Washington’s moral confusion over slavery was also apparent in his directives to stewards at Mount Vernon. Despite the enormous demands of the presidency, he continued to exercise close scrutiny of his overseers through elaborate weekly letters. Even as his mind was consumed with affairs of state, he forgot nothing about Mount Vernon. After an unusually large number of slaves died during the winter of 1790-91, possibly from influenza, Washington wrote fervently to his estate manager, Anthony Whitting, about the timely care of sick slaves. Saying the subject was “foremost in my thoughts,” he instructed Whitting to “be particularly attentive to my Negroes in their sickness and to order every overseer positively to be so likewise.”⁴¹ Washington saw himself as a benevolent master who deplored cruelties practiced elsewhere. To Arthur Young, he made the revealing (if questionable) point that farmers who had only two or three slaves lived not much differently from their slaves. He went on to say that “far otherwise is the case with those who are owned in great numbers by the wealthy, who are not always as kind . . . as they ought to be.”⁴²

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.”⁴³ 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.”⁴⁴ “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.”⁴⁵ 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.”⁴⁶ 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.”⁴⁷ 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.”⁴⁸ When two slaves died, Washington tossed off this heartless remark: “The death of Paris is a loss, that of Jupiter the reverse.”⁴⁹ 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.”⁵⁰

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.⁵¹ 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.”⁵² 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.”⁵³ 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.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Southern Exposure

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.”¹ 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.