You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington

by Alexis Coe

No woman has written an adult biography of George Washington in more than forty years, and no woman historian has written one in far longer.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that there is not a single letter or diary entry substantiating the wooden teeth. Nor are there instructional materials on wooden-tooth making in early American medical literature, or anything to suggest that Washington was a dental innovator. The wooden teeth are a myth,

His dentists took chunks of ivory from hippopotamuses, walruses, and elephants, sculpted them down, and affixed them to dentures using brass screws.

He paid his slaves for their teeth, but not at fair market value. From his ledger, recorded in his own hand, we see that he offered six pounds and two shillings for at least nine teeth—two-thirds less than Greenwood offered in newspaper advertisements.5

In a young, monarchy-weary America, Washington’s lack of heirs gave him a distinct political advantage; it comforted people to know that he had no bloodline to preserve, no power-hungry scion to worry about.

“Ciprian Dame” was eighteenth-century-speak for a sex worker, but she may have been a barmaid or a mistress or a slave.

White Americans’ enthusiasm for liberty and “humanity and tenderness” was mostly reserved for people who shared their skin color. They had no plans to abolish slavery. That left them vulnerable to the British, who’d promised freedom for slaves who fought for the crown.

None of Washington’s struggles “fixed itself on my mind so indelibly as the crossing of the Delaware,” wrote Abraham Lincoln, the man who saved the union Washington won, four score and a few years later. Lincoln added, “I am exceedingly anxious that the object they fought for—liberty, and the Union and Constitution they formed—shall be perpetual.”

And so was the image of that Christmas night, recorded seventy-five years later in Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. The painting’s inaccuracies abound—the flag Monroe carries has yet to be introduced, the ice is much too thick—but it hardly matters.9 Leutze managed to capture a certain against-all-odds spirit, which seemed to persuade the world that America was born righteous, so Washington along with it.

Benjamin Quarles, a scholar of African American history, estimates that the British evacuated four thousand slaves from Savannah, six thousand from Charleston, and four thousand from New York after the war, but cautions “these figures are a bit low.” The British likely “carried away” another five thousand people before the surrender at Yorktown,

Washington went by the name of Agent 711 and exchanged enough letters with Woodhull to grow tired of his lengthy asides about how brightly the American cause for liberty and freedom burned.

When Washington assumed the presidency, his reputation was beyond reproach. Everywhere he went, the public celebrated him, and everyone he met respected him, wanted to be his friend, and seemed eager to serve him in any capacity. But by the end of two terms in office, Washington was estranged from three of his four original cabinet members, as well as three out of four future presidents. Half the country considered itself politically opposed to him.

“My movements to the chair of Government will be accompanied with feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.” He worried that he lacked “that competency of political skill—abilities & inclination which is necessary to manage the helm.”

He was private about his religious views; he often spoke of “Providence,” rarely “God” and “Jesus” or “Christ.” He was most likely a deist, which meant he believed that God was responsible for the creation of the world, but does not intervene in it. Above all, he firmly believed in religious freedom; during his presidency, he would write as much to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island.

He eventually recovered, only to be taken ill again and again during his presidency; there was a repeat abscess in his thigh, and later, his cheek; he experienced regular fevers, inflammation of the eye, and back strains; he fell off a horse and had to use a crutch to move around. In the spring of 1790, during a flu outbreak in New York, he became infected.

“Time has made havoc upon his face,” observed Fisher Ames, a congressman from Massachusetts, during the inauguration.18 It may have been a pained reaction to all the attention, but such comments would only become more frequent—and be made about every president who followed.

He became the first and only president to take up arms against his own citizens, and to come along for the ride—though he did so mostly from a carriage, dismounting only when it was time to review the troops.

But months later, Washington still had a point to make. During his sixth annual address to Congress, he blamed “Self created Societies” for inflaming dissent against the government and causing greater divisions across the country.

In December, Randolph published a pamphlet titled Vindication, the first tell-all from an American presidential administration. (Jefferson’s copy, complete with his marginalia, resides at the Library of Congress.)

In the spring of 1796, they demanded that the president share the diplomatic instructions Jay had received. Washington refused, asserting for the first time what would become known as executive privilege.

The Constitution prescribed term limits of four years, but it did not restrict how many terms could be served; in choosing to stop at two, Washington set a precedent that would endure into the twentieth century, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt went for a third.

He worried that “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of Government.”10 Political partisanship, Washington predicted, would reduce the government to a crowd of bickering representatives who were very good at thwarting each other but got very little accomplished for their constituents.

Unbridled partisanship was his greatest fear, and his greatest failure was that he became increasingly partisan.

Washington always emphasized that emancipation be gradual; one could argue that this was to acclimate everyone to the notion, but it would, most importantly, lessen the financial blow to slave owners. Still, he did nothing to address the issue while he was in office.