Washington [293]
Jacky Custis left behind a murky legacy. Many years later his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, who was born a year after George Washington rode off to war, told how her father would hoist her on a table and force her to sing indecent songs that he had taught her in order to divert his inebriated friends. “I was animated to exert myself to give him delight,” she wrote. “The servants in the passage would join their mirth and I, holding my head erect, would strut about the table to receive the praises of the company. My mother remonstrated in vain.” Because he had been denied a son, Jacky told his guests that little Elizabeth “must make fun for him until he had.”73 It would be hard to imagine a stepson more alien to George Washington.
FOLLOWING YORKTOWN, Washington had to deal with another troubled dimension of his life: his prickly seventy-three-year-old mother. After Jacky’s burial, he stopped by Fredericksburg to see her and learned that she had gone west on a trip to Frederick County with daughter Betty and ailing son-in-law Fielding Lewis. Mindful of her waspish comments about his financial neglect, Washington dropped off ten guineas before riding on to Mount Vernon. The poorly educated Mary sent him a thank-you letter in which she misspelled his name. This letter, full of self-pity, solicited more money: “My dear Georg I was truly unesy by Not being at hom when you went thru Fredriceksburg it was a onlucky thing for me now I am afraid I Never Shall have that pleasure agin I am soe very unwell this trip over the Mountins has almost kill’d me I gott the 2 five ginnes you was so kind to send me i am greatly obliged to you.”74 Now that George had bought her a house in Fredericksburg, she wanted one beyond the western mountains—“some little hous of my one if it is only twelve foot squar.” In a postscript, she asked to be remembered to Martha, then crossed out the words “I would have wrote to her but my reason has jis left me.”75 The world might be buzzing excitedly about Yorktown, but Mary Washington resolutely refused to congratulate her son or even mention the event. “When others congratulated her and were enthusiastic in [George’s praise],” wrote Washington Irving, “she listened in silence and would temperately reply that he had been a good son, and she believed he had done his duty as a man.”76 Neither did she extend condolences or refer to Jacky’s death. Mary Washington had always been a peevish, egocentric woman, but one suspects that some mild form of dementia may have set in by this point. The failure to mention Jacky Custis’s death suggests a lapse in short-term memory, and her allusion to her reason having “left” her indicates an awareness of impaired mental faculties.
When Washington attended a ball in Fredericksburg to honor the French and American officers who had fought valiantly at Yorktown, Mary was told that His Excellency was coming for the occasion. “His Excellency!” she snapped. “What nonsense!” 77 As during the French and Indian War, Mary seemed to regard her son’s long years of military service as a trick