I CANNOT TELL A LIE is a claim that doesn’t go very far today.

Henry Wiencek’s 2003 study of George Washington, An Imperfect God: George Washington and Slavery and the Creation of America, suggests a replacement for the tale given us by Mason Locke Weems.

Until recent decades, when teaching students about male heroism declined, Weems’s idolatry of the young Washington’s “I cannot tell a lie” was standard fare.

Augustine Washington’s death in 1744 left Washington, then 11, and four younger children bereft, and under the aegis of the widow Washington, Mary Ball. The relationship was never warm. Madame Washington was hard put to support the five on the modest farm left to her in Fredericksburg, known as Ferry Farm. She became a stern, long-lived matron, a challenge to Washington all his days. He addressed her in letters from the woods of Pennsylvania when serving under Gen. Edward Braddock, from the campaigns during the Revolution and from retirement at Mount Vernon as “Honored Madam.”

George’s two half-brothers, 10 years and more his senior, educated in England and settled on their own Virginia acres, would often visit Madame Ball’s modest farm. The young George had grown particularly close to Lawrence, owner of Mount Vernon. In Mary Ball Washington’s presence, all of Augustine Washington’s offspring, young men and youths, were the souls of discipline and deference. Before her, a cousin reported, the Washington sons, “proper tall fellows[,] . . . were all as mute as mice.”

When Washington was around 16 and an admired athlete and rider, Mary Ball Washington acquired a sorrel colt. She prized it above all. Its stable was distant from the other pastures of Ferry Farm. The horse had a “fierce and ungovernable nature,” according to George Washington Parke Custis, grandson of the general. No one could mount, let alone bridle, the animal.

Early one morning (also recorded by John F. Schroeder, in his Life and Times of Washington, an elegant, illustrated two-volume study from 1859 in URI’s collection), George’s cousins Lawrence and Robin Washington were visiting on Ferry Farm. They admired the unbroken sorrel and, with much effort, “penned the mettlesome and fiery animal.” The boys bridled it. George vaulted onto its back, provoking the expected reaction.

In Custis’s account, “the struggle now became terrific to the beholder.” The visitors regretted their rashness and began to fear that it was “likely to be fatal to their daring associate.”

Schroeder continues: “The sorrel tried every instinctive contortion with a view to throw his rider and to regain liberty. Finding his master unmoved from his seat, with a violent, convulsive, furious plunge, he fell down dead.”

Madame Washington, at breakfast, “knowing that the three boys had been rambling around the distant pastures of the farm,” . . . asked them how her horses were faring that bright spring morning. The embarrassed silence at the table was broken by George. “Your favorite, the sorrel, is dead, madam . . . I rode him, and in a desperate struggle for the mastery, he fell under me and died on the spot.”

Madame Washington was momentarily angered, but, the three writers concur, she soon remarked (verbatim in both Schroeder and Custis accounts), “while I regret the loss of my favorite, I rejoice in my son, who always speaks the truth.”

Henry Wiencek (who confirmed the possibility of such a sudden equine death with Montana horsemen) proposes in his An Imperfect God that Mason Locke Weems, called “Parson” by his Mount Vernon neighbors, well knew the story, but concocted the placid cherry tree tale (once taught to all American youngsters), thus preserving the moral but protecting his young readers’ sensibilities.

Helen Farrell Allen lives in Wakefield.