While many states have separately celebrated Lincoln's birthday, it has NEVER been a federal holiday!
Top Ten Myths about George Washington - for more details, please see this excellent link:
1. George Washington cut down a cherry tree with his hatchet as a boy, and then told the truth about his action. False. It is an historic myth. and the link has the details of how it became a widely circulated story.
2. George Washington had wooden teeth. False, he had six pairs of false teeth made for him; as an adult he had only one of his own teeth remaining in his head. The materials in those false teeth include: hippo ivory, animal teeth, human teeth (from slaves), and gold. The misidentification of wood as a material came from the discoloration of one of the surviving sets of teeth.
3. Washington threw a silver dollar across the Potomac. Nope! It is the misrepresentation of something in a biography of Washington written by his step-grandson George Washington Parke Custis. Again, for details, follow the link above.
4. Washington could have been king instead of president of the United States. No again! This is a myth based solely on a letter from Lewis Nicola, who favored a constitutional monarchy. Washington was never seriously approached with an offer. It had no broad support, and was in any case for a single state, not the United States.
5. The Valley Forge Prayer, celebrated at sites like this, did not occur either; rather they were the work of Parson Weems, who is responsible for the Cherry Tree story in Myth 1. Beware bad history, which is too often cited as if it were factual when it is not!
6. George Washington had an angelic, prophetic vision. Again, while popular among a certain audience (sadly too often specific to the right wing and faux scholars like Paul Barton) these stories are NOT true or accurate! This history fraud goes back to Charles Wesley Alexander, appearing in print in 1861.
7. Did George Washington smoke Marijuana? A myth from the 1960s, it is not true. Washington DID however grow hemp for rope and other industrial uses.
8. Washignton died of syphillis - a myth that dates back to the 1950s. Washington was attended by doctors, and his symptoms suggest he most likely died of a bacterial infection of the epiglottis, called acute epiglottitis.
9. Washington was not the first president. This comes closest to being true. There were nine presidents under the Articles of Confederation which preceded the Constitution, and by another calculation, using that reasoning he was the fifteenth president, if you go back to Peyton Randolph's election to the presidency of the Continental Congress. Washington was the first national president; the others were only president of deliberative bodies, not a country. It's complex - read the link!
10. Washington was not born in the United States. (Ha! I bet you thought that this was a unique belief about Barak Obama - he's in good company!) It is true that George Washington was not born in the United States; he was born in the colony of Virginia, which later became part of the United States but was not a part at the time of his birth. By that reasoning, neither were the next six presidents either.
Coming from the subsequent century, I only have FIVE myths to offer for fact-checking Abe Lincoln. Typically the longer the time elapsed from their actual life, the greater the opportunity for more myths to develop. These five myths come from a different source, here.
1. Lincoln was a simple country lawyer who sometimes forgot to collect fees, and who joked and cajoled judges and juries. No! He had the reputation as a very serious, very complex and successful lawyer, one of the top appeals lawyers in the state of IL, representing clients like the Illinois Central Railroad and Rock Island Bridge Co. His personal papers do not support that he was a 'simple country lawyer', quite the opposite. Movies on the other hand, portray him otherwise, as does sadly some children's fiction.
2. Lincoln was gay. I have to admit this was a new 'myth' to me, but it apparently is the premise of two different authors, Larry Kramer who claimed in 1999 to have found love letters from Lincoln to a male roommate, and another author, C.A. Tripp in 2005. Other more reliable sources suggest that in fact Lincoln not only was heterosexual, but that he frequented brothels prior to marriage at age 33. Could Lincoln have been gay or bi-sexual? While it is a possibility, there is no credible and authenticated evidence to support either of those possibilities.
3. Lincoln suffered from severe clinical depression. While a contested theory promoted by Joshua Wolf Shenk, that is an opinion which is challenged by other experts on Lincoln's life, including Harold Holzer who worked on Lincoln papers with Shenk. It is arguable that while Lincoln had occasions to grieve, he was not so debilitated by grief or depression as to qualify the Shenk diagnosis nor was there a similar diagnosis in Lincoln's lifetime - depression, or melancholia, was known to medical experts.
4. Lincoln was excessively compassionate, and a serial pardoner who pardoned too many people. This dates to a premise promoted by Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg, and to a scandal over a pardon in the National Archive that was supposedly altered by Thomas P. Lowry in 1998. Nope! Per scholar Holzer:
This is untrue - Lincoln not only approved the execution of deserters, but 38 alleged Indian raiders were hanged by his order in Mankato, Minn. on Dec. 26, 1862, still the largest mass execution on U.S. soil.5. Lincoln was already mortally ill at the time he was shot by John Wilkes Booth. False, there is not only no evidence for this, but it was considered remarkable that Lincoln survived for nine hours after being shot, and his remarkable physical condition was noted by attending physicians on his deathbed.
Meanwhile, Lincoln conducted the bloodiest war in American history to preserve the Union, authorized the deployment of deadly new weaponry such as mines, ironclad warships and niter (a 19th-century version of napalm), and accepted unprecedented casualties for his chosen cause.
I hope our readers have enjoyed another holiday fact check! Lets keep our history, and our celebrations of it, accurate!
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