“On Christmas-Day” in Fredericksburg

Sometime between 1745 and 1747, just a few years after the Gentleman’s Magazine published Elizabeth Teft’s poem “On Christmas-Day” (quoted yesterday), a teenager in Virginia copied it into a notebook.

That teenager was George Washington, and his copybook has of course become a precious national artifact.

Most of that volume was devoted to the texts of legal and business forms. After the one poem came a recipe for ink and the famous “Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour,” also copied from a British source.

In this blog post and his book George Washington: A Life in Books, Kevin J. Hayes strives mightily to find significance in how the young teen copied this poem. Unlike the way it appeared in the magazine, George capitalized all the nouns, which “reveals Washington’s fastidiousness”—or perhaps his tutor’s insistence.

As for the content, Hayes concludes the young man was “confident in his religious beliefs but pleased to have another confirm them.” Or perhaps someone told him to copy that poem.

At the time, George Washington was living at his late father’s slave-labor plantation called Ferry Farm, across the river from Fredericksburg, Virginia. The minister at St. George’s parish in that town was the Rev. James Marye, who had actually been born in France and educated for the Catholic priesthood before converting to the Church of England. Did he assign that poem as a handwriting exercise (and theological reminder) to the young planter’s son?

The Rev. Mr. Marye died in 1767, after Washington had grown up and moved away to Mount Vernon. The new rector at St. George’s parish was the old minister’s son, also the Rev. James Marye (1731-1780). According to David DeSimone of Colonial Williamsburg, he thought enough of “On Christmas-Day” to set Teft’s words to music sometime in the early 1770s.