First Family
George Washington's Heirs and the Making of America
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
For readers of Never Caught and You Never Forget Your First, a revealing true story of celebrity, race and the children George Washington raised.
While it’s widely known that George and Martha Washington never had children of their own, few are aware that they raised children together. In First Family, we see Washington as a father figure and are introduced to the children he helped raise, tracing their complicated roles in American history.
The children of Martha Washington’s son by her first marriage—Eliza, Patty, Nelly and Wash Custis—were born into life in the public eye, well-known as George Washington’s family and keepers of his legacy. By turns petty and powerful, glamorous and cruel, the Custises used Washington as a means to enhance their own power and status. As enslavers committed to the American empire, the Custis family embodied the failures of the American experiment that finally exploded into civil war—all the while being celebrities in a soap opera of their own making.
First Family brings new focus and attention to this surprisingly neglected aspect of George Washington’s life and legacy, shedding a light on:
What it meant to be a “family” The complexities of kinship and race in the Custis family Political power, fame, and the obsession with the celebrity The Custises’ probable Black half-sibling
As the country grapples with concerns about political dynasties and the public role of presidential families, the saga of Washington’s family offers a human story of historical precedent. Award-winning historian Cassandra A. Good shows how the outspoken step-grandchildren of George Washington played an overlooked but important role in the development of American society and politics from the Revolution to the Civil War.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
George and Martha Washington's grandchildren were "proud but profoundly flawed people," according to this immersive family biography by historian Good (Founding Friendships). Martha's wealthy first husband, Daniel Parke Custis, died in 1757, two years before she married George, who became step-grandfather to her son Jacky's children, Elizabeth (Eliza), Martha (Patty), Eleanor (Nelly), and Wash. After Jacky's sudden death in 1781, George and Martha adopted and raised Nelly and Wash, who "enter their young adulthood just as the country was experiencing an awkward stage in its own growth." Good tracks the Custis girls through their courtships and marriages and details George's "stern advice and guidance" to Wash, who had "an almost unconquerable disposition to indolence in every thing that did not tend to his amusements," according to his grandfather. Light is also shed on how slavery helped the Custises build their wealth, and on Wash's support—influenced by "a growing race science that codified supposed African American racial inferiority"—for the American Colonization Society, which sought to relocate free Blacks to Africa. Throughout, Good's meticulous research and fluid prose buttress her case that the Custises were emblematic of "America's story in its first century: military triumph and tragedy; democracy and old aristocratic ties; visions of liberty coexisting alongside the horrors of slavery." It's a fascinating perspective on the nation's growing pains.