Washington [292]
The presence at Yorktown of Jacky Custis as a volunteer aide to Washington has sparked a certain cynicism among historians. Before then Jacky had contributed only modestly to the war effort, serving for two years as a delegate in the Virginia assembly, where he showed a grandiosity that sometimes vexed his stepfather. He had also invested with Washington in a privateer that prowled the Atlantic in quest of British merchant ships. Yet he had never placed his life in jeopardy, leading to snickers that he went to Yorktown to bask in a major victory without having paid his dues. If it irked Washington to see the raffish Jacky mingling with brave, hard-bitten men who had sacrificed years to the cause, he never admitted it openly.
Amid the unsanitary conditions at Yorktown, Jacky Custis contracted camp fever. Since the condition often proved fatal, Jacky expressed a last wish to witness Cornwallis’s surrender and was lifted to a high spot atop a redoubt, giving him a panoramic glimpse of the ceremonies. Then he was carted thirty miles to Eltham in New Kent County, the estate of his uncle, Burwell Bassett. Martha Washington and Jacky’s wife, Eleanor (Nelly) Calvert Curtis, were summoned to attend him. Preoccupied with the aftermath of victory, Washington couldn’t extricate himself from Yorktown until November 5, when, alerted to Jacky’s perilous condition, he hastened to Eltham. By the time he arrived, he learned that the doctors’ ministrations had failed and that Jacky Custis was dying. The young man expired a few hours later, three weeks before his twenty-seventh birthday.
For a disconsolate Martha Washington, it was an indescribably sad moment. Having already lost three children, she had doted on Jacky, and Washington alluded to her “deep and solemn distress.”68 By some accounts, Washington had a profound emotional response to Jacky’s death, clasping his bereaved widow to his bosom and proclaiming that henceforth he regarded Jacky’s two youngest children as his own. One French observer described Washington as “uncommonly affected” by the death and said his friends “perceived some change in his equanimity of temper subsequent to that event.”69 In a less sentimental vein, biographer James T. Flexner wrote bluntly that Washington expressed “no personal grief.”70 If Washington reacted deeply to the death, it is not surprising, for it meant that he would have no chance to improve his strained relationship with his stepson. It was also a sobering reminder that, after years of war, he might not return to the happy home life he had pictured.
After spending a week at Eltham and attending to Jacky’s funeral, Washington escorted Martha and Nelly back to Mount Vernon, where they dealt with the fate of the three small girls and baby boy who had lost their father. The Washingtons decided to adopt informally the two youngest children, Eleanor Parke Custis, then two years old and like her mother called Nelly, and George Washington Parke Custis, seven months old. Such informal adoptions were commonplace in the eighteenth century, when life expectancy was shorter and children often lost parents. A gay, whimsical child, Nelly would turn into a vivacious, dark-haired little girl, while the baby boy, nicknamed Washy or Tub, had blond hair and blue eyes and inherited both his father’s charm and his wayward nature. With his solemn sense of responsibility, Washington took seriously his duties toward the children and wrote in his will that it had “always been my intention, since my expectation of having issue has ceased, to consider the grandchildren of my wife in the same light as I do my own relations.”71
These two adopted