George Washington Parke Custis (April 30, 1781 – October 10, 1857) was an American antiquarian, author, and playwright. He was a veteran of the War of 1812. His father John Parke Custis served in the American Revolution with then-General George Washington, and died after the Battle of Yorktown that ended the revolution.
Custis was the grandson of Martha Washington, First Lady and wife of President George Washington. His father John was the stepson of George Washington. His mother was Eleanor Calvert Custis. He and his sister Eleanor (Nelly) were officially the wards of his mother's second husband (their stepfather, David Stuart). His father, his father's sister Patsy, his own sister Nelly and he grew up at George Washington's Mount Vernon.
Upon reaching age 21, Custis inherited a large fortune from his late father, John Parke Custis, including a plantation in what became Arlington, Virginia. High atop a hill overlooking the Potomac River and Washington, D.C., Custis built the Greek Revival mansion Arlington House (1803–18), as a shrine to George Washington. There he preserved and displayed many of Washington's belongings. Custis also wrote historical plays about Virginia, delivered a number of patriotic addresses, and was the author of the posthumously published Recollections and Private Memoirs of George Washington (1860).
His daughter, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, married Robert E. Lee. They inherited Arlington House and the plantation surrounding it, but the property was soon confiscated by the federal government during the Civil War. After the war, the US Supreme Court determined the property to have been illegally confiscated and ordered it returned to Lee's heirs. After regaining Arlington, George Washington Custis Lee immediately sold it back to the federal government for its market value. Arlington House is now a museum, interpreted by the National Park Service as the Robert E. Lee Memorial. Fort Myer and Arlington National Cemetery are also located on what had been Custis' plantation.
Early life and education
Custis was born on April 30, 1781, at his mother's family home, Mount Airy, which survives in Rosaryville State Park in Prince George's County, Maryland. He initially lived with his parents John Parke Custis and Eleanor Calvert Custis, and his sisters Elizabeth Parke Custis, Martha Parke Custis and Nelly Custis, at Abingdon Plantation, which is now part of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, in Arlington County, Virginia, which his father had purchased in 1778. However, six months after Custis's birth, his father died of "camp fever" at Yorktown, Virginia, shortly after the siege of Yorktown ended on October 19, 1781.
Custis's grandmother, Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, had been widowed in 1757, and married George Washington in January 1759. His father had grown up at Mount Vernon. Following John Parke Custis's death, Custis and his sister, Nelly, were taken in by George and Martha Washington and grew up at Mount Vernon. in Custis's two oldest sisters, Elizabeth and Martha, remained at Abingdon with their widowed mother, who in 1783 married Dr. David Stuart, an Alexandria physician and associate of George Washington.The Stuarts subsequently had 16 children while living at Abingdon, Hope Park, and Ossian Hall in Northern Virginia.
The Washingtons brought Custis and Nelly, 8 and 10 years old, respectively, to New York City in 1789 to live in the first and second presidential mansions. Following the transfer of the national capital to Philadelphia, the original "First Family" occupied the President's House from 1790 to 1797.
Custis (nicknamed "Washy" or "Wash") attended—but did not graduate from—Philadelphia Academy (the preparatory school of what is now the University of Pennsylvania); the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University); and St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. George Washington repeatedly expressed frustration with young Custis and his inability to improve the youth's attitude. Upon young Custis's return to Mount Vernon after only one term at St. John's, George Washington sent him to his mother and stepfather (Dr. David Stuart) at Hope Park, writing, "He appears to me to be moped and Stupid, says nothing, and is always in some hole or corner excluded from the Company." At Google Books.
His grandfather gave him a sword when "Wash" Custis received a Virginia military commission shortly before the turn of the century. Custis served briefly at the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, but never experienced combat.Cassandra A. Good, First Family: George Washington's Heirs and the Making of America (2023 ) p. 106
Planter and builder When Custis came of age in 1802, he inherited large amounts of money, land, and property from the estates of his father, John Parke Custis, and grandfather Daniel Parke Custis. When Martha Washington died (also in 1802), Custis received both a bequest from her (as he had upon George Washington's death in 1799) as well as his father's former plantations because of the termination of Martha's life estate.These included about 80 slaves from the John Parke Custis estate; 35 dower slaves at Mount Vernon from the Daniel Parke Custis estate; Elisha, the one slave Martha Washington owned outright; and about 40 more slaves from the John Parke Custis estate following his mother's 1811 death. Multiple references:
However, Martha's executor, Bushrod Washington, refused to sell to Custis the Mount Vernon estate on which Custis had been living and which Bushrod Washington (George Washington's nephew) had inherited. Custis thereupon moved into a four-room, 80-year-old house on land inherited from his father, who had called it "Mount Washington".Rudy, p. 15.
Almost immediately, Custis began constructing Arlington House on his land, which at the time was within Alexandria County (now Arlington County) in the District of Columbia. Hiring George Hadfield as architect, he constructed a mansion that was the first example of Greek Revival architecture in America. He located the building on a prominent hill overlooking the Georgetown-Alexandria Turnpike (at the approximate location of the present Eisenhower Drive in Arlington National Cemetery), the Potomac River, and the growing Washington City on the opposite side of the river.
Interrupted by the War of 1812 (and material shortages after the Burning of Washington by British forces), Custis finally completed the mansion's exterior using slave labor and materials on site in 1818.Rudy, pp. 16–18, 35–36. Custis intended the mansion to serve as a memorial to George Washington, and included design elements similar to that of George Washington's Mount Vernon.Rudy, pp. 9, 31. Custis famously displayed relics from Mount Vernon at events he held at Arlington House.Multiple sources:
Rudy, p. 37.
Marriage and family On July 7, 1804, Custis married Mary Lee Fitzhugh. Of their four children, only one daughter, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, survived to maturity. Friends throughout their childhood, she married her distant cousin, Robert E. Lee at Arlington House on June 30, 1831. Lee's father, Henry Lee III (Light-Horse Harry Lee) had delivered the eulogy at George Washington's December 18, 1799, funeral.
There are over 300,000 headstones and hundreds of memorials at Arlington National Cemetery. Arlington House itself is a memorial to George Washington. The son of Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, John Parke Custis purchased the 1,100-acre (450 ha) tract of wooded land on the Potomac River north of Alexandria, Virginia in 1778. When John Parke Custis died after the Battle of Yorktown, the final battle of the American Revolution, Arlington Estate was inherited by his son, then-six-month-old George Washington Parke Custis. John Parke Custis, his sister Martha (Patsy) Parke Custis, his son George (named after George Washington, the step-father of John). and his daughter Eleanor (Nelly) Parke Custis (later Lewis) grew up at Mount Vernon, the home of Martha and George Washington. George Washington Parke Custis built Arlington House as a memorial to George Washington. An Army veteran of the War of 1812, George W. P. Custis and his wife Mary Lee Fitzhugh Custis were buried in a fenced-in area now located in section 13.
Other family members include: daughter Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee; Maria Carter Syphax, illegitimate daughter of enslaved (and later freed) maid, Arianna Carter Syphax, son-in-law: Robert Edward Lee, and seven grandchildren: George Custis Lee, Mary, William, Robert E. Jr., Anne, Eleanor, and Mildred.
George W. P. Custis and his wife Mary Fitzhugh Custis who raised their daughter Mary Anna Randolph Custis at Arlington, left the estate to her. Custis stipulated that whomever owned his beloved Arlington must be named Custis. Therefore, Arlington would go to his daughter and then to his grandson, Custis Lee. Mary Anna Custis married her distant cousin, United States Army Lieutenant Robert E. Lee in June 1831. With the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War on April 12, 1861, Robert E. Lee resigned from the United States Army and took command of Virginia's confederate forces on April 23, 1861. Mary Custis Lee left Arlington on May 15, 1861 to join her daughters at Ravensworth, a nearby home owned by Custis relatives. When Mary Custis Lee did not pay her property taxes in person, the estate was legally confiscated. The United States would later return it, and then purchase the property from Custis Lee. Union troops occupied Arlington on May 24.
On July 16, 1862, the United States Congress passed legislation authorizing the purchase of land for national cemeteries for military dead. In May 1864, large numbers of Union forces died in the Battle of the Wilderness, requiring a large new cemetery to be built near the District of Columbia. A study quickly determined that Arlington Estate was the most suitable property for this purpose. While Private William Henry Christmas became the first Union soldier buried at Arlington on May 13, 1864, formal authorization for burials did not occur until June 15, 1864.
Military service
In January 1799, Custis accepted a commission as a cornet in the United States Army and was promoted to second lieutenant in March. He served as aide-de-camp to General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and was honorably discharged on June 15, 1800.
During the War of 1812, Custis, in spite of his physical infirmities, assisted in the firing of an American artillery piece at the Battle of Bladensburg on August 24, 1814. At Internet Archive. Custis also delivered and published an address condemning the death of Revolutionary War general James Lingan, whom a Baltimore mob killed for defending an anti-war publisher's right to oppose the war.Multiple references
With Mrs. Madison, it is reported that Custis initiated the saving of George Washington's portrait from the Executive Mansion (The White House), preventing it from being destroyed when British forces burned the building.
Slavery