by Ron Chernow
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.
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.”2 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.3
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.”4 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.”5 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.”6 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.7
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.”8 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. 9 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.”10 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.”11 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.”12
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 “c
onstellation of beauties” present.13 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.”14
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.”15
For all the loose talk of a Republican Court, those who had actually haunted the royal courts of Europe were utterly disarmed by the quaint simplicity of the executive residence. When the French writer Chateaubriand stopped in Philadelphia, he was startled by the absence of pretension, and his description is a salutary corrective to contemporary critics who saw Washington as aping European royalty:A small house, just like the adjacent houses, was the palace of the President of the United States; no guard, not even a footman. I knocked; a young maid servant opened the door. I asked her whether the general was at home; she answered that he was. I added that I had a letter for him. The girl asked for my name; it is not an easy one to pronounce in English and she could not repeat it. She then said gently: “Walk in, Sir. Entrez, Monsieur,” and she walked ahead of me through one of these narrow passageways which form the vestibule of English houses. Finally she showed me into a parlor and bade me wait for the general.16
One wonders whether Chateaubriand also noticed that a hairdressing shop stood next door to the presidential “palace.”
The president hobnobbed with the city’s commercial elite, especially the two wealthy couples he had befriended during earlier stays in Philadelphia: William and Anne Willing Bingham and Samuel and Elizabeth Willing Powel. Washington was chivalrous with both wives. When he sent Anne Bingham a watercolor version of the portrait of him by the Marquise de Bréhan, he appended this stylish note: “In presenting the enclosed (with compliments to Mrs. Bingham), the President fulfills a promise. Not for the representation—not for the value—but as the production of a fair hand, the offering is made and the acceptan[ce] of it requested.”17 With Elizabeth Powel, Washington continued to permit himself social liberties that he took with no other woman. In an age when subtle social signals counted a great deal, Washington boldly signed his letters to her, “With the greatest respect and affection”—extremely unusual for Washington.18 She, in turn, addressed her letters to “My dear Sir” and signed them, “Your sincere affectionate friend.”19 We know from Washington’s letters that he met with Elizabeth Powel many times but often failed to note their meetings in his diaries. At the very least he was beguiled by this social and political confidante. On the other hand, Powel was also a good friend of Martha, and George consulted her before buying gifts for his wife. In a sign that the Washingtons were slightly awed by this rich bluestocking, George would draft letters for Martha to send to Eliza Powel, and Martha would then rewrite them in her own hand.
On Sundays the president attended church and afterward was enveloped by throngs of admirers. One observer recalled him leaving Old Christ Church, wrapped in his blue cloak, with organ music bellowing behind him. Instead of touching people, he nodded to the hushed crowd that instinctively parted before him, so that there was something vaguely ecclesiastical about his presence: “His noble height and commanding air . . . his patient demeanor in the crowd . . . his gentle bendings of the neck, to the right and to the left, parentally, and expressive of delighted feelings on his part; these, with the appearance of the awed and charmed and silent crowd of spectators, gently falling back on each side, as he approached, unequivocally announced to the gazing stranger . . . behold the man!”20
Even as president, Washington’s interests were wider, his curiosity more far-ranging, than is commonly supposed. Confident in his own taste, he personally selected the paintings that adorned the presidential mansion—“fancy pieces of my own choosing,” he called them.21 He had an occasional sense of fun that belied his grave air. In April 1793 he led a party of eight to see the first American circus, staged by an English equestrian acrobat, John Bill Ricketts, who had set up a Philadelphia riding school. And he remained a keen theatergoer, absorbing a steady diet of history plays, farces, and satires. He patronized the South Street Theater so frequently that he had his own private box, complete with cushioned seats and plush red drapery. With a soldier stationed at each stage door and four distributed in the gallery, Washington probably enjoyed better security than did Lincoln the night of his assassination at Ford’s Theater.
However bowed down by presidential tasks, Washington always found time for family and for the many waifs and wards who sheltered under his roof. Harriot Washington, the daughter of his deceased brother Samuel, had lived at Mount Vernon since 1785. A wayward girl, slovenly and lazy, she clashed with Fanny Bassett Washington. Nonetheless, Washington still hoped to make a lady out of Harriot and in the fall of 1790 tried to install her at a proper boarding school in Philadelphia. Harriot stayed at Mount Vernon until 1792, when she moved to Fredericksburg and lived with Washington’s sister, Betty, before marrying Andrew Parks in 1795. When Harriot committed the faux pas of not consulting Washington about the marriage, the paterfamilias was miffed. When he belatedly congratulated her, he hinted that she would have to subdue her headstrong nature and that success in marriage would depend upon her subordinating her views to her husband’s.
In the fall of 1790 he brought to Philadelphia Harriot’s two unruly brothers, George Steptoe and Lawrence Augustine, who entered the College of Philadelphia (afterward the University of Pennsylvania). The status-conscious president wrote the boys long-winded letters about being clean and presentable and shying away from bad company—suggesting that his ungovernable nephews did neither. Although he footed the bill for their education, he did not invite them to stay in the presidential mansion, either from a shortage of space or because the mischievous boys lacked proper decorum. In writing to Betty, he revealed how financially strapped he felt in caring for Samuel’s three children: “I shall continue to do for [Harriot] what I have already done for seven years past and that is to furnish her with such reasonable and proper necessaries as she may stand in need of, notwithstanding I have had both her brothers upon my hands, and I have been obliged to pay several hundred pounds out of my own pocket for their boards, schooling, clothing etc.”22 Washington’s family munificence was all the more commendable in view of his financial difficulties. The two brothers must have matured in Philadelphia and outgrown their youthful indiscretions, for Washington later rewarded them handsomely in his will.
ON DECEMBER 14, 1790, Alexander Hamilton issued another electrifying state paper, this time on the need to charter the first central bank in American history. Capitalized at $10 million, the Bank of the United States would blend public and private ownership; the government would take a 20 percent stake and private investors the remaining 80 percent. This versatile institution would lend money to the government, issue notes that could serve as a national currency, and act as a repository for tax payments. The bank was patterned after the Bank of England—Hamilton kept its charter on his desk as he wrote—and coming on the heels of his report on public credit and excise taxes,
it unsettled opponents with the insidious specter of a British-style executive branch.
Five weeks later the bank bill passed the Senate with deceptive ease, prompting Madison to marshal stiff opposition in the House. Once again the southern states feared that Hamilton’s system would consolidate northern financial hegemony over agrarian southern interests. Madison responded boldly to the views of his dismayed constituents. Where he had articulated a broad view of federal power as coauthor of The Federalist, he now balked at what he deemed a dangerous extension of that power. In the Constitution he could find no specific license for a central bank—in his evocative phrase, the bank bill “was condemned by the silence of the Constitution.” 23 In defiance of his determined efforts, the bill passed the House on February 8 by a margin of 39 to 20. In an omen of future strife, the vote again divided sharply along geographic lines: the northern states were almost solidly for the bank, and the southern states were largely lined up against it. To skittish southerners, the treasury secretary seemed triumphant and unstoppable in his quest for centralized power, rolling out programs in rapid succession, each one meshing with the next in a seamless system of interlocking parts.