The German-American Press

Critics have expressed mixed emotions about the Weems
biography. In 1810 an anonymous critic wrote:
We have questioned whether the book before us may not be termed a
novel founded on fact. Second thoughts would induce us to style it rather
as an epick poem; for besides its figures, characters, battles, and episodes,
it is duly provided with a suitable quantity of preternaturalmachinery.
The exploits and future greatness of Washington are early foretold by
a wonderful dream, two pages in length, which happened to his mother
while he was a boy.24
In 1927 Jerry Wallace, an Episcopal Minister, in his book,
A Parson at Large, wrote that more copies of Weems' Life of
Washington have been sold than of any other biography ever written
in America. Its appeal has been to the "common people." He
places Weems' greatest contribution in the field in which Weems
is considered most controversial:
[Weems ] is the author of the best-known hero tale in American
history. This is something; and it is more, I think, to have been the author
(in the same hero tale) of the only two legends in American history which
are portrayed by symbols: The legend of the cherry tree and There goes the
golden-headed boy who never told a lie . . . just legends . . . but there
isn't an American whose heart doesn't warm at the mention of them and
whose eyes do not smile when the story is told. . . . Let any American
see the picture of a hatchet and a cluster of cherries, and it speaks to
something inside him, without any words . . . as easily understood as
the thistle and the shamrock. . . . To me that is better to have mastered
such matters to one's credit-"unconsidered trifles" than to have left a
solemn memory in the world.25
Among the many settlers pushing forward the frontier and taking up
cheap western lands were thousands of Germans from Pennsylvania,
Maryland, Virginia and from the Fatherland, many of whose cabins
may have contained the Schnee translation of Das Leben des Georg
Waschington.26
Schnee printed one final imprint in 1810, Georg Friederich
Seiler's Biblische Religion und Glickseligkeitslehre, then relin-
quished his press to Jacob Stoever. It was time to turn his attention
to the career for which printing had been the prologue-the ministry.
In July of 1810 Jacob Schnee began the three-year period
of study with Dr. George Lochman, pastor of Salem Evangelical
Lutheran Church, which ended in 1813 at the Sixty-sixth Convention

39