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

by Cassandra A. Good

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781335449511
Publisher:	Hanover Square Press
Publication date:	06/06/2023
Edition description:	Original
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	116,441
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Cassandra Good is a writer and historian focused on gender and politics in early America. She is the author of the prize-winning Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2015). She has taught at Marymount University, George Washington University and University of Mary Washington and has written for Smithsonian Magazine, Mental Floss, The Atlantic and Slate.

Editorial Reviews

04/17/2023

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. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Using an impressive range of sources and with vivid storytelling, Cassandra Good views issues of history, memory, class, and race and slavery through the experience of the ‘first’ (and arguably the most famous) American family. Analyzing the kin network created by George and Martha Washington, Good illumines the complexity in the very definition of ‘family’ and American identity. First Family is an important entry in the new historical re-examination of the role of ‘blood family’ in what we tell ourselves about the past.”—Catherine Allgor, author of A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation

“This compelling narrative of the Custis family and its efforts to shape the historical reputation of George Washington reveals how their continued enslavement of Black laborers betrayed the Revolution’s promise of liberty. Rather than follow Washington’s example of emancipation, the grandchildren of Martha Washington variously supported expatriation to Africa, the hiring out of enslaved people, and forced relocation to the Deep South in their failed efforts to reconcile slavery with their vision for America. Good shows how the Custises’ reluctance to end slavery and their determination to be political players paralleled the nation’s descent into sectional crisis. This is a fascinating study of the impact of slavery on contests over national memory and political influence.”—Bruce Ragsdale, author of Washington at the Plow: The Founder Farmer and the Question of Slavery

“Cassandra Good blends deep historical research with her gifts as a storyteller to recover the legacy of George Washington and the powerful role his family played in preserving his memory. First Family delivers new and important insights on the complexities of kinship and the creation of political dynasties in American history.”—Tamika Y. Nunley, award-winning author of At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C.

"In First Family, Cassandra Good details the private life of George and Martha Washington's heirs and descendants. Focused largely on the first presidents Custis' step-grandchildren, Good examines their impact on the ideas of political power and fame in America. Exhaustively researched and engagingly written, the author successfully recreates the star power of the nation's first First Family and convincingly explains their impact on the American obsession with celebrity—while never losing sight of the enslaved workforce attending them at every turn."—Ramin Ganeshram, author of The General's Cook

“To a growing collection of Founding Family biographies comes Cassandra Good’s elaborately detailed account of the Custis family, the step-grandchildren of George Washington. Spanning the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War, First Family gives us a front-row seat to the drama and tensions of a new nation struggling to define the meaning of freedom and citizenship. Opportunistic Custises seize every occasion to trumpet their association with Washington, boosting their social profile, while his actual blood relatives shy away from the spotlight. Meanwhile, the children George Washington Parke Custis had with enslaved women did not even enter the Custises’ calculus of family. With her exhaustive research and vibrant storytelling, Good has brought us into the intimacy of Washington’s adopted family circle, inviting us to consider who constitutes ‘family,’ and the implications of that very important question for claims of citizenship, in both the Custises’ day and our own.”—Catherine Kerrison, author of Jefferson's Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America

“Well-researched… An intimate and authoritative history offering a close look at the original first family.”–Kirkus Reviews

“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.” –Publishers Weekly

“Good capably balances the book’s three narrative tracks: the lives of the Custis clan; the wars, politics, and society around them; and the lives of enslaved and free African Americans in the antebellum era. Her accounts of slave owners and enslaved people in the lives of the Washington and Custis families are the most precise and extensive to be found. Good's invaluable family history also offers solid coverage of how women influenced politics before they had the right to vote.” –Booklist

From the Publisher

2023-04-04
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.

Kirkus Reviews