[1] Some popular stories about Washington thought during the 20th century to be apocryphal can be traced to Weems, including the cherry tree tale ("I cannot tell a lie, I did it with my little hatchet").

[4] In 1784, he became the rector of All Hallows Parish in his native Anne Arundel County, served as chaplain of a school for girls, and preached to local African Americans.

However, his tendencies toward Methodism (whose ministers were itinerant) proved unpopular with his bishop, Thomas John Claggett, so by 1792 Weems resigned as rector and began a traveling ministry, which included selling books on behalf of Mathew Carey, a prominent Philadelphia publisher who had emigrated from Ireland to flee persecution based on his Catholic faith.

[6] He had a small bookstore in Dumfries, which now houses the Weems–Botts Museum, but continued to travel extensively, particularly in the Mid-Atlantic states and South, a market previously dominated by British booksellers, selling books and preaching.

[7] Dumfries is not far from Pohick Church, part of Truro Parish, in Lorton, Virginia, where both George Washington and his father, Augustine, worshiped in pre-Revolutionary days.

Weems occasionally preached at Pohick Church but later inflated this Washington connection and promoted himself as the former "rector of Mount-Vernon parish".

[8] In fact, Washington had provided an invaluable endorsement to what would be Weems's first bestselling pamphlet, condemning partisanship shortly before the former president's death, The Philanthropist: or a Good Twenty-Five Cents Worth of Political Love Powder, for Honest Adamites and Jeffersonists.

[11] In 1800[12] he published A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington, a popular book in its time that went into many reprints.

[20][21] According to the historian James M. McPherson, Weems's biography of George Washington was likely Abraham Lincoln's only exposure to the study of history as a boy.

"[22] Weems's book Life of George Washington (1800) is an early source that helped popularize the phrase "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes!

The strength of this esteem can be seen on the ceiling of the United States Capitol Building in the form of Constantino Brumidi's fresco The Apotheosis of Washington.

Among the exaggerated or invented anecdotes is that of the cherry tree, attributed by Weems to "an aged lady, who was a distant relative, and, when a girl, spent much of her time in the family", who referred to young George as "cousin".

One day, in the garden, where he often amused himself hacking his mother's pea-sticks, he unluckily tried the edge of his hatchet on the body of a beautiful young English cherry-tree, which he barked so terribly, that I don't believe the tree ever got the better of it.