The surveyor and
frontier soldier wrote very differently from the general of the army
and the President of the United States, and the improvements of Mr.
Sparks only served to hide the real man.[1]
[Footnote 1: These facts in regard to Washington's early letters,
and to his correspondence generally, were first brought to public
attention by the Reed letters, and by the controversy between Mr.
Sparks and Lord Mahon. They have, of course, been long familiar to
students of the original manuscripts. The full extent, however, of the
changes made by Mr. Sparks, and of the mischief he wrought, and of the
injustice thus done both to his hero and to posterity, has but lately
been made known generally by the new edition of Washington's papers
which have been published, under the supervision of Mr. W.C. Ford.
Washington himself, when he undertook to arrange his military and
state papers after his retirement from the presidency, began to
correct the style of some of his earlier letters. This was natural
enough, and he had a right to do what he pleased with his own, even
if he thereby injured the material of the future historian and
biographer. But he did not proceed far in his work, and the fact
that he corrected a few of his own letters gave Mr. Sparks no right
whatever to enter upon a wholesale revision.]
If Washington had been of coarse fibre and heavy mind, this lack of
education would have troubled him but little. His great success in
that case would have served only to convince him of the uselessness of
education except for inferior persons, who could not get along in the
world without artificial aids.
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