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 Washington’s left cheekbone, the by-product of an abscessed tooth.

By 1781 Washington had partial dentures made with a bone and ivory framework, secured to natural teeth and held together by a primitive mesh of wires. Before marching south to Yorktown, he wrote with some urgency to Dr. Baker, asking for “a pair of pincers to fasten the wire of my teeth” and also “one of your scrapers, as my teeth stand in need of cleaning.” 3 At this point Washington had a small arsenal of devices to keep his aching mouth in working order. In a secret, locked drawer of his desk at Mount Vernon, he preserved a pair of pulled teeth and not long before the Newburgh mutiny asked Lund to wrap them up carefully and send them along. His objective was to have Dr. Baker insert them into a partial bridge; the dentist was to send him plaster of paris or some other powder to create a model of his mouth. When this letter was intercepted by the British, it occasioned some sadistic merriment while leaving poor Washington in considerable distress. The episode could only have strengthened his self-consciousness about his dental problems.

As it turned out, deliverance lay at hand in the person of an eminent French dentist, Dr. Jean-Pierre Le Mayeur, who had worked in occupied New York, treating Sir Henry Clinton and other British generals. One day a British officer made a cutting remark about the French alliance with America, and the dentist rushed indignantly to his country’s defense, ending the honeymoon with the British. Having established his patriotic credentials, Dr. Le Mayeur passed over to the American side, where his reputation preceded him. Washington was eager to consult the Frenchman, “of whose skill much has been said,” but he wanted the matter treated with utmost discretion, telling his intermediary categorically that “I would not wish that this matter should be made a parade of.”4 Thorough in all things, Washington demanded “a private investigation of this man’s character and knowledge of his profession” before he opened up his mouth to his ministrations.5

In June 1783, when Washington consulted the urbane Le Mayeur in confidence at Newburgh, he handled their relationship as furtively as if he were meeting a master spy. (He seemed mystified by the spelling of the Frenchman’s name, calling him La Moyuer at one point, as if he dared not check the spelling with a potentially indiscreet third party.) Evidently, the dentist agreed to craft a pair of partial dentures. Washington responded with an elliptical letter that resorted to euphemisms, never mentioning such explosive words as dental or dentures in case unfriendly eyes stumbled upon it. “The valise arrived safe, as did the three articles which accompanied your card,” Washington wrote cryptically. “. . . The small matters [his teeth?] which were expected from Virginia are not yet received, and it is to be feared will never be found.”6

Always a tough, leery customer, Washington was skeptical about claims made for transplanted teeth. The following year, when Le Mayeur performed a successful transplant upon Richard Varick, it made a convert of Washington. According to Mary Thompson, Washington bought nine teeth in 1784 from certain nameless “Negroes” for thirteen shillings apiece.7 Whether he wanted the teeth implanted directly in his mouth or incorporated into dentures, we cannot say. However ghoulish this trade sounds to modern readers, it was then standard practice for rich people to purchase teeth from the poor. In his advertisements, Dr. Le Mayeur offered to buy teeth from willing vendors and bid “three guineas for good front teeth from anyone but slaves.”8 This suggests a stigma among white people about having slaves’ teeth. We can deduce that Washington’s dental transplant miscarried, since by the time of his presidential inauguration in 1789, he had only a single working tooth remaining.

ON APRIL 18 , 1783 , Washington announced the cessation of hostilities between America and Great Britain and seemed to pinch himself with wonder as he evoked “the almost infinite variety of scenes thro[ugh] which we have passed with a mixture of pleasure, astonishment, and gratitude.”9 The normally prudent Washington, throwing caution to the winds, rhapsodized about America’s future, saying of the patriotic soldiers who had wrested freedom from Great Britain that “happy, thrice happy shall they be pronounced hereafter . . . in erecting this stupendous fabric of freedom and empire on the broad basis of independence . . . and establishing an asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations and religions.”10 As always when casting events in grandiose historical terms, he fell back on a theatrical metaphor: “Nothing now remains but for the actors of this mighty scene to preserve a perfect, unvarying consistency of character through the very last act” and then “close the drama with applause.”11 Washington ordered his quartermaster general to gather up discharges so he could begin sending soldiers home. In a wonderful tribute to his men, he personally signed thousands of these documents. His hand surely ached from this gesture, which spoke volumes about the affection and empathy he had developed for them.

Unwilling to abandon his command until the final peace treaty was signed and the British had evacuated New York, Washington still had no firm plans to return to Virginia. He had to cope with nettlesome racial issues, as the armistice reopened questions about the status of former slaves. When a slaveholder named Jonathan Hobby tried to recapture a runaway slave serving in the Third Massachusetts Regiment, Washington shunted the matter to a board of inquiry, which ruled that the soldier in question hadn’t yet served out his term. Refusing to release the black soldier, Washington dodged the deeper issue of whether a slave master could reclaim a fugitive slave in the Continental Army. Hardly an abolitionist, Washington fielded messages from incensed southern slaveholders inquiring about the fate of slaves who had dashed to freedom behind British lines. Washington seemed caught off guard. “Although I have several servants in like predicament with yours,” he told one Virginia slaveholder, “I have not yet made any attempt for their recovery.”12