CHAPTER THREE

The Widow Custis

MARTHA DANDRIDGE CUSTIS was just under five feet tall, with hazel eyes and dark hair. By her own account she had “beautiful” teeth and was “a fine, healthy girl.” Except for her tiny hands and her rather prominent nose, almost everything about her was round and soft. Plain, plump, and short, she might have been invisible to male eyes in the vicinity of one of Virginia’s tempestuous beauties except that she was vivacious—“good, sweet … loves to talk,” said one European nobleman—and she was very, very rich.1

Her wealth came from her marriage to Daniel Parke Custis. His death in 1757 at the age of forty-six, probably from a heart attack, had left twenty-six-year-old Martha with two small children and an estate worth more than £40,000, as well as some 18,000 acres of land.2

The time and place of George and Martha’s first meeting has been thoroughly debated by historians: did Washington deliberately seek out the widow Custis for her fortune, or did he happen to cross paths with her and receive, unbidden, Cupid’s arrow? The family liked to believe the latter. A story passed down in the Custis and Washington families, transmitted by an old Custis slave and by Washington’s white body servant, claimed that Washington was traveling to Williamsburg on military business when he crossed the Pamunkey River near the home of a friend who, in the usual Virginia fashion, insisted that Washington come in for a visit and meet his guests, among them the recently widowed Martha Custis. Smitten, Washington lingered at the house overnight, and soon thereafter asked Mrs. Custis for her hand. A close reading of Washington’s diary, however, casts doubt. The slave and the servant were probably remembering a different visit.

The bare fact is that Washington’s first mention of Martha occurs in his daily record of expenses: he noted how much he tipped her servants on a visit in March 1758 to her house.3 (The tips were very large—he was making a great display of generosity.) Thus the evidence points to a planned call upon a rich widow (nine months older than himself) whose recent bereavement was well known in the upper echelon of Virginia society. Some calculation is apparent on the other side as well. Daniel Custis had been dead only nine months, but the widow was not so consumed by grief that she could not entertain a gentleman caller.

Washington would certainly have arrived looking resplendent in his uniform, full of stories of action on the frontier. He would, with equal certainty, have stated his intention to resign his commission in the event of a change in his marital status, since a young widow would not want to exchange the solitude of bereavement for the loneliness of being an officer’s wife. The setting itself was romantic. Martha resided in a grand old Virginia house by the side of a lazy river.

A clue to their feelings can be found in their expense accounts. The month after they met both George and Martha were firing off orders to their London agents for something gay to wear. Washington, all atwitter, ordered, “By the first ship bound to any part of Virginia* … as much of the best superfine Blue Cotton Velvet as will make a coat, waistcoat and breeches for a tall man.” Martha ordered a suit of clothes “not to be mourning” and, thinking way ahead, sent her favorite nightgown out to be dyed a “fashionable” color.4

The marriage went ahead very swiftly thanks to the absence of meddlesome fathers-in-law, who would have scrutinized the couple’s accounts and haggled over the marriage settlement. Negotiations over an earlier Custis marriage, for example, included this sharp communiqué from the father of the prospective bride: “I do not know your young gentleman, nor have you or he thought fit to send an account of his real and personal effects; however, if my daughter likes him, I will give her upon her marriage with him, half as much as he can make it appear he is worth.”5

George and Martha married at the Custis mansion, named “White House,” on the Pamunkey River on January 6, 1759. In his first order to his London merchant as a married man, George ordered a quantity of Spanish fly, the bitter aphrodisiac powder made from crushed beetles, useful for both sexes.6

Martha’s order for a spruced-up nightgown and George’s for the aphrodisiac hint at a physical attraction between the couple, but they were preeminently practical people. Financially and socially they possessed matching gears that meshed to power an engine of upward ascent. Martha needed a manager for her properties and a father for her children; Washington came from a family that married well, usually above its station. Altogether, it was a match made in Virginia. Washington resigned his commission in the Virginia militia largely because Martha’s fortune enabled him to become a large-scale gentleman planter. Had Martha not entered the picture, he might have returned to the militia to pursue another dream, a commission in the regular army of His Majesty.

*   *   *

The fortune that George Washington sought and won in the person of Martha Custis had a baroque history. The two children Martha brought to her second marriage both bore the middle name Parke, which would also be the middle name of every child in the next Custis generation. Names bespeak tradition, but in this instance the names bore heavy legal and financial freight. Part of the fortune Martha conveyed to Washington originated with one of Virginia’s most notorious figures, Daniel Parke II, a grandfather of Martha’s first husband. George Washington inherited the man’s assets and debts and raised two of his great-grandchildren. Even in the annals of Virginia, the Parke-Custis story stands out for its bizarre twists.

Born in Virginia in 1669, Daniel Parke II was exceedingly handsome, rich, and good with a sword. His skill at fencing unfortunately coincided with a short temper. He possessed “a quick resentment of every the least thing that looks like an affront or injury.” One Sunday morning at church he angrily threw out a woman who was sitting in the wrong pew. He was in the habit of issuing challenges to duel, “especially before company,” which was a serious breach of decorum. Parke managed to appall the gentry of two colonies at once when he took a horsewhip to the governor of Maryland and subsequently challenged him to a duel.7 As gross a breach as this was, Parke was merely beginning his climb up the slopes of notoriety. He returned from a sojourn in England with a young woman whom he airily called his “cousin,” openly installing her in the colony as his mistress, with their illegitimate son. He seemed to think that Virginians would close their eyes to the fact that he was already married to a high-ranking Virginia woman, whom he more or less abandoned, along with their two daughters.8

Parke grew bored with provincial society and sought excitement in England. He also tired of the complaints of his long-suffering wife; as he put it himself, he felt “obliged to be on one side of the ocean” with her on the other. Exquisitely adding insult to injury, he departed with his mistress, leaving his bastard son to be raised by his wife in Virginia.9

His charm, his fortune, and his connections wafted Parke aloft in the home country. He received a commission as a colonel in the British army, serving as aide-de-camp to the Duke of Marlborough with such distinction that he was given the honor of personally delivering news to Queen Anne of the army’s great victory at Blenheim in 1704. As expected, the queen expressed her delight by offering the messenger the very generous gift of £500. Unexpectedly, Parke declined the gift, saying that his only wish was to have a portrait of Her Majesty. The court swooned, and the queen bestowed upon Parke a lavish, jewel-encrusted miniature of herself. Modesty and humility, strategically expressed, had their reward.10

Back in Virginia, Parke’s two daughters attracted suitors of the highest rank, as Parke’s ascent to celebrity and royal favor erased concerns about his morals. Lucy Parke married William Byrd II, while Frances was pursued by John Custis, scion of a wealthy landowning family and later to be a member of the topmost governing body in the colony, the twelve-man Royal Council. Custis won the hand of Frances after arduous long-distance negotiations between the fathers-in-law. They married in 1706 and celebrated the birth of their son, Daniel Parke Custis, in 1710. Young Daniel never laid eyes on his grandfather.

In death, Parke ascended simultaneously to the heights of notoriety and gallantry. Having been appointed royal governor of the Leeward Islands, he managed to provoke his constituents, both high and low, in Antigua by incessant philandering with the wives and daughters of prominent planters and harsh attempts to enforce the smuggling laws, while himself sipping bootlegged claret. Spurning demands that he leave the island, Parke found himself facing a mob one morning in 1710. Captured by the rioters, Parke was brutally tortured. Here his stoic training emerged for the ultimate test. In the midst of extreme agony he remained calm, uttering no curse upon his tormentors but only rebuking them as an aristocrat would, urging them to be quicker with their foul business: “Gentlemen, you have no sense of honor left, pray have some humanity.” Sending up prayers, he died.11

Parke’s sudden demise provoked a scramble among his heirs, who knew that he possessed enormous wealth but did not know that he also owed crushing debts. He gave handsome bequests to two illegitimate children, while requiring that anyone who wished to claim an inheritance had to adopt the surname Parke. John and Frances Custis took possession of a portion of the Parke land in Virginia, while beginning a legal wrangle over who would pay the Parke debts. The squabble enriched lawyers in Virginia and England until 1772.

Not only Parke’s estate but his temperament endured as well. A family historian wrote that Parke’s “reckless blood seems to have raced like wildfire through the veins” of his descendants, including his daughter Frances. The strife in the Custis-Parke marriage grew to legendary proportions, all over money. As the husband, John Custis had the legal right to manage his wife’s properties, and he was so stingy that Frances was reduced to pawning pieces of the family silver. The couple argued violently and often, until they had to sit down with lawyers in Williamsburg and hash out an agreement by which Frances promised to forbear calling her husband “any vile names or give him any ill language, neither shall he give her any but to live lovingly together.”12

Their quarrels culminated in a famous episode near their plantation, called Arlington, on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, the peninsula that separates the Chesapeake Bay from the Atlantic. Ostensibly declaring a truce in their wrangling, John invited Frances to join him in a carriage ride to the shore. Instead of turning to drive along the beach John whipped the horses straight into the bay.

“Where are you going, Mr. Custis?” Frances asked, with the water swirling around them.

“To hell, Madam,” came the reply.

“Drive on,” said Frances, “any place is better than Arlington.”

Their quarrels ceased only with the death of Frances in 1715 from smallpox.13

After the death of his mother, Daniel Custis lived with his cantankerous father, alone except for their slaves; his older sister was sent away to be raised by her grandmother. The son seems to have been as docile as the father was demanding. His first attempts to establish a family of his own were quickly thwarted by the old man. At twenty-one Daniel courted a young woman who was already a widow (her name is known only as “Mrs. Betty”), but John Custis refused his approval on the shaky pretext that the lovers were too young. At the age of thirty-one he was still courting, and was again frustrated because his father and the father of his intended could not agree on a marriage settlement. In the meantime Daniel did his duty as a son, managing properties he did not yet own so successfully that the Custises expanded without taking on a great deal of debt. They kept much of their profits in cash, locked away in a formidable iron strongbox that eventually made its way to Mount Vernon, a symbol of the solidity of wealth.14

Against all expectation, the two-man Custis household expanded around 1739 when the senior Custis, now about sixty-one, presented Daniel with a half sibling. He had fathered a son, whom he named John, with one of his slaves. One would expect an elder statesman of Virginia to keep such a development private. But the child, dark-skinned or not, was a Custis. In 1744 John Custis took the extraordinary step of petitioning the governor and the council, where he sat himself, to set a slave child free. The petition stated the boy was “Christened John but commonly called Jack, born of the body of his Negro Wench Young Alice.” Though Jack was only about five years old, Custis had already bestowed property on him; now he wished the boy to be made free and specified that all Jack’s descendants would be free people. The implication of this petition would have been quite clear to Custis’s co-councillors; he did not ruffle the serenity of the council chamber with a bald statement that little John was his son. James B. Lynch, Jr., a Custis family historian, writes: “Although John … may have stretched the conventions of his age by treating Jack as a son, he did not defy them by declaring him one—such a manifesto would not only have been outside the bounds of tolerable behavior, it would have been unthinkable for a person of Custis’ stature and position.”15

Inured as he was to the demands, caprices, and the emotional distance of his father, Daniel must nevertheless have been flabbergasted by the gifts and the love John Custis bestowed on this mixed-race child of his old age. Lynch writes, “John’s legitimate son Daniel often had reason to believe that his father preferred ‘Black Jack’ to him.” In a letter to Daniel the father referred to the young mulatto half brother as his “dear black boy Jack,” making no secret of his affection. He had a portrait made of the boy. When Jack became ill, Custis wrote, with evident deep feeling, “my dear black boy Jack [is] … sick; wch make me very melancholy.” Custis said that if Jack were to die “I am sure I should soon follow him; it would break my heart, and bring my grey hairs with sorrow to the grave my lif being wrapt up in his.”16

The recesses of John Custis’s mind cannot be plumbed, but it is possible that his love for his black child came from a feeling that Jack was a true Custis, his black mother notwithstanding, whereas Daniel was a Parke, with the traits of John’s late, unlamented wife. In a fit of anger at Daniel, John drew up a will disinheriting him and giving his entire estate to Jack. Friends intervened and Custis tore up the will; but he still intended that Jack would inherit a substantial estate.17

In his final will Custis reaffirmed his emancipation of Jack and wrote, “I hereby strictly require” that Daniel build for Jack “a handsome strong convenient dwelling house” furnished with feather beds, walnut tables, and leather-cushioned chairs. Jack was also to have “a good riding horse and two able working horses.” To put a young black man on horseback was quite a declaration in Virginia. He gave him land and livestock, and set aside £500 sterling to provide a lifetime annuity and a yearly provision of food, clothing, and additional livestock, clearly intending that Jack should never have to work a day as long as he lived.18

Custis loved his black son but this did not make him an emancipator. He freed no other slaves, and gave several to Jack, who was allowed to choose four slaves his own age as companion-servants. In addition, into Jack’s care Custis placed the enslaved mother, Alice, whom Jack was to own with all her “increase” (the plantation term for a slave woman’s offspring). It seems that Custis felt no great love for Alice, else he might have set her free as well. To him, she may once have been a lover but she was still a slave. But Jack was different—Custis blood ran in his veins. Nothing, evidently, tormented old Custis more than to know that a Custis might be enslaved. In his will he carefully specified that all Jack’s offspring “born of any free Woman” were to be free. This clause virtually commanded Jack to confine his love to free women, because any children he had with a slave would be enslaved. Custis specified that Jack was to live with Daniel until he reached the age of seventeen.19

Into this peculiar household came Martha Dandridge. Martha was seventeen and Daniel thirty-eight when the couple decided to marry. Given his age, he may have thought Martha represented his last chance at matrimony. The Custis and Dandridge families lived not far from each other on the Pamunkey River in New Kent County. Martha’s uncle had served on the council with John Custis, but what should have been a mark in her favor was instead a point of contention, for the two politicians had quarreled in the past and the elder Custis continued to harbor a grudge. Worse, Custis was far richer than anyone in the Dandridge clan, “to whom he patently felt superior,” as a historian wrote. Martha, he probably thought, was nothing but a gold digger.20

The couple tried to keep their betrothal a secret until Daniel figured out a way to broach the subject with his father, but word of the arrangement leaked out through friends. Old man Custis was furious, threatening to throw his silverware into the street before he would see any Dandridge get a hand on it. He wrote bluntly on the subject of money: Martha was “much inferior in point of fortune.” High-ranking friends tried to intervene, as they had done before when Custis disinherited Daniel, but the father would have none of it.21

Clearly terrified of his father, Daniel could find no solution to the deadlock. Had he possessed some of the grit and temper of his Custis and Parke forebears, he might have bullied the bully into submission, but nearly four decades of his father’s dominance had snuffed any spark of independence. So Martha, a mere teenager, stepped into the lion’s den herself. She went to see old man Custis at Six Chimneys, as his grand Williamsburg mansion was called, and delivered “a prudent speech.” The old man softened somewhat at the pleadings of the young woman, whom he now saw as “beautifull & sweet temper’d.” But his irritation with his son remained, and he still refused to sanction the marriage. If Daniel and Martha proceeded with the nuptials without approval, in the hope that the old man would eventually relent, they ran the risk of provoking him into disinheriting Daniel a second time in favor of “Black Jack.”22

Shortly after Martha’s visit to Custis another negotiator arrived at Six Chimneys. A lawyer friend named James Power came bearing gifts, not for the old man but for his mulatto son. He presented young Jack with a horse, bridle, and saddle, and told Custis that the gifts were from Daniel. Custis melted at this display of affection from one brother to another; the kindness came wholly unexpected. All obstacles vanished—indeed Custis’s effusiveness over the match knew no bounds. He told Power to convey the following to Daniel immediately:

I am empowered by your father to let you know that he heartily and willingly consents to your marriage with Miss Dandridge—that he has so good a character of her, that he had rather you should have her than any lady in Virginia—nay, if possible, he is as much enamored with her character as you are with her person.… I stayed with him all night, and presented Jack with [a] horse, bridle, and saddle, in your name, which was taken as a singular favor.23

Since Power had brought the horse and its equipage with him, the gift had been planned in advance—but not by Daniel. Power had to tell him about the gift and that it had been bestowed in his name. One wonders if Power would have attempted such a bold and potentially hazardous stroke on his own, without the knowledge and approval of one of the principals. If Daniel did not know of the plan, Martha is the only one who could have been behind it. She understood the enigmatic John Custis better than his son did; she grasped that the father’s affection for his son, though he was of mixed race, was genuine and deep.

John Custis died in November 1749, writing his last will only eight days before his death. To the end he harbored suspicion about Daniel’s loyalty and obedience. He wrote that he wished to be buried on his ancestral plantation, Arlington, a long distance from Williamsburg. Conveying a corpse to the Eastern Shore would be bothersome, and Custis feared that his son might be inclined to forgo the inconvenience. To ensure that Daniel would honor this wish Custis specified: “I strictly require it that as soon as possible my Real Dead Body and not a sham Coffin be carried to my plantation … and there my real Dead Body be buried [next to] my grandfather.”24

The wedding of Martha Dandridge and Daniel Custis took place in May 1750,* probably at her family’s home. Under the terms of his father’s will Daniel was required to look after his younger mulatto brother until Jack turned seventeen. Virginia mansions were full of unacknowledged, dark-skinned half siblings acting as house servants, but the Custis situation was different. Jack had not been explicitly acknowledged as kin, but he had been freed and given property. As the Custis historian James Lynch writes, “One tries to visualize Daniel, Martha … and Jack living in a sort of ménage à trois at White House.”25

The “ménage” did not last very long. One night in 1751 Jack, then about twelve years old, became violently ill. A doctor was summoned to bleed him, but he died the following night. The sudden death of a mulatto heir, who had caused much distress to his wealthy brother, would be cause for suspicion, except that the diary of a family friend records a significant symptom: “Col. Custis’s Favorite Boy Jack died in ab[out] 21 hours illness … with a Pain in the back of his Neck.” Localized neck pain, rapid onset, and rapid death in a young patient are all consistent with meningococcal meningitis.26

The early death of Jack rescued Martha and Daniel from the humiliating requirement of overseeing the welfare of a freed slave who had been granted a life of ease on their money. Even in death, Black Jack caused problems for his brother. His father had given him a 266-acre parcel of land with the stipulation that in the event of Jack’s death it would go to a white man named Kendall. After Jack died Kendall took over the property, but Daniel went to court asserting that Jack had never been free, that his father’s manumission was defective on a technicality. The court disagreed, allowing Kendall to keep the land. Daniel had to buy it back.27

The story of the Custis fortune reveals the complexity of slavery, “the peculiar institution” Washington initially embraced and later contended against. Slavery began as a labor system, and we continue to think of it mainly in that narrow way, but in Washington’s time it was evolving into an interlocking network of public and private systems. The need to control enslaved laborers and to regularize ownership of them created a legal system of slavery;* the web of daily interactions between free and enslaved made slavery into a social system; finally, blood ties linking slaves and free people made slavery into a family system.

Each system had its own customs and rules, which sometimes came into conflict with the rules and customs of another system. As one of the richest and most powerful men in Virginia, John Custis had believed that within his private realm he could bend the social and legal apparatus to suit the needs of his black son. Combining affection for his son with the traditional haughtiness of the Virginia aristocrat, he had believed that he could, by Custis fiat, abolish slavery in this one instance for the sake of his family feelings.

On the surface, the Custis story is an amusing, racy tale of illicit sex and big money. We have caught a wealthy slaveholder, a titan of Virginia politics, in bed with a slave. We could take this as a revelation of the hypocrisy of colonial society, which condemned racial mixing while avidly practicing it, but in our eagerness to assert our moral superiority we would miss the significance of the episode: human impulse was the great enemy of the slave system. John Custis put his family’s wealth in danger when he acted out of sentiment, out of common humanity. He lost control of the situation, not in fathering an illegitimate child but in yielding to the fatherly impulse to recognize the child as his own. The legal and social rules of the time were designed to eliminate these dangers caused by human weakness. If slaves could not own property, then no one would give them any; if slaves could not be free without sending them out of the colony, then no one would free them; if slaves could not marry, then no free person would marry an enslaved lover. Slavery’s laws and customs constrained the free as well as the enslaved, but always with the purpose of preserving slavery.

History has been carefully shaped to suppress evidence of cracks in the slave system and distort the actions of the masters and mistresses who deviated from orthodoxy. In 1860 a biographer who worked closely with the Custis family, Benson J. Lossing, sought to explain Black Jack’s unusual status by saying that John Custis “had taken a most violent fancy” to him, omitting any mention of a blood tie. A cover story was being put in place by the Custis family with the aid of a cooperative biographer. Yet the Black Jack episode remained so well known in Virginia that it was impossible to suppress it entirely, though it was easy to hide the truth by implying that the old gentleman was deluded or senile. No Southerner would actually believe that explanation, but it would be useful for outsiders, who knew so little of plantation ways that they might swallow it. In my previous research into the Hairston family of planters, I documented the story of Robert Hairston, who had a daughter with a slave, set her free, and bequeathed her his entire estate. Some of his relatives tried to overturn the will on the grounds that he was insane, and the insanity explanation was advanced by generations of white Hairstons who could not bear to admit that their forebear had a black child.28

In similar fashion, Washington’s preeminent biographer, Douglas Southall Freeman, embellishes the Black Jack cover story by portraying Custis almost as a lunatic, writing that his “eccentricities were daily more marked and, in some ways, alarming. [He] had developed, in particular, an inexplicable fancy for a little slave boy named Jack, and once, after a madly unreasoning outburst of temper against Daniel, actually was believed to have made a will in which he left nothing to his children and his entire estate to the small Negro.” Writing in 1965, the biographer James Thomas Flexner was able to acknowledge Custis’s paternity of Jack, but so obliquely that the reader might easily miss it: “He freed a colored boy born on his estate whom he had named after himself, and threatened, whenever his white son did not obey him, to make Jack his sole heir.”29

The Black Jack story involved George Washington only tangentially, but it tended to cast a slight shadow of disrepute on Martha, by association, and a deeper one directly on the character of the Custis family. Lossing, author of several books about the Washington and Custis families, edited the memoirs of Martha’s grandson George Washington Parke Custis, in which the Black Jack tale is told in a footnote. He probably got the “most violent fancy” explanation of the story from Martha’s great-granddaughter Mary Custis Lee, the wife of Robert E. Lee; but the originator of the cover story was probably Martha herself, because there is a detail in the story that would have been known only to someone who had actually experienced the events in question. Only Martha could have conveyed the information that John Custis had written a will giving everything to Jack and then had torn it up; the will itself did not survive. That aspect of the story was the most unsettling one—it was a cautionary tale. Everyone knew that love could cross the racial boundary, but the real danger arose when property crossed it. Martha wanted it known that such people were mad, or nearly so.

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The newly wed Washingtons arrived at Mount Vernon in April 1759, after a honeymoon, with Martha’s children, at Williamsburg. In advance of their arrival Washington sent a hasty note by a slave to his manager, ordering him to put Mount Vernon in order for the arrival of the master and mistress. “Have the house very well cleaned,” he wrote, “make fires in the Rooms [and] Air them—You must get two of the best Bedsteads put up.… get out the Chairs and Tables, & have them very well rubd & Cleand—the Stair case ought also to be polishd in order to make it look well. Enquire about the Neighbourhood, & get some Egg’s and Chickens, and prepare in the best manner you can for our coming.” Mount Vernon was in disarray on many counts—Washington was enlarging and renovating the house, which was cluttered with paints, tools, and construction debris. The farm itself was clearly in disorder if Washington felt he had to send out for eggs.30

Hardly had the Washingtons arrived when George got down to very pressing business, his assumption of control over the Custis estate. He settled at his desk with a large pile of Custis accounts and ran his eye over page after page of inventories from their six plantations in six counties. He wrote out lists of all the slaves, beginning with a roster of the eighty-four “dower slaves,” worth almost £3,000, that represented Martha’s share of the Custis slaves, the share he now controlled. He wrote to the Custis agents in London, Robert Cary & Company, informing them of the new arrangement of the family affairs:

The Inclos’d is the Ministers Certificate of my Marriage with Mrs. Martha Custis, properly as I am told, Authenticated, You will therefore for the future please to address all your Letters which relate to the Affairs of the late Danl. Parke Custis Esqr. to me, as by Marriage I am entitled to a third part of that Estate, and Invested likewise with the care of the other two thirds by a Decree of our Genl. Court which I obtain’d in order to strengthen the Power I before had in consequence of my Wifes Administration.31

Under Virginia law, because Daniel Custis had died without leaving a will, his estate had been divided into three parts for his wife and two children. The value of Daniel Custis’s Virginia estate, not counting his nearly 18,000 acres of land, was about £30,000, of which about £9,000 represented the value of his slaves. In addition he held about £10,000 in British accounts. His Virginia cash, bonds, securities, other liquid assets, and personal property were split evenly, with each heir receiving more than £7,000. Under the law, Martha’s “dower” share became Washington’s property immediately upon their marriage. By court order Washington became legal guardian of both children, with control over their finances. Two-thirds of the land and slaves went to Jacky in name, but under Washington’s guardianship. Martha received the remaining third for her use during her lifetime only; these lands and slaves came under George Washington’s management, but he could not sell them because after Martha’s death they would revert to the Custis estate, earmarked for Jacky. Patsy received no land or slaves, her inheritance being entirely in cash and securities.32

Jacky and Patsy embodied the future of the Custis family. To ensure their position in their toplofty stratum of Virginia society, their fortune could not just be ample, it had to be splendid. When the time came, they would not find suitable marriage mates if the estate had declined. Martha would not want to see her children endure the rejection she had suffered at the hands of old John Custis, who spurned her because she was “much inferior in point of fortune.” Thus Martha, her children, and Washington entered into a symbiotic relationship with the estate that supported them. As David Hackett Fischer observes: “The primary purpose of [inheritance] customs was not to serve the interest of individuals, but to promote the welfare of the family and even the estate.… More than one English gentleman believed that his estate did not exist to serve posterity; but that posterity existed to serve the estate.”33

Indeed the Custis estate remained a legal entity unto itself until Jacky Custis came of age. The law required Washington to make regular reports of his stewardship to the court in Williamsburg. For more than a decade he had judges and lawyers looking over his shoulder as he recorded, in minute detail, every transaction involving the Custis children. If he summoned a doctor to treat Patsy, if he bought Jacky books, he had to write the expenditures in his ledger and report them annually. This complicated arrangement required that he keep the books carefully, since he was managing three distinct financial entities whose assets could easily become commingled and confused. In fact, this happened among the slaves. Custis slaves married Washington slaves, creating families that crossed the columns in Washington’s ledgers. These intermarriages caused Washington enormous anxiety at the end of his life, as he faced the prospect of freeing part of a family while leaving the other part enslaved, unless he could persuade the Custis heirs of the justice of emancipation. But all of that was far in the future. Washington wrote to another business agent expressing the delight he was feeling as family life took root at Mount Vernon: “I am now I believe fixd at this Seat with an agreable Consort for Life and hope to find more happiness [here] than I ever experienc’d amidst a wide and bustling World.”34

Though Washington could be aloof and distant among adults, he loved children. “He was rather partial to children,” Martha’s grandson G.W.P. Custis recalled, drawing from his own memories of gamboling about Mount Vernon; “their infantine playfulness appeared to please him.”35 Jacky and Patsy, aged five and three, had their own slaves at Mount Vernon. A ten-year-old boy named Julius “waits on Jacky Custis,” according to the financial accounts Washington wrote out. Jacky shared with his sister the services of a nineteen-year-old maid named Moll, who “sews &ca for them.” In addition, Patsy had her own maid, a twelve-year-old also named Moll. To Washington, who had spent his own teen years on the frontier, sleeping in the open and in vermin-ridden pest holes, the constant bustling of house servants tending to the every whim of children must have seemed like a mirage. Altogether, twelve house slaves tended the four Washingtons, including two waiters, a cook, scullion, ironer, washer, spinner, seamstress, and Martha’s fifteen-year-old maid, Sally. Such a profusion of services would have been impossible without slavery.36

Although Washington adopted Martha’s two children, they did not take their new father’s name: their name remained “Custis.” The children’s personal slaves wore “livery,” colorful “Babes in Toyland” uniforms with a customized design that signified their servitude not to the Washingtons but to the Custises. In ordering the livery from London, Washington specified: “let the Livery be suited to the Arms of the Custis Family.” Clearly Martha wanted to impress upon her children their Custis bloodline over their acquired Washington lineage.37

*   *   *

With historical figures of George and Martha Washington’s stature—people whose lives have been minutely researched—it would seem very unlikely that new material would surface that would change our view of them in any significant way. But in the archives at Mount Vernon and through contacts with slave descendants I came across quite startling new information about the Washingtons and their slaves. There was a slave child at Mount Vernon who was their relative; she was Martha’s half sister and became George Washington’s kin through his marriage to Martha.

Among the small slave children frolicking about Mount Vernon in the spring of 1759 was a girl named Ann Dandridge, who probably became a playmate of Jacky and Patsy. She was also their aunt, though they didn’t know it. Ann was the daughter of Martha’s father and a woman whose name is not known, of mixed white, Native American, and African blood. Ann’s date of birth is unknown, but Martha’s father died in 1756, at age fifty-six, so Ann would have been at least three when she came to Mount Vernon and may have been slightly older. Martha took her in after her father’s death and made her part of the Custis household and then the Washington household. As far as I can tell Ann is not mentioned in any of the Mount Vernon records. This omission led me to think that Ann might not have been a slave, because Washington kept rather good accounts of the slaves at Mount Vernon, though there are many gaps (for one thing, no systematic record of slave births has been found). Tracing a slave or servant named Ann is problematic because the nicknames Anna, Nancy, and Nan were common. The question of Ann’s legal status was resolved when, through a descendant of hers, I found a record of her manumission in 1802, carried out after Martha’s death. Ann came into the possession of Martha’s granddaughter Eliza Custis Law, whose husband arranged the manumission when Ann was in her forties. She was freed under her married name, Holmes, and the nickname Nancy.38*

The manumission record does not mention a blood tie to Martha. Ann’s family history emerges, ironically, in a record of the most public sort—a Congressional report published in 1871, a survey of schools in Washington, D.C., whose authors interviewed Ann’s granddaughter, a teacher. She gave an account of her family background: “Ann Dandridge was the daughter of a half-breed, (Indian and colored,) her grandfather being a Cherokee chief, and her reputed father was the father of Martha Dandridge, afterwards Mrs. Custis, who, in 1759, was married to General Washington.” This discovery struck me as highly important for many reasons: it completely undercuts the image of the Washingtons as radically separate and aloof from their slaves; it adds layers of questions to Washington’s final decision to emancipate his slaves; and it takes us deeply into the psychology of mastery.39

In many respects Ann Dandridge existed in a kind of twilight. She was in fact a Dandridge and carried the name, but legally she was a nonperson, mere property. Ann’s very existence presented Martha with a problem. Had Martha felt resentment or malice for her half sister, she would have sold her or found some other way of discreetly getting rid of her. We might speculate that to protect the child Martha believed she had to keep her a slave—it was her duty as a sister and as a Dandridge, whatever feelings she might have had. By the standards of that time and place Martha probably thought this enslavement was an act of benevolence. Looking at the situation from Martha’s perspective, one can see that the Virginia of 1759 was an impossible place for a free black Dandridge female. Ann might have found a home as a servant girl to a genteel family, but her path would have been inexorably downward. No white man of any substance would have married her; she would probably have found a colored or black husband among the free or enslaved African-Americans. Her children—Dandridge children—would have been dark-skinned and possibly enslaved. So out of duty and perhaps out of affection Martha took her sister under her wing and kept her a slave indefinitely. But there is another perspective here as well: once Martha was dead, Eliza and her husband could not bear to have Ann’s enslavement continue. So one is compelled to ask, if Eliza could see the humanity of her great-aunt and free her, why could Martha not see it when Ann was no longer a child in need of protection but a grown woman?

Unlike old John Custis, who could not abide keeping his son Jack in slavery, Martha had the mental steel to hold a half sister as a slave. Martha’s act reveals the capacity of the masters and mistresses to tolerate profound psychological dislocation, the conversion of kin into property. The evolution of slavery from a simple labor system into a complex, multigenerational nexus of sexual entanglements, property rights, secret family ties, and inheritance customs had thrown their tight little world out of joint. They had constructed a society where one sister held another in slavery, or where a family might simply dispose of blood kin. To his surprise, Washington discovered in 1760 that a Mount Vernon slave was the offspring of another prominent white family: “I was informd that Colo. Cocke was disgusted at my House, and left it because he [saw] an old Negroe there resembling his own Image.” As Catesby Cocke was then fifty-eight, the old slave might have been a half brother he never knew he had. In any case he was flabbergasted to encounter enslaved kin. Some slaveholders saw the moral contradiction and some did not; there were divisions even in the same household. Later on, when George Washington was strenuously, desperately seeking a way to free his slaves, Martha lifted not a finger to help. She had been schooled better than he in the rigid mental discipline of mastery.40

With his marriage to Martha Custis, Washington became personally engaged in a mode of slavery that required certain evasions, denials, and psychological cruelties. When I traced Ann Dandridge’s later life, I suspected that her plight formed one of the major reasons George Washington ultimately decided to free his slaves. Her role in motivating his actions remains unclear because George and Martha Washington never mention Ann in their surviving papers; but she was there at Mount Vernon, a daily reminder of the paradox of slavery. For a man of Washington’s character, the lies and emotional cruelties of the plantation became unbearable. In 1759, as the beneficiary of one of the greatest slave-based fortunes in Virginia, Washington had to acquiesce, to cooperate with a bizarre system. Ultimately it repelled him, but not now—not when the Custis slaves brought him his salvation.