Presidents' Day: 7 myths about George Washington

By Michael Gryboski, Mainline Church Editor Monday, February 19, 2024

‘Washington’s vision’

In June 1861, a journalist named Charles Wesley Alexander penned a story under the pseudonym “Wesley Bradshaw” titled “Washington’s Vision,” in which he claimed that George Washington had a divine vision while at Valley Forge.

Alexander cited a supposed interview he conducted with an elderly Revolutionary War veteran named Anthony Sherman, who claimed that Washington told another officer who later told him that the future president of the United States saw a divine vision showing America becoming a world power and facing a Civil War.

Historian Joseph Coohill of the “Professor Buzzkill” podcast pointed out in 2016 that the Alexander story was inherently apocryphal and lacked any factual backing to justify it.

“There’s no evidence of Washington reporting such a vision to an officer at Valley Forge at the time. This dramatic story doesn’t appear in any of the recollections of his officers published after the war,” Coohill said.

“An officer named Anthony Sherman did serve in the Continental Army, but he was at Saratoga under the command of Benedict Arnold in late 1777, and not part of the Valley Forge contingent. Further, military pension records indicate that Sherman died in 1840, twenty-one years before he ‘told’ of ‘Washington’s Vision’ to Alexander in 1861.”