Custis, George Washington Parke, 1781-1857

George Washington Parke Custis was the son of John Parke Custis who was the stepson of George Washington. Custis' mother was Eleanor Calvert. He grew up at "Mount Vernon" after the death of his father. He married Mary Lee Fitzhugh and lived at "Arlington." His daughter Mary Anna Randolph Custis married Robert E. Lee. George Washington Parke Custis was a playwright and agricultural reformer.

George Washington Parke Custis (April 30, 1781 – October 10, 1857) was an American plantation owner, antiquarian, author, and playwright. His father John Parke Custis was a stepson of George Washington. He and his sister Eleanor grew up at Mount Vernon and in the Washington presidential household.

Upon reaching age 21, Custis inherited a large fortune from his late father, John Parke Custis, including a plantation in what became Arlington, Virginia. High atop a hill overlooking the Potomac River and Washington, D.C., Custis built the Greek Revival mansion Arlington House (1803–18), as a shrine to George Washington. There he preserved and displayed many of Washington's belongings. Custis also wrote historical plays about Virginia, delivered a number of patriotic addresses, and was the author of the posthumously published Recollections and Private Memoirs of George Washington (1860).

His daughter, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, married Robert E. Lee. They inherited Arlington House and the plantation surrounding it, but the property was soon confiscated by the federal government during the Civil War. After the war, the US Supreme Court determined the property to have been illegally confiscated and ordered it returned to Lee's heirs. After regaining Arlington, George Washington Custis Lee immediately sold it back to the federal government for its market value. Arlington House is now a museum, interpreted by the National Park Service as the Robert E. Lee Memorial. Fort Myer and Arlington National Cemetery are also located on what had been Custis' plantation.Custis was born on April 30, 1781, at his mother's family home, Mount Airy, which survives in Rosaryville State Park in Prince George's County, Maryland.[1] He initially lived with his parents John Parke Custis and Eleanor Calvert Custis, and his sisters Elizabeth Parke Custis, Martha Parke Custis and Nelly Custis, at Abingdon Plantation (part of which is now Ronald Reagan National Airport, in Arlington County), which his father had purchased in 1778.[2] However, six months after Custis's birth, his father died of "camp fever" at Yorktown, Virginia, shortly after the British army surrendered there.

Custis's grandmother, Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, had been widowed in 1757, and married George Washington in January 1759. His father had grown up at Mount Vernon. Following John Parke Custis's death, Custis and his sister, Nelly, however, were taken in by George and Martha Washington and grew up at Mount VernonWhen Custis came of age in 1802, he inherited large amounts of money, land, and property from the estates of his father, John Parke Custis, and grandfather Daniel Parke Custis. When Martha Washington died (also in 1802), Custis received both a bequest from her (as he had upon George Washington's death in 1799) as well as his father's former plantations because of the termination of Martha's life estate.[7] However, Martha's executor, Bushrod Washington, refused to sell to Custis the Mount Vernon estate on which Custis had been living and which Bushrod Washington (George Washington's nephew) had inherited. Custis thereupon moved into a four-room, 80-year-old house on land inherited from his father, who had called it "Mount Washington".[8]

Almost immediately, Custis began constructing Arlington House on his land, which at the time was within Alexandria County (now Arlington County) in the District of Columbia. Hiring George Hadfield as architect, he constructed a mansion that was the first example of Greek Revival architecture in America.[9] He located the building on a prominent hill overlooking the Georgetown-Alexandria Turnpike (at the approximate location of the present Eisenhower Drive in Arlington National Cemetery), the Potomac River, and the growing Washington City on the opposite side of the river.[9]

Using slave labor and materials on site, and interrupted by the War of 1812 (and material shortages after the British burned the American capital city), Custis finally completed the mansion's exterior in 1818.[10] Custis intended the mansion to serve as a living memorial to George Washington, and included design elements similar to Mt. Vernon's.[11] He then gained a reputation for inviting many guests for various celebrations and social events at the mansion, where he displayed relics from Mt. Vernon, although the interior was not completed (and renovated) until occupancy by Robert E. Lee's family (including Custis's grandsons/heirs) in the 1850s.[12][13] On July 7, 1804, Custis married Mary Lee Fitzhugh. Of their four children, only one daughter, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, survived to maturity. She married Robert E. Lee at Arlington House on June 30, 1831. Lee's father, Henry Lee III (Light-Horse Harry Lee) had delivered the eulogy at George Washington's December 18, 1799, funeral.[14]

In January 1799, Custis accepted a commission as a cornet in the United States Army and was promoted to second lieutenant in March. He served as aide-de-camp to General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and was honorably discharged on June 15, 1800.[citation needed]

During the War of 1812, Custis, despite physical infirmities, assisted in the firing of an artillery piece to help defend Washington, D.C., from the British during the Battle of Bladensburg.[15] Custis also delivered and published an address condemning the death of Revolutionary War general James Lingan, whom a Baltimore mob killed for defending an anti-war publisher's right to oppose the war.[16][17]Custis owned land and enslaved people in several Virginia counties. In the 1820 U.S. Federal Census, he owned 116 slaves in New Kent County, Virginia in land he inherited from his father and hired a steward to manage.[18] He also owned 58 slaves in what became Arlington County, then the Alexandria section of the District of Columbia.[19] In 1830, Custis owned 57 slaves in the Alexandria section of the District of Columbia,[20] and in 1840 owned 52 slaves in that area (33 male and 19 female).[21] The Alexandria slave schedules are missing or misindexed for the last census of his lifetime, in 1850. By 1850, Custis owned 98 enslaved people in New Kent County,[22] and an additional 34 in King William County, Virginia.[23]

During the 1820s, Custis was an active member of the American Colonization Society—an organization led by his cousin Bushrod Washington and that supported the colonization of free blacks in Africa, particularly in Liberia.In 1826, Custis admitted the paternity of Maria Carter, who had been born in 1803 to Arianna "Airy" Carter (1776–1880), an African-American slave maid at the Arlington estate who had earlier resided at Mount Vernon as a slave of Martha Washington. Maria lived and worked at Arlington as a slave until 1826, when she married Charles Syphax, a slave who oversaw the dining room of Arlington House. (It was a religious ceremony only; enslaved people could not legally marry.)[25] Soon after Maria's marriage, Custis freed her and gave her a 17-acre (7-hectare) plot in the southwest corner of the Arlington estate. Maria subsequently raised ten children on her property, thus establishing the Syphax family. Tall trees and stretches of grassland reportedly surrounded Maria's white cottage.[24][26] Custis is also believed to have fathered a girl named Lucy with the slave Caroline Branham.[27]Custis achieved some distinction as an orator and playwright.