George Washington Parke Custis
George Washington Parke Custis (born April 30, 1781 in Mount Airy, Maryland , † October 10, 1857 in Arlington ) was an American writer , orator and agricultural reformer. He was the step-grandson and adopted son of George Washington and the builder of Arlington House .
Life
Custis was the son of Eleanor Calvert Custis Stuart and John Parke Custis . Through his mother, Custis was a great grandson of Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore and Henry Lee of Ditchley. He was also the grandson of Martha Washington . His father was their son from her first marriage to Daniel Parke Custis . John Parke Custis died in November 1781 when "Wash" was a child. He and his sister Nelly grew up on the Mount Vernon country estate with George and Martha Washington. Her two older sisters Elizabeth and Martha stayed with their mother and her second husband Dr. David Stuart in Alexandria , who together had seven more children.
Wash and Nelly were eight and ten years old when they moved their grandparents to New York City in 1789 to live in the presidential household. After changing the national capital, the family lived in Philadelphia from 1790 to 1797 . Wash Custis attended the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University ) and St. John's College in Annapolis , Maryland , but did not graduate.
On his 21st birthday, Custis inherited a large sum of money, land and slaves from the possessions of his father and grandfather, as well as from the inheritance of his grandmother and step-grandfather. This inheritance also included over 80 slaves from the property of his father John Parke Custis, 35 dowry slaves from Mount Vernon who had belonged to the property of John Parke Custis, Elisha, the only slave who had owned Martha Washington herself, and another 40 slaves he inherited his mother's death in 1811. Almost immediately, he began construction of Arlington House , on a hill above the Potomac River , directly across from the National Mall in Washington, DC. It took 16 years to complete the house, which was a memorial to George Washington was intended.
On July 7, 1804, he married Mary Lee Fitzhugh . Of their four children, only one daughter, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, survived . She married Robert Edward Lee on June 30, 1831 at Arlington House .
In 1799, Custis was appointed cornet of the United States Army and aide-de-camp (personal adjutant) to General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. During the British-American War of 1812 he volunteered in the defense of Washington, DC at the Battle of Bladensburg .
Custis was a notable public speaker and playwright. Two addresses written during the War of 1812 found national circulation: 1812 Oration by Mr. Custis, of Arlington; with an Account of the Funeral Solemnities in Honor of the Lamented Gen. James M. Lingan and, in 1813, The Celebration of the Russian Victories, in Georgetown, District of Columbia; on the 5th of June, 1813 . Of Custi's plays, two have been published The Indian Prophecy; or Visions of Glory (1827) and Pocahontas; or, The Settlers of Virginia (1830). Other of his pieces were 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). He also published a series of biographical essays on his adoptive father, which were collected and published by his daughter after his death under the title Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington . In 1853 the author Benson visited John Lossing Custis in Arlington.
When Custis died in 1857, his son-in-law Robert E. Lee took control of the 200 slaves in Custis' three plantations: Arlington, White House in New Kent County, and Romancoke in King William County . According to the last will of Custis, the slaves were to be released if they bought themselves free from his heirs within five years.
After the outbreak of the Civil War , Arlington was confiscated by the Union Army for strategic reasons to secure the river and the Capitol . The fact that it became a cemetery for the fallen from 1864 onwards was due to Montgomery C. Meigs , who had served in the US Army under Lee and hated his former comrade, who was now fighting the Northern States. Arlington is now a National Cemetery and National Memorial . Originally intended by Custis as a memorial in honor of Washington, it is now the Robert E. Lee Memorial, under the auspices of the National Park Service, and open to the public.
literature
- Bearss, Sara B. "The Federalist Career of George Washington Parke Custis," Northern Virginia Heritage 8 (February 1986): 15-20.
- Bearss, Sara B. "The Farmer of Arlington: George WP Custis and the Arlington Sheep Shearings," Virginia Cavalcade 38 (1989): 124-133.
- Brady, Patricia. Martha Washington: An American Life (New York: Viking / Penguin, 2005). ISBN 0-670-03430-4 .
- John T. Kneebone et al., Eds., Dictionary of Virginia Biography (Richmond: The Library of Virginia, 1998-), 3: 630-633. ISBN 0-88490-206-4 .
Web links
- Biography on the National Park Service homepage
- Biography and epitaph
- Custis's will
- The President's House in Philadelphia
Individual evidence
- ↑ Henry Weincek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 383n. See also: Slavery by the Numbers
- ↑ See the Cornell University Library transcription of Harper's New Monthly Magazine article: [1] (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 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Custis, George Washington Parke |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Wash (nickname) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American author, public speaker, and playwright |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 30, 1781 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Mount Airy, Maryland |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 10, 1857 |
| Place of death | Arlington |