Washington [303]
Making good on his pledges, Washington wrote impassioned letters to Congress on behalf of the officers’ finances. In one to Joseph Jones, he said that Congress shouldn’t rely on him again to “dispel other clouds, if any should arise, from the causes of the last.”60 Perhaps he sensed that a deity couldn’t step down from the clouds more than once without dispelling his mystique. He had tamed his mutinous officers and established congressional supremacy in the nick of time. A few days later he received word that a preliminary peace treaty had been signed in Paris. In mid-April Congress ratified the treaty, leading to a formal cessation of hostilities eight years after the first shots rang out in Lexington and Concord.
The man who had pulled off the exemplary feat of humbling the most powerful military on earth had not been corrupted by fame. Though quietly elated and relieved, he was neither intoxicated by power nor puffed up with a sense of his own genius. On April 15 a Jamaican visitor dined with Washington at his Newburgh headquarters and was amazed at the simplicity of the scene: “The dinner was good, but everything was quite plain. We all sat on camp stools . . . Mrs. W[ashington] was as plain, easy, and affable as [the general] was and one would have thought from the familiarity which prevailed here that he saw a respectable private gentleman dining at the head of his own family.”61 Washington shunned the conqueror’s bravado. “In his dress he was perfectly plain—an old blue coat faced with buff, waistcoat and britches . . . seemingly of the same age and without any lace upon them composed his dress,” the visitor wrote. “His shirt had no ruffles at the wrists, but [was] of very fine linen . . . His hair is a little gray and combed smoothly back from the forehead and in a small queue—no curls and but very little powder to it. Such is the man, but his character I cannot presume to describe—it is held in the highest veneration over the whole continent.”62
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Closing the Drama with Applause
BY THE SPRING OF 1783 George Washington had visibly aged, as evidenced by his gray hair and failing eyesight. “He was fine-looking until three years ago,” an aide to Rochambeau had reported a year earlier, adding that “those who have been constantly with him since that time say that he seems to have grown old fast.” 1 It could only have saddened a man of his athletic vitality to feel his powers begin to ebb. One great blow to Washington’s sense of well-being was the steady deterioration of his teeth. While in the eyes of posterity his dental problems rank among his best-known attributes, he did everything he could to screen the trouble from contemporaries. An air of extreme secrecy shrouded his dealings with dentists, as if he were dabbling in a dark, shameful art. Perhaps he sensed that nothing could subvert his heroic image more unalterably than derisory sniggers about his teeth.
As early as the French and Indian War, Washington had had a tooth pulled, and thereafter his papers are replete with allusions to dental tribulations. From one London apothecary, he ordered “sponge” toothbrushes and bottles of tincture designed to soothe toothaches. A typical complaint in his diaries reads: “indisposed with an aching tooth and swelled and inflamed gums.”2 By 1773 he found it agonizing to chew meals. His customary solution was to pull troublesome teeth, and, while sitting in the House of Burgesses, he kept busy a Williamsburg dentist, Dr. John Baker. When he painted Washington in 1779, the observant Charles Willson Peale spotted an indentation just below