First Family: George Washington's Heirs and the Making of America

“In First Family, Good writes well of George Washington and the lives of the youngest of his step-grandchildren but without overreaching with the discussion of gossip. The presence of the enslaved African Americans is always there but no more than the fragmentary records and general knowledge will allow.”

Cassandra A. Good’s First Family appropriately begins with Edward Savage’s famous 1789 portrait of George Washington’s immediate family and their servant. “They were America’s very first ‘First Family.’”

The author of First Family, however, asks “Who was George Washington’s family?” Children made up a much larger part of the Washington household beyond Martha’s children from her previous marriage, but also “a bevy of nieces and nephews over the course of the decades” of George and Martha’s marriage.

A true portrait of the household would be epic just from the sheer number of Black and white faces. The Washington relations were extensive and not all prosperous. Two of George Washington’s great nephews, whom he probably never met, were sailors seized (impressed) to serve in the British Navy.

George Washington, America’s first great hero, fathered no children but he supported numerous nieces and nephews although “his closest emotional bonds were with Martha’s grandchildren.” They did not inherit Mount Vernon but emptied the house of its contents, items considered almost sacred because they had belonged to their celebrated step-grandfather.

Good tells this side of George Washington’s private life from the last days of the American Revolution and beyond through the lives of the youngest of Martha’s grandchildren, George Washington Parke and Eleanor Parke Custis, whom George and Martha largely raised.

The Washingtons, as a couple and the grandchildren, live as portrayed in the Savage painting in a world of disease, love, politics, public life, and enslaved people. Over the generations that followed, the Custis family members would celebrate their connection to George Washington although they would divide over other matters including the institution of slavery.  Many of the Custises lived close enough to the nation’s capital to be part of its society.

All of the differences common in a family were accentuated with the Curtis, Washington, and related families because of their connections to the first President of the United States. The War of 1812 widened personal and political rifts among these relations. “Fractures in the nation and the Custis family deepened in a war that was rooted as much in a sense of America’s wounded pride as it was in policy disputes.”

George Washington, as also depicted in the painting, had as his great project the new national capital being built on the Potomac. His postwar public life took his family to New York and Philadelphia which provided grandchildren Wash and Nelly (George and Eleanor Custis) with wonders to experience but also unaccustomed celebrity.

First Family does not deal with great historical events but rather the intimate lives of the two youngest of the grandchildren people within the framework of the challenging times of making the United States a functioning country. Wash and Nelly would be affected very differently by the unique situation in which they grew up and among the Washingtons’ numerous nephews and nieces and their full and half-siblings (at least one Black and enslaved).

Nelly grew up to become a very independent, high-spirited woman of her age. She married Georgia Washington’s nephew Lawrence Lewis. In her later years, she suffered through many personal tragedies but also became a friend to later President Andrew Jackson.

Wash Custis tried to not disappoint his famous step-grandfather who, in turn, struggled to prevent Wash from growing up to be the flighty man his deceased father John Parke Custis had been. He would, however, become the great standard-bearer of George Washington’s memory. Wash Custis also promoted American agriculture and manufacturing. He built the famous Arlington House that would become the legendary home of his daughter Mary Anna Randolph Custis, and her husband Robert E. Lee.

Other children of John Parke Custis receive notice in First Family. The very independent Elizabeth “Eliza” Parke Custis divorced her husband Thomas Law, later of the British East India Company. She became a prominent Washington socialite and close friend to First Lady Dolly Madison. Her other sister Martha Parke Custis married Thomas Peter.

In First Family, Good writes well of George Washington and the lives of the youngest of his step-grandchildren but without overreaching with the discussion of gossip. The presence of the enslaved African Americans is always there but no more than the fragmentary records and general knowledge will allow.

Aside from being a fun read, this work represents extensive, serious scholarship. Family trees, endnotes, and bibliography take up almost one-third of First Family.

This work also begins with an interesting statement on today’s terminology used to define human bondage “according to still-evolving standards in the historical profession.” That problem does not reflect on Dr. Good or this book as much as a growing problem of restrictions imposed in conflict with free speech, common sense, historical usage, scholarship, and, as Dr. Good writes about alternatives for the word “plantation,” modern “current substitutes” for traditional terminology that is “problematic in myriad other ways.”