Letters to the Editor

Washington quotation not found in history

In his column “Learning from the Founding Fathers,” Tom Daniels included a statement about the importance of rifles and pistols to the United States (“next in importance to the Constitution itself”) supposedly made by George Washington in a speech to Congress Jan. 7, 1790.

Washington did not speak to Congress that day, but he did deliver his first annual message to Congress the following day, and the words cited by Daniels do not appear in that address, nor in any other address Washington made during his many years of service as Army chief and president.

The 1790 address did call for the “comfortable support of the officers and soldiers with a due regard to economy,” but its emphasis was on the development of manufacturing in the new nation and the “promotion of science and literature.”

The Washington firearms quotation is new to me, and I hope to include it in the next edition of “They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions.”

—Paul Boller, Jr., professor emeritus, history department

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