George Washington Parke Custis

George Washington Parke Custis

George Washington Parke Custis (April 30, 1781 – October 10, 1857), the step-grandson (and adopted son) of United States President George Washington, was a nineteenth-century American writer, orator, and agricultural reformer.

Family

The Arms of the Barons Baltimore

Through his mother Eleanor Calvert Custis Stuart, he was a great-grandson of Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore and of Henry Lee of Ditchley. He was the grandson of Martha Washington through her first marriage to Daniel Parke Custis. His father, John Parke Custis, died in November 1781, when "Wash" was an infant. He and his sister "Nelly" (Eleanor Parke Custis) were raised at Mount Vernon by George and Martha Washington. Their two older sisters, Elizabeth Parke Custis and Martha Parke Custis, remained with their mother and her second husband, Dr. David Stuart of Alexandria, VA (married 1783), who subsequently produced 7 additional children.

Life

^{Mellon Collection, National Gallery of Art}
"The Washington Family" by Edward Savage, painted between 1789 and 1796, shows (from left to right): Wash Custis, George Washington, Nelly Custis, Martha Washington, and an enslaved servant (probably William Lee or Christopher Sheels).

Wash and Nelly were 8 and 10, respectively, when brought to New York City in 1789 to live with their grandparents in the first presidential mansion. Following the transfer of the national capital, the First Family occupied the President's House in Philadelphia from 1790 to 1797. Wash Custis attended but did not graduate from the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) and St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland.

Upon reaching his majority in 1802, he inherited vast sums of money, land and slaves from the estates of his father and grandfather, as well as bequests from his grandmother and step-grandfather.^[1] Almost immediately, he began the construction of Arlington House on a high hill directly across the Potomac River from the Mall in Washington, D.C.. It took 16 years to complete the mansion, which he intended to serve as a living memorial to George Washington.

On July 7, 1804, Custis married Mary Lee Fitzhugh. Of their four children, only one daughter, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, survived. She married Robert E. Lee at Arlington House on June 30, 1831.

In 1799, Custis was commissioned as a cornet in the United States Army and aide-de-camp to general Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. During the War of 1812, Custis volunteered in the defense of Washington, D.C., at the Battle of Bladensburg.

In 1825, Lafayette and his son Georges Washington de La Fayette visited him at Mount Vernon.^[2]

In 1853, the writer Benson John Lossing visited Custis at Arlington House.^[3]

Custis was notable as an orator and playwright. Two addresses delivered during the War of 1812 had national circulation, Oration by Mr. Custis, of Arlington; with an Account of the Funeral Solemnities in Honor of the Lamented Gen. James M. Lingan (1812) and The Celebration of the Russian Victories, in Georgetown, District of Columbia; on the 5th of June, 1813 (1813). Two of Custis's plays, The Indian Prophecy; or Visions of Glory (1827) and Pocahontas; or, The Settlers of Virginia (1830), were published. Other plays include The Rail Road (1828), The Eighth of January, or, Hurra for the Boys of the West! (ca. 1830), North Point, or, Baltimore Defended (1833), and Montgomerie, or, The Orphan of a Wreck (1836). Custis wrote a series of biographical essays about his adoptive father, collectively entitled Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington, which was posthumously edited and published by his daughter.

Civil War

Arlington House from a pre-1861 sketch, published in 1875.

When Custis died in 1857, his son-in-law Robert E. Lee came to control almost 200 slaves on Custis's three plantations, Arlington House, White House in New Kent County, and Romancoke in King William County. Under Custis's will, the slaves were to be freed once the legacies from his estate were paid, and absolutely no later than five years after his death.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, the 1,100-acre Arlington Plantation was confiscated by Union forces for strategic reasons (protection of the river and national capital). But the burial, beginning in 1864, of 16,000 War dead surrounding Confederate General Robert E. Lee's home attests to the cold resentment against the commander of the Confederate Army, by Montgomery C. Meigs. Arlington Plantation is now Arlington National Cemetery. Arlington House, built by Custis to honor Washington, is now the Robert E. Lee Memorial, and is open to the public under the auspices of the National Park Service.

Notes

References

Memorial Drive and the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery. Arlington House is visible on the hill above.

• Bearss, Sara B. "The Federalist Career of George Washington Parke Custis," Northern Virginia Heritage 8 (February 1986): 15–20.
• Bearss, Sara B. "The Farmer of Arlington: George W. P. Custis and the Arlington Sheep Shearings," Virginia Cavalcade 38 (1989): 124–133.
• Brady, Patricia. Martha Washington: An American Life (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2005). ISBN 0-670-03430-4.
• John T. Kneebone et al., eds., Dictionary of Virginia Biography (Richmond: The Library of Virginia, 1998- ), 3:630-633. ISBN 0-88490-206-4.

External links

• Biography by the National Park Service
• Biography and epitaph
• Custis's Will
• The President's House in Philadelphia