I cannot tell a lie... I did cut it with my hatchet
Not George Washington — invented by his biographer, Mason Locke WeemsMason Locke Weems1759–1825 · Anglican parson, traveling bookseller & Washington’s first popular biographer
The line is a piece of moral fiction. It first appears in the fifth edition of Weems’s The Life of Washington in 1806, several years after Washington’s death, and Weems’s only cited authority was an unnamed “aged lady.” His actual sentence is longer and folksier than the version people quote: “I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.” No contemporary record has Washington saying anything of the kind. See the National Park Service ↗.
“I cannot tell a lie... I did cut it with my hatchet” written by Mason Locke Weems and put in the mouth of a young George Washington, The Life of Washington, fifth edition (1806). Not a documented statement by Washington. Via Quotle.info
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Provenance
Where the words actually come from
Work
The Life of Washington
Author
Mason Locke Weems (1759–1825)
First appearance
Fifth edition, 1806 — not in the original 1800 biography
Text shown from
The 1809 Philadelphia printing, “printed for the author”
“George, do you know who killed that beautiful little cherry-tree yonder in the garden?” … “I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.” … “Run to my arms, you dearest boy, run to my arms; glad am I, George, that you killed my tree; for you have paid me for it a thousand fold.”
Fiction, presented as biography
Weems’s dialogue as reproduced by The Washington Papers project at the University of Virginia. The words are the biographer’s composition, not a transcript.
The National Park Service ↗ states the cherry-tree story first appeared in the fifth edition of The Life of Washington in 1806, and that the official position is that it is “only a story” — the anonymous informant makes it unreliable.
The Washington Papers ↗ reproduces the exchange verbatim, including the reply people misquote: “I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.”
The Journal of the American Revolution ↗ notes Weems published the original biography in 1800 and added the cherry tree to the 1806 fifth edition, embellishing successive printings to boost sales.
In his 1889 biography of Washington, Henry Cabot Lodge called Weems’s stories “on their face hopelessly and ridiculously false” — quoted here ↗.
Weems’s The Life of Washington was published in the United States in the early nineteenth century — the cherry-tree passage entering the fifth edition in 1806, with an 1809 Philadelphia printing freely scanned at the Internet Archive. Published long before 1931, the text is in the public domain in the United States; only modern scholarly introductions and apparatus in reprint editions carry their own copyright.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
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Fact-check
How a parable became a quotation
This is the rare case where the misattribution is not a mix-up but a deliberate invention — and the wording people repeat is a tidied-up version of the invention.
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The speakerGeorge Washington Never said it
Nothing in Washington’s own papers or in any contemporary account records the exchange. The National Park Service states the story first appeared in the fifth edition of Weems’s The Life of Washington in 1806 and that the official position is that it is only a story ↗.
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The wordingA smoothed-down paraphrase Mis-worded
Weems’s sentence is “I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet” — reproduced by The Washington Papers ↗. The crisp “I cannot tell a lie” is a later compression.
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The even shorter version“I cannot tell a lie, I did it with my little hatchet” Not in Weems’s text
This one-line form circulates widely and is listed on Wikiquote ↗ as words Weems portrayed young Washington speaking — but it is not how the passage actually reads.
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The evidenceAn unnamed “aged lady”
Weems’s sole cited authority was “an aged lady, who was a distant relative, and, when a girl, spent much of her time in the family” — anonymous, and therefore uncheckable ↗.
✓The honest attribution is to the biographer, not the president: these are Mason Locke Weems’s words, published in the fifth edition of The Life of Washington in 1806 — one of several anecdotes he added as the book grew ↗.
Context
Why a fake quote became the most famous thing Washington never said
Washington died in December 1799 and the public immediately wanted a childhood to go with the monument. Weems, who sold books off the back of a wagon, supplied one. The cherry tree was not in his first 1800 biography at all — he added it as the book grew, and it landed in the fifth edition of 1806.
What makes the anecdote unusually durable is that it was engineered to be repeated. It is short, it has a punchline, and it teaches a single virtue. Reprinted in the McGuffey Readers that drilled generations of American schoolchildren, it stopped reading like a story and started reading like a fact.
Weems was not lying about Washington so much as writing a parable and forgetting to label it.
What Weems actually claimed as his source
Weems attributed the story to “an aged lady, who was a distant relative, and, when a girl, spent much of her time in the family.” He never named her. That single anonymous informant is the entire evidentiary basis for the most quoted line in Washington’s childhood.
Historians were unimpressed early. In his 1889 biography of Washington, Henry Cabot Lodge judged the cherry tree and Weems’s other tales “on their face hopelessly and ridiculously false.”
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1759–1825 · Anglican parson, traveling bookseller & Washington's first popular biographer
Mason Locke Weems — “Parson Weems” — was a clergyman turned traveling book peddler who published A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington in 1800, the year after Washington died. He kept enlarging it edition by edition, and the cherry tree first turns up in the fifth edition of 1806, credited only to an anonymous “aged lady, who was a distant relative.” Weems was writing improving stories for boys rather than documented history, and the anecdote’s reach through the McGuffey Readers made his invention one of the most widely believed ‘facts’ in American life.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cite this page
Weems, Mason Locke. The Life of Washington. The cherry-tree anecdote first appears in the fifth edition (1806); text as reproduced from the 1809 edition in Peter S. Onuf, ed., The Life of Washington (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe), 8–10.
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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I cannot tell a lie... I did cut it with my hatchet’?” Last verified 22 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-cannot-tell-a-lie-i-did-cut-it-with-my-hatchet/