Washington [111]
The president of King’s College, the Reverend Myles Cooper, welcomed Jacky Custis and his personal slave Joe to the school. An accomplished scholar and poet, versed in classical tongues, Cooper had strengthened the college by adding new professors and a medical school and expanding the library. He had also turned the school into a hotbed of Tory sentiment as the colonies became polarized by the controversial taxes imposed by London. The school stood on the Hudson River, one block west of the common, where radicals congregated to spout anti-British venom. Myles Cooper, with no patience for such critics, branded the radical Sons of Liberty the “sons of licentiousness, faction, and confusion.”24
There is no suggestion that Washington had any qualms about depositing Jacky in a school known for its Tory views. He must have alerted Cooper candidly to Jacky’s wanton history, because he told the president that, if Jacky spent too freely, he hoped Cooper would “by your friendly admonitions . . . check the progress of it.”25 College life was shot through with class differences, and Jacky basked in his privileged station. Thanks to his wealth, the cosseted boy enjoyed social equality with his professors, who seemed to know his status and cater to it. Instead of socializing with other students, Jacky boasted of dining with President Cooper and his tutors. “I believe I may say without vanity that I am look[e]d upon in a particular light” by the faculty, Jacky told his mother. “There is as much distinction made between me and the other students as can be expected.”26 He also bragged that he and Joe had their own suite of rooms, with a large sitting room and two small bedrooms. At times Jacky wrote about King’s College as if it were a swank resort staffed with servile employees hired to wait upon him, assuring his mother that “there has nothing been omitted by my good friend Doctor Cooper which was necessary to my contentment in this place.”27 After Washington returned to Mount Vernon, Jacky promised that he would prove a credit to his family. The young man’s cozy relationship with the faculty suggested that things wouldn’t turn out exactly as Washington had planned.
The concern over Jacky paled into insignificance, however, beside mounting trepidation over Patsy’s medical condition. Charles Willson Peale remembered the palpable atmosphere of fear at Mount Vernon, writing that “we used to walk together to enjoy the evening breeze” and “danced to give exercise to Miss Custis . . . who did not enjoy good health. She was subject to fits and Mrs. Washington never suffered her to be a minute out of her sight.”28 Washington’s diaries for early 1773 are rife with emergency visits by Dr. Rumney. During one particularly distressing time in late January, the doctor camped out at Mount Vernon for almost a full week. Then on Saturday, June 19, 1773, Patsy Custis died a sudden, painless death, leading her stepfather to make a terse entry in his diary: “At home all day. About five o’clock poor Patcy Custis died suddenly.”
The next day, a shaken Washington wrote a note eloquent in its brevity to his brother-in-law Burwell Bassett:
Dear Sir: It is an easier matter to conceive than to describe the distress of this family, especially that of the unhappy parent of our dear Patcy Custis, when I inform you that yesterday remov[e]d the sweet, innocent girl into a more happy and peaceful abode than any she has met with in the afflicted path she hitherto has trod. She rose from dinner about four o’clock in better health and spirits than she appear[e]d to have been in for some time. Soon after which she was seized with one of her usual fits and expir[e]d in it in less than two minutes without uttering a word, a groan, or scarce a sigh. This sudden and unexpected blow, I scarce need add, has almost reduced my poor wife to the lowest ebb of misery, which is increas[e]d by the absence of her son (whom I have just fixed at the College in New York).29
After five