John Parke "Jacky" Custis
Washington’s step son, John Parke “Jacky” Custis was
destined to inherit his late father’s huge fortune.
George Washington wanted to make sure the boy
was prepared for the responsibilities that so much wealth entailed.
Jacky’s early education was initially handled by his
mother, Martha.
But in 1761, when the
boy was about seven, a Scottish tutor named Walter Magowan was brought to live
at Mount Vernon to begin Jacky’s formal education.
Unfortunately the boy was lazy, head strong,
and had no interest in his studies.
In 1768 Jacky was sent away to a boarding school in order
to prepare him for college.
George
Washington wrote to the Reverend Jonathan Boucher, an Anglican minister who ran
the school for boys noting that Jacky had been introduced to both Greek and
Latin by his tutor and described his stepson as a boy “…about 14 yrs. of age,
untainted in his morals, and of innocent manners.” He considered him “a
promising boy” and expressed “anxiety” that as “the last of his Family,” who
would be coming into “a very large Fortune,” he wanted to see the boy made “fit
for more useful purposes, than a horse Racer.”
The next five years were frustrating for both George
Washington and Reverend Boucher. When Jacky Custis was sixteen, Washington
wrote to Boucher that his stepson's mind was wholly centered on “Dogs, Horses,
and Guns,” as well as Dress and equipage.”
Boucher was unable to give Washington any reassurances noting that young
Jack “…does not much like books”.
Warming to his subject, Boucher reported that Jack was the laziest boy
he had ever known and also “so surprisingly voluptuous: one would suppose
Nature had intended Him for some Asiatic Prince.”
Jacky was always full of surprises.
In 1773, he announced his engagement to fifteen
your old Eleanor Calvert, who came from a prominent Maryland family. Washington
was outraged; Martha was delighted. Washington was initially able to convince
the young couple to postpone the marriage until after Jack had finished college
and could “thereby render himself more deserving of the Lady and useful to
Society.”
Jack lasted a few months at
King’s College (now Columbia University) in New York City before bolting for
home.
On February 3, 1774, Jack, now nineteen
years old and Eleanor, sixteen, were wed.
Prospects for the young couple were bright.
After all, Jack had inherited an enormous
fortune.
But what the father had made,
the son could not keep.
Jack bought a
plantation called Abingdon in Fairfax County, Virginia.
The seller, one Robert Alexander, took every
advantage of the inexperienced and impetuous Jack.
When he learned of the terms of the purchase,
George Washington informed Custis that “No Virginia Estate (except a few under
the best management) can stand simple Interest how then can they bear compound
Interest?”
George Washington wrote in 1778: “I am afraid Jack
Custis, in spite of all of the admonition and advice I gave him about selling
faster than he bought, is making a ruinous hand of his Estate.” By 1781, the
financial strains of the Abingdon purchase had almost bankrupted Jack Custis.
No hand at business, Jack Custis proved himself equally
poor at politics.
In 1778 he was elected
to the Virginia House of Burgesses as a delegate from Fairfax County.
Taking time out from his duties as a general
in the field, commanding the Continental Army, engaged in a desperate war,
Washington wrote to the young politician, “I do not suppose that so young a
senator as you are, so little versed in political disquisition, can yet have
much influence in a popular assembly, composed of various talents and different
views, but it is in your power to be punctual in attendance.”
Custis won reelection but missed assignments
to important committees because of his habitual late arrival, usually the
result of personal matters.
Despite Washington's frequent criticism of Jack, the
young man described their relationship fondly. Custis wrote Washington that, “It
pleased the Almighty to deprive me at a very early Period of Life of my Father,
but I cannot sufficiently adore His Goodness in sending Me so good a Guardian
as you Sir.” He went on to assure Washington that, “He best deserves the Name
of Father who acts the Part of one. . . .”
As the Revolutionary War came to a close, Custis persuaded
Washington to allow him to join the general’s suite at Yorktown as a “civilian aide-de-camp.”
This turned out to be another unfortunate
choice.
Soon after the British surrender,
Jack was stricken with the contagious fever spreading throughout the crowded
army camps. On November 5, 1781, shortly before his twenty seventh birthday,
John Parke Custis died.
Neither Martha Washington
nor the women of the South’s leading families were marble statues, they had the
same strengths and weaknesses, passions and problems, joys and sorrows, as the
women of any age. So just how did they
live?
A brief look at love, sex, and marriage in colonial America and the
early republic.
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