Washington: A Life (126 page)

Still, Washington remained a tough master. Slavery depended on exerting a sizable degree of terror to cow slaves into submission. Before the war Washington had shipped two difficult slaves to the West Indies, where life expectancy was short in the tropical climate. In March 1793, when Whitting told Washington about a refractory slave named Ben, Washington replied that, if he persisted in his misbehavior, Whitting should warn Ben that “I will ship him off as I did Waggoner Jack for the West Indies, where he will have no opportunity to play such pranks.”
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While Washington ordinarily did not allow slaves to be whipped, he sometimes condoned it if all else failed. Such was the case in January 1793 with a slave named Charlotte, whom Martha had found “indolent” and “idle.”
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“Your treatment of Charlotte was very proper,” Washington advised Whitting, “and if she, or any other of the servants, will not do their duty by fair means or are impertinent, correction (as the only alternative) must be administered.”
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It is unnerving to find the president of the United States writing such cold-blooded sentences.

In the army, in his cabinet, and on his plantation, Washington demanded high performance and had little patience with sluggards and loafers. But in the army and the presidency, Washington fought in a noble cause, whereas that same diligence was repugnant when applied to the loathsome system of slavery. The president never lightened up on his tough demands. “Keep everyone in their places and to their duty,” he lectured Whitting, warning that slaves tended to slack off and test overseers “to see how far they durst go.”
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If slaves were crippled, he still demanded their participation. Of his slave Doll, who was apparently lame, he told Whitting that she “must be taught to knit and
made
to do a sufficient day’s work of it. Otherwise, (if suffered to be idle) many more will walk in her steps. Lame Peter, if nobody else will, must teach her and she must be brought to the house for that purpose.”
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When Billy Lee returned to Mount Vernon, Washington assigned him to be the overseer of the house slaves. At the same time he made clear to Whitting that those slaves must “be kept
steadily
to work at that place under Will, or some other, if he cannot keep them to their business.”
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When two slaves died, Washington tossed off this heartless remark: “The death of Paris is a loss, that of Jupiter the reverse.”
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And when grooming a young slave named Cyrus as a house servant, Washington directed his estate manager to take “a strong horn comb and direct [Cyrus] to keep his head well combed that the hair or wool may grow long.”
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Washington felt beleaguered by his slaves, who never delivered the crisp efficiency he expected. During his presidency he ordered a time-and-motion study of the productivity of Mount Vernon’s female slaves while they sewed. Not surprisingly, he found that the slaves produced nine shirts weekly when Martha was there but only six when she was gone. Only a measure of coercion could force slaves to produce anything efficiently, since they had no economic incentive to do so. “There are few Negroes who will work unless there be a constant eye on them,” Washington warned one overseer, and he believed that he could never slacken pressure if the slaves were to produce a decent return on his investment.
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Unable to curb rampant thievery at Mount Vernon, Washington was convinced that slaves were stealing him blind. He continued to chastise overseers for “frolicking at the expense of my business,” when they should have spent more time “watching the barns, visiting the negro quarters at unexpected hours, waylaying the roads, or contriving some device by which the receivers of stolen goods might be entrapped.”
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At the same time, Washington ordered his overseers to feed the slaves well, since he didn’t wish to “lie under the imputation of starving my negroes and thereby driving them to the necessity of thieving to supply the deficiency.”
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George Washington desperately wanted to think well of himself and believed he was merciful toward the slaves even as the inherent cruelty of the system repeatedly forced him into behavior that questioned that belief.

NOT THE LEAST OF WASHINGTON’S TROUBLES in relocating to Philadelphia was that he left behind in New York a consequential figure in his life, his dentist John Greenwood, who had replaced his earlier friend and dentist, Jean-Pierre Le Mayeur. By the time he was sworn in as president, Washington was down to a single tooth, a lonely lower left bicuspid, which bore the entire brunt of a complete set of dentures. These large, ungainly contraptions forced Washington’s lower lip to thrust so far forward that George Washington Parke Custis called it his outstanding facial feature in the 1790s. Tooth decay was, of course, a universal malady in the eighteenth century. Even Martha Washington, who had once boasted a beautiful set of teeth, had dentures by her husband’s second term, if not before, and constantly badgered her grandchildren to use toothbrushes and cleansing powders. George’s problems, however, were so severe to as to be incapacitating and affected his life in numberless ways.

A miniature portrait of John Greenwood shows an elegantly clad man in a scarlet velvet coat and white jabot, his graying hair combed straight back from a broad forehead. Having fought in the Revolutionary War and studied dentistry with Paul Revere, he had an excellent patriotic pedigree and crafted several sets of dentures for President Washington. The dentures that Greenwood fashioned during Washington’s first year as president used natural teeth, inserted into a framework of hippopotamus ivory and anchored on Washington’s one surviving tooth. Some dental historians have argued that these dentures were forged from walrus or elephant ivory; the one thing they were
not
made from is the wood so powerfully entrenched in popular mythology. That historical error arose from the gradual staining of hairline fractures in the ivory that made it resemble a wood grain. Curved gold springs in the back of the mouth attached the upper and lower dentures. As mentioned earlier, these springs made public speaking a nightmare, especially when Washington was enunciating sibilant sounds. The dentures also limited him to a diet of soft foods, chewed carefully with the front teeth, and would certainly have limited his outbursts of unrestrained laughter at the dinner table.

With their wiring, pins, and rough edges, such dentures rubbed painfully against the gums, forcing dentists to prescribe soothing ointments or opiate-based powders to alleviate discomfort. With or without the dentures, Washington had to endure constant misery. He spent Sunday, January 17, 1790, at home in excruciating tooth pain, writing in his diary the next day, “Still indisposed with an aching tooth and swelled and inflamed gum.”
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Later in the year Tobias Lear bought laudanum for Washington’s household account, which was likely used to relieve the tortured presidential mouth. Washington could also have derived opiates from poppies grown at Mount Vernon.

One of Greenwood’s attractions for Washington must have been his steadfast discretion, for Washington demanded absolute secrecy and could not afford a blabbermouth dentist. After he moved to Philadelphia, he and Greenwood swapped letters in cloak-and-dagger style; Washington entrusted dental letters to secret intermediaries, afraid to commit them to the mails. Writing to Greenwood in February 1791 about some needed adjustments of his dentures, Washington maintained the tone of hugger-mugger. “Your letter of the 6th and the box which accompanied it came safe to hand,” he wrote enigmatically. “The contents of the latter were perfectly agreeable to me and will … answer the end proposed very well.”
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Greenwood confessed to Washington that there were limits to what he could accomplish via long distance, noting that “it is difficult to do these things without being on the spot,” and he promised to travel to Philadelphia to make needed alterations.
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During his two terms Washington chomped his way through several pairs of dentures, and his letters to Greenwood explain why they so often wore out. Bars holding the teeth together were either too wide on the side or too long in the front, leading Washington to complain that they “bulge my lips out in such a manner as to make them appear considerably swelled.”
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To relieve this discomfort, he often filed down the dentures but ended up loosening the teeth in the process. So embarrassed was he by the way the dentures distorted his facial appearance that he pleaded with Greenwood to refrain from anything that “will in the
least
degree force the lips out more than [they]
now
do, as it does this too much already.”
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In the portrait of Washington done by Christian Güllager in 1789, Washington’s lower lip juts out rather grotesquely. Apparently the president undertook some amateur dentistry of his own, telling Greenwood to send a foot of spiral spring and two feet of gold wire that he could shape himself.

Washington must have been very fond of Greenwood, for when his last tooth was pulled in 1796, he allowed Greenwood to retain this valuable souvenir, which the dentist inserted into a little glass locket on his watch fob. Without this tooth to serve as an anchor, keeping new dentures in place became an ordeal. Washington never overcame his dental tribulations and as late as December 1798 still protested that his new set “shoots beyond the gums” and “forces the lip out just under the nose.”
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Usually tightfisted, he gave Greenwood carte blanche to spend whatever it took to solve the problem. “I am willing and ready to pay whatever you may charge me,” he wrote in some despair.
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If Washington was self-conscious about smiling in later years, it may also have been because his dentures grew discolored. When he sent Greenwood a pair of dentures for repair in December 1798, the dentist noted that they had turned “very black,” either because Washington had soaked them in port wine or because he drank too much of it. Greenwood gave Washington a terse lesson in denture care: “I advise you to either take them out after dinner and put them in clean water and put in another set or clean them with a brush and some chalk scraped fine.”
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For someone who took inordinate pride in his appearance, the highly visible dentures must have been mortifying, especially since public speaking and socializing were constant, obligatory duties for a president.

 

AT THE TIME Philadelphia became the temporary capital, it ranked, with 45,000 inhabitants, as America’s largest city, overshadowing New York and Boston in size and sophistication. Its spacious brick abodes and broad thoroughfares, illumined by streetlamps at night, gave the city an orderly air, matched by a rich cultural life of theaters and newspapers. Among its intellectual ornaments were the American Philosophical Society and the Library Company, both founded under the aegis of Ben Franklin. Having profited from wartime trade, the town’s wealthy merchants set the social tone—one French visitor said, “The rich alone take precedence over the common people”—and much of its political life centered on their brilliant affairs.
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The social demands placed on George and Martha Washington grew apace as rounds of extravagant parties enlivened the new capital. One resident stood amazed at the sheer number of sumptuous gatherings. “You have never seen anything like the frenzy which has seized upon the inhabitants here,” he informed a friend. “They have been half mad ever since the city became the seat of government.”
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Notwithstanding the city’s Quaker heritage, its social life was quite racy and luxurious, with heavy gambling at many parties. The straitlaced Abigail Adams was scandalized by the daringly low-cut dresses exhibited by women at soirées: “The style of dress … is really an outrage upon all decency … Most [ladies] wear their clothes scant upon the body and too full upon the bosom for my fancy.”
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Even French émigré aristocrats were struck by all the finery, one marveling that the “women of Philadelphia wore hats and caps almost as varied as those of Paris and bestowed immense expense in dressing their heads.”
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Martha Washington felt emancipated by Philadelphia’s freer ways. In New York she had been inhibited by protocol, whereas in the new capital she was emboldened to pay visits on friends. She kept up her Friday-evening receptions, which came to be ridiculed as the Republican Court, even though Martha, the most unaffected of first ladies, frequently prepared tea and coffee for visitors herself. Of one crowded Friday reception, Abigail Adams wrote, “The room became full before I left it, and the circle very brilliant,” and she commented on the “constellation of beauties” present.
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She judged the president more unbuttoned in this new environment. “On Thursday last, I dined with the president in company with the ministers and ladies of the court,” she reported to her daughter. “He was more than usually social … He asked affectionately after you and the children and at table picked the sugarplums from a cake and requested me to take them for Master John.”
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Washington regained the vigor lost during his two illnesses and strode about town with Tobias Lear and William Jackson tagging behind him. He often presented a romantic image; the corner of his blue cape was flung back over his shoulder to reveal a scarlet lining, giving him the gallant bearing of a stage character. One Philadelphian remembered watching the Washingtons emerge from their High Street doorway and enter their majestic coach, hitched to a team of six bay horses. When the mansion door opened, Washington stepped out “in a suit of dark silk velvet of the old cut, silver or steel hilted small sword at left side, hair full powdered, black silk hose and bag, accompanied by Lady Washington, also in full dress, [who] appeared standing upon the marble steps—presenting her his hand, he led her down to the coach with that ease and grace peculiar to him in everything and … with the attentive assiduity of an ardent, youthful lover.”
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