Washington [440]
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