Everything about George Washington Parke Custis totally explained
George Washington Parke Custis (
April 30,
1781 –
October 10,
1857), the adopted son (and also stepgrandson) of
United States President George Washington, was a nineteenth-century American writer, orator, and agricultural reformer.
Through his mother Eleanor Calvert Custis Stuart, he was a great-grandson of
Charles Calvert, 5th Baron Baltimore and of
Henry Lee of Ditchley. He was the grandson of
Martha Washington through her first marriage to
Daniel Parke Custis. After his father,
John Parke Custis, died in November 1781, he and one of his sisters,
Eleanor Parke Custis, were raised at
Mount Vernon by George and Martha Washington. Custis attended but didn't graduate from the College of New Jersey (later
Princeton University) and
St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland.
In
1802 he began the construction of
Arlington House on land he'd inherited from his father. He intended the house also to serve as a memorial to his adoptive father. The house has been restored and is now open to the public under the auspices of the
National Park Service.
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 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. Later, Custis volunteered in the defense of
Washington, D.C., at the
Battle of Bladensburg during the
War of 1812.
In
1853, the writer
Benson John Lossing visited Custis at Arlington House. See the Cornell University Library transcription of
Harper's New Monthly Magazine article:
(External Link
) (starting on page 433). Four of the Custis paintings mentioned in the
Harper's article can be seen in color (Battle of Germantown/Battle of Trenton/Battle of Princeton/Washington at Yorktown) in the February 1966 issue of
American Heritage magazine.
Custis was also 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.
When Custis died in 1857, his son-in-law
Robert E. Lee came to control (as executor of the will) almost 200 slaves on Custis's three plantations, Arlington, 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.
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