Mason Locke Weems (1759–1825), bookseller, author, and Episcopal clergyman, was a native of Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Having received medical training in London and at the University of Edinburgh prior to the Revolutionary War, he returned to Great Britain after the conflict and was ordained into the Episcopal ministry in 1784. Weems served in two parishes in Maryland, 1784–92, before relocating to Dumfries, Virginia, in the mid-1790s. About that time he became an agent for the prominent Philadelphia publisher Mathew Carey and, as such, spent the rest of his life traveling up and down the East Coast selling books. Following the publication of his famed biography of George Washington in 1800, a later edition of which included the oft-repeated cherry-tree story, Weems wrote biographies of Francis Marion, Benjamin Franklin, and William Penn, as well as a number of moralizing tracts. He died in Beaufort, South Carolina (ANB description begins John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 1999, 24 vols. description ends ; DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, 20 vols. description ends ; Paul Leicester Ford and Emily Ellsword Ford Skeel, Mason Locke Weems, 3 vols. [1928–29]; Lewis Leary, The Book-Peddling Parson: An account of the life and works of Mason Locke Weems [1984]; Weems and Edward Gantt to Benjamin Franklin, 9 July 1784 [PPAmP: Franklin Papers]; Franklin to Weems and Gantt, 18 July 1784 [DLC: Franklin Papers]; PTJ description begins Julian P. Boyd, Charles T. Cullen, John Catanzariti, Barbara B. Oberg, and others, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1950– , 37 vols. description ends , 34:321–2; Richmond Enquirer, 1 July 1825).

TJ received at this time a copy of Peter Horry and Mason L. Weems, The Life of Gen. Francis Marion, 3d ed. (Baltimore, 1815; Poor, Jefferson’s Library description begins Nathaniel P. Poor, Catalogue. President Jefferson’s Library, 1829 description ends , 4 [no. 137]).