FIRST FAMILY

A crisp account of George Washington’s stepgrandchildren and how they weathered the political shifting winds and preserved his legacy.

Although Washington had no children of his own, his marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis brought to his household a new blended family thanks to her son’s four children. Good, a history professor at Marymount University and author of Founding Friendships, begins with an iconic portrait by Edward Savage. The painting featured the president and his wife in the presence of Nelly and Wash, two of the stepgrandchildren who were raised in the president’s home, and the author explains how the portrait helped create the reassuring image of what a first family should look like. Good painstakingly works through each of the four children’s lives: the headstrong girls, Eliza, Patty, and Nelly, who entered into strong marriages and made some political waves themselves; and Wash, who struggled in adolescence and dropped out of Princeton (George noted how he displayed “an almost unconquerable disposition to indolence in every thing that did not tend to his amusements”). All of the children were fierce protectors of their famous patriarch’s legacy, but they did not necessarily agree with Washington’s supposed intention to free his hundreds of slaves upon Martha’s death. Good offers a thoughtful discussion of Washington as a slave master, showing how many of the enslaved families had been torn apart and cruelly divvied up among Washington’s households. He never freed a slave in his lifetime. The Custises “chose to re­main enslavers,” and Wash fathered several children with enslaved women (“a recognized and common reality” in 19th-century Virginia). Toward the end of this well-researched narrative, Good notes how “Americans defaulted to a definition of family that they still rely upon today: family was about blood relationships.”

An intimate and authoritative history offering a close look at the original first family.