A revisionist view of George Washington

A Washington Post article reviews a new biography of our first president:

Consider the cherry tree story — it’s a myth created in 1800 by Washington’s first biographer, Parson Weems.

Also, he could tell a lie, which really came in handy with the masterful spying operation he ran during the Revolutionary War.

And what about those allegedly wooden teeth? Yes, he had horrible teeth, Coe explains, but his dentures weren’t ligneous; they were made of ivory, cow and horse teeth, and sometimes human teeth removed from the people he enslaved. (He would pay them for their teeth, Coe writes, although not at market rate.)..

Coe’s book is peppered with BuzzFeed-like charts and listicles packed with information both humorous and profound. “If history is boring, it’s the historian’s fault,” she said. It has received mostly glowing reviews from readers and other historians, but on Saturday, a Daily Mail story inaccurately claimed Coe called Washington “an illiterate liar who cheated his way to top,” causing a wave of online harassment. Some early reviews have also described the book as “irreverent” — a characterization she takes issue with...

“Every biography has to mention that he owned slaves, of course,” Coe said. “And it is absolutely true to say that he inherited slaves when he was still an adolescent, but it is not true to say that that was the only world that he knew,” or that “he was a man of his times.”  Washington spent time in regions where slavery was taboo or illegal, was pressured by close friends for decades to free the people he enslaved, and complained that he didn’t have the money to pay the required fees to free them, even though he did, Coe found.