George Washington Parke Custis - Life

Life

George and Nelly were 8 and 10, respectively, when brought to New York City in 1789 to live with the Washingtons in the first presidential mansion. Following the transfer of the national capital to Philadelphia, the original "First Family" occupied the President's House from 1790 to 1797. Custis attended but did not graduate from the Germantown Academy in Germantown (now Philadelphia) PA, the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) and St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. Upon Custis' return to Mount Vernon after only one term at St. John's, George Washington sent him to his mother and stepfather at Hope Park saying, "He appears to me to be moped and stupid, says nothing, and is always in some hole or corner excluded from the company." It appears that Custis was a reluctant student throughout his learning years. George Washington repeatedly expressed in his diaries and correspondence concern and frustration about Custis and his own inability to improve Custis.

Upon reaching his majority in 1802, Custis inherited large amounts of money, land and property from the estates of his father and grandfather, as well as through bequests from Martha and George Washington. Almost immediately, he began constructing Arlington House on land inherited from his father that was located on a hill that is now directly across the Potomac River from the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Custis 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; Lee's father, Henry Lee, had famously eulogized Pres. George Washington at the December 18, 1799 funeral.

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.

In 1853, the writer Benson John Lossing visited Custis at Arlington House.

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.