handling of the Newburgh mutiny of 1783, a key crisis in early American freedom, discovered it was directly lifted from Addison's play. [Act III, Scene 5, if you have a script; see Carl J. Richard, "The Founders and the Classics," pp.50-59].
The process that began in Washington's life snowballed upon his death in 1799. "America produced a flood of mourning pictures in many different genres: paintings, prints, sculptures, textiles, rings, ceramics. ... These images of George Washington became icons in every sense. They were reproduced in lithographs and chromos, hung on the walls of American homes, and regarded with a reverence that other people reserved for religious images." [David Hackett Fischer, "Liberty and Freedom," p.181]
Chief among the icons was a pamphlet, later expanded into a book: Mason Locke Weems's "Life and Memorable Actions of General George Washington," published a year after Washington's death. The Chesapeake clergyman and itinerant bible salesman wrote a lively, if overblown, prose, and told a series of stories meant to display Washington's "Great Virtues." It was one of many pamphlet biographies written mainly for the young, but it was the one that endured. And it set the general squarely in a classical context, consciously modeled on Plutarch.
Washington was as pious as Numa, just as Aristides, temperate as Apictetus, patriotic as Regulus. In giving public trusts, impartial as Severus; in victory, modest as Scipio -- prudent as Fabius, rapid as Marcellus, undaunted as Hannibal, as Cincinnatus disinterested, to liberty firm as Cato, and respectful of the law as Socrates.
Like the ancient Greeks, Weems' story turns history into mythology and mythology into history. Some of the stories were true, some were passed around as true in the oral culture, a few perhaps were entirely fabricated by Weems. All were embellished by him and hammered into morality tales to teach citizenship to young republicans. Virtue, not veracity, was the essential thing.
And so we get Washington barking the cherry tree, handling the school bullies, in the face of Braddock's defeat, refusing a duel, apologizing when wrong.
W itness, ye sons of tyrant's black womb,
That acrostic doggerel was signed only by "A Young Lady." One sees a carefully folded letter written in a small, fine hand, pressed on the editor of the Pennsylvania "Evening Post," who passed it back to the lead-blackened fingers of the typos and printed it in his columns on Jan. 7, 1777.
A nd see his Excellence victorious come!
S erene, majestic, see he gains the field!
H is heart is tender, while his arms are steel'd.
I ntent on virtue, and his cause so fair,
N ow treats his captive with a parent's care!
G reatness of soul his ev'ry action shows,
T hus virtue from celestial bounty flows,
O ur GEORGE, by heaven destin'd to command,
N ow strikes the British yoke with prosp'rous hand.
The "tender heart" that "treats his captive with a parent's care" is the core image. Young Lady probably was inspired by Washington's victories a few weeks earlier at Trenton and Princeton, whereafter the American rebels found themselves in possession of their first large crop of prisoners of war.
Washington made a 