by Flora Fraser
8
The Schooling of Jacky Custis
“His Mind…more ever turnd to Dogs Horses & Guns.”
IN JULY 1771 WASHINGTON had ordered for Martha from London “a handsome white satin cloak,” ten yards of pea green lutestring—a glossy silk—and a dozen silk pocket handkerchiefs. He also asked Robert Cary to procure “2 handsome Gauze Caps for a middle aged Woman.” In years to come, an older and more redoubtable Martha, chins and all, gray hair tucked into a succession of large caps, stiff and frilled, would become an image familiar to many. She would rarely be seen—or painted or otherwise described—without this armor. But at this time, when she was forty, she was still a stylish woman. Her hair was thick and chestnut brown, and these “Gauze Caps” would very likely have been ornamental rather than enveloping. The following year’s invoice, for instance, includes an order for “2 handsome caps of mignonette lace, one to wear in [formal] dress, the other with a nightgown [casual dress].”
Martha wears no cap in a miniature by Peale for which she sat in this latter year, 1772, and which Washington charged to Jacky’s account. Instead, a silk scarf with a thin gold stripe, pinned in her hair with pearls, twines round the back of her head to fall over one shoulder. Round her neck are more pearls, and, at the neckline of her dress, a thin lace fichu is collar to a heavier lace border. She looks elegant and, with clear, wide eyes and a long, curved smile, content. Jacky’s inattention to his studies, however, as much as Patsy’s declining health, was cause for concern.
In the summer of 1770 Martha’s son had followed Jonathan Boucher, when the clergyman obtained a living in Annapolis, Maryland, and set up a new school in that lively commercial town. It soon attracted, besides Jacky, a number of scholars. Boucher suggested that he should in the course of time lead young Parke Custis on a grand tour of Europe: “it is to be hoped…that it will stimulate Him to pursue his Studies with greater Earnestness, when He recollects how often He must be put to the Blush, if He appears illiterate amongst Men of Letters, into whose Company, in Travelling, He will often fall.” George and Martha gave serious consideration to this proposal. Before thinking himself “at liberty to encourage this plan,” Washington was to recall a year later, he judged it “highly reasonable and necessary…that the mother should be consulted.” Accordingly he laid Boucher’s letter and suggestions before Martha and “desired that she would ponder well.” Her considered answer, he reported, was: “if it appeared to be his [Jacky’s] inclination to undertake this tour, and if it should be adjudged for his benefit, she would not oppose it, whatever pangs it might give her to part with him.”
In the late winter of 1771, it seemed that this scheme to expand Jacky’s horizons was about to take final shape. Lord Fairfax’s younger brother and heir, Colonel Robert Fairfax, on a prolonged visit to his American relations in Virginia, expressed his approval of the plan. On the point of returning to England, the Englishman expressed a wish for a meeting with Jacky and his would-be cicerone, Boucher. “The warmth with which he has made a tender of his Services,” Washington continued, “& the pressing Invitation to make use of Leeds Castle”—a Fairfax stronghold in England, formerly a royal residence—“as a home in vacation time [during Jacky’s projected residence at an English university], are too obliging to be neglected.”
Discussions about Jacky being inoculated against smallpox before the projected journey then occupied the family. Washington himself had contracted the disease while in the West Indies with his brother Lawrence in 1754. In consequence, he rode immune over his plantations and could venture into the dwellings of sick slaves when outbreaks of smallpox occurred. Martha and her children had not been inoculated and were always in danger of infection. Regardless of whether Jacky was to tour Europe, inoculation was proving efficacious in a colony where outbreaks of the disease could sweep an area, spread fast in crowded slave quarters, and readily infect planter households. Numerous enterprising doctors now offered the procedure in clinics and hospitals, some of them more salubrious than others. It involved the patient being—lightly—infected with the pox. Occasionally a great many pustules formed, and unlucky patients were scarred. Very occasionally a virulent case of smallpox resulted and proved fatal. But under the care of an experienced doctor, such tragedies were rare.
Unfortunately, at Mount Vernon in the spring of 1771, Martha’s old fears about her children’s well-being resurfaced. Washington was to tell Boucher that Martha had “often wished, that Jack would take & go through the disorder [smallpox inoculation] without her knowing of it; that she might escape those Tortures which Suspense would throw her into, little as the cause might be for it.” Now she and Jacky imbued each other with anxiety about the procedure. He left home for school in early April with, George and Martha believed, no intention of proceeding to Baltimore, where a suitable clinic had been identified. But Jacky went directly from Annapolis to Dr. Stevenson’s and put himself willingly under the doctor’s care. Wrote Boucher of his mercurial charge: “He was very eager for it, & in high Spirits.”
At this point a curious correspondence ensued, shedding some light on relations between the master and mistress of Mount Vernon. Washington, responding to Boucher, begged the clergyman not to write to him direct again but “under cover to Lund Washington, & in a hand not your own.” Martha believed Jacky had resolved to postpone the procedure, Washington wrote. Nonetheless, he continued, “her anxiety & uneasiness is so great, that I am sure she could not rest satisfied without knowing the Contents of any Letter to this Family of your Writing.” Were she to know that Jacky was “under Inoculation, it would,” Washington wrote, “put an infallible stop to her journey to Williamsburg & possibly delay mine; which would prove very injurious.” Washington was bound to submit his guardian accounts to the General Court, which sat during the months of April and October only.
Information came from Boucher, dated April 19, that Jacky was now out of all danger: “in Dr Stephenson’s own Phrase, He cannot now die if He would.” Martha was told of this and was apparently satisfied. She and Patsy accompanied Washington when he journeyed south, on the twenty-seventh, to Williamsburg. A conscientious reporter, Boucher had added in his letter of the nineteenth: “Jack’s [blisters], as I remember, are one on his Neck, another by his Ear, one on his Breast, two on one Arm & one on Another, & two on one Leg; not one on his Face.” Indeed, gregarious Jacky felt so well after his adventure that, rather than hasten to show an unmarked face to his mother or return to his studies, he stayed on in Baltimore to attend the wedding of “a Mr Gough, a gentleman of rank and fortune.” So Boucher, “exceedingly displeased” but impotent in Annapolis, informed the Washingtons on May 3. But if those around him—though never Martha—cursed Jacky for his thoughtlessness, or despaired of him and his sybaritic ways, he was always quick to show penitence, promise reform, and win forgiveness. Book learning he might not have; charm he had in abundance.
Though Jacky was now immune to smallpox, the plans for his grand tour slowly crumbled. First, Boucher secured the promise from Governor Eden of Maryland of a good parish in Prince George County, midway between Annapolis and the Eastern Shore of the Potomac. The duties of that parish, which he was to take up in December 1771, required his remaining in the colony. Jacky’s mother and stepfather had no interest in Jacky traveling abroad without the clergyman, as Washington made clear on June 5: “to Embark on a Tour of the kind you proposed without a Conductor; as pleasure and dissipation without a kirb, would leave little room for study, & more than probably end in his Ruin.”
Washington expressed a wish at numerous times in his life to visit England and also France. He had initially embraced the scheme for Jacky’s improvement abroad. Boucher had spared no ink to describe an ugly alternative, should Jacky remain at home: “Sunk in unmanly Sloth.” His estates would soon be left to the management of “some worthless overseer,” and Jacky himself would become entangled in some matrimonial adventure, in which passion would dominate over reason. Now both Washington and Mar
tha had serious doubts about the benefits of a grand tour. When Boucher won from the governor permission to travel for a year, Washington caviled at the exorbitant expense of the journey proposed. In Williamsburg the Dunbar suit was in danger of at last coming to trial in the General Court. George Wythe, representing the Antigua plaintiffs—now Thomas Dunbar’s grandsons, John and Joseph Dunbar—had filed an attachment. Washington retained Edmund Pendleton, as well as John Randolph and James Mercer, at no small cost to the Parke Custis estate. Five years earlier these same plaintiffs had suggested settling out of court. That had come to nothing but had engendered a flurry of correspondence and invoices. Preparations now for trial were similarly urgent, but there was as yet no date. Though Washington could not know it, the Antigua plaintiffs were never to have that hearing in the General Court, the fear of which featured so large in all his calculations during his wards’ minorities.
Washington’s vicarious pride in the Parke Custis wealth and acreage, of whose splendors he had boasted when first enrolling Jacky among Boucher’s scholars three years earlier, was now much muted. He wrote to Boucher on July 9, 1771: “his [Jacky’s] estate is of a kind that rather comes under the denomination of a large than a profitable one. He has a good deal of land and a great many slaves, it is true, but the former is more to be esteemed for the situation than the produce, being of an indifferent quality and much worn, so that large crops cannot be made from them.”
This gloomy assessment of Jacky’s landholdings on the York and Pamunkey, where previously their yield had far outstripped that of the Washington holdings on the Potomac, calls for some explanation. The slow degeneration of a tobacco plantation where the crop was farmed without rotation, as was the practice among Virginians, hungry for barter with London merchants, was inevitable. Washington could counter the slide in fortunes of his own Parke Custis dower lands by expanding west and investing in schemes to acquire land elsewhere. At Mount Vernon he had turned to planting wheat and other crops in place of tobacco. As Jacky’s guardian answerable to the General Court, he was unwilling to involve his stepson in such gambles, and the boy—land rich, cash poor—must stand or fall by his ancestral acres and by hallowed Virginian agricultural practices. In the circumstances, and given, in addition, that the tobacco yield on all plantations varied wildly from one year to another, a grand tour of the kind Boucher proposed would be a drain on Jacky’s income difficult to justify.
Washington made mention now of Jacky’s education, which he judged “by no means ripe enough for a tour of travelling.” In particular, the boy was wholly ignorant of French—a language “absolutely necessary to him as a traveller.” Notable too was the boy’s apparent indifference to the project: “if his mother does not speak her sentiments, rather than his, he is abundantly lukewarm in the scheme.” Above all, wrote Washington, “there is a possibility, if not a probability, that the whole design may be totally defeated.” In short, Martha no longer supported the project. Her earlier declaration that she would not oppose the journey if it were to be of benefit to her son she still adhered to, “but in so faint a manner,” wrote Washington, “that I think, what with her fears and his indifference…it will soon be declared he has no inclination to go.” That there had not been the usual openness between the Washingtons in recent months regarding the project emerges from Washington’s subsequent tentative phrasing: “I do not say that this will be the case; I cannot speak positively.” But he continued: “Several causes, I believe, have concurred to make her view his departure, as the time approaches, with more reluctance than she expected.”
Washington had referred in an earlier letter to the “doubts of her friends,” their number probably including her brother-in-law Bassett and brother Bartholomew Dandridge. All had counseled against the venture: “some on acct of the expense; others, as being almost the last of a Family, think he should run no risks that are to be avoided.” In this letter of July he made plain the principal cause of Martha’s reluctance to part with Jacky: “The unhappy situation of her daughter has in some degree fixed her eyes upon him as her only hope.” In the face of this quiet but painful objection, the subject of a grand tour for Jacky was dropped and never raised again. No one knew how long his sister’s life would be prolonged.
Peale’s haunting image of Patsy and his miniatures of Martha and of Jacky, which provide so lucid a picture of their appearances, were painted over the course of a week and as something of an afterthought in May 1772. The artist came with a letter of introduction from Boucher and in the hope that the master of the house, of whom no portrait then existed, would sit for him. “Inclination having yielded to importunity,” as Washington informed Boucher, the sittings took place, and a three-quarter-length portrait was the result. Washington—clothed, despite his growing concerns about British government measures, in the blue coat and red waistcoat and breeches that he had worn to serve his King against the French and their Indian allies—looks resolute and stern. The truth was, as the reluctant hero wrote wryly, he was posing “in so grave—so sullen a Mood—and now and then under the influence of Morpheus [Sleep], when some critical strokes are making, that I fancy the skill of this Gentleman’s Pencil, will be put to it, in describing to the World what manner of Man I am.” As soon as he could, Washington escaped west on business, leaving Peale to finish painting the “drapery,” or details of his uniform, and his more artistically minded wife and children to entertain the artist further and sit for their own souvenirs of the visit. Daniel Parke Custis’s portrait, a pair to the Wollaston portrait of Martha till now, could at last be relegated to a less prominent place in the house.
When Jacky was in Annapolis, Washington had been fearful for his stepson’s morals. In December 1770 he had written: “Jacky Custis now returns to Annapolis—His Mind a good deal relaxed from Study, & more than ever turnd to Dogs Horses & Guns; indeed upon Dress & equipage, which till of late, he has discoverd little Inclination of giving into.” Jacky was not to sleep elsewhere than under Boucher’s roof, he instructed, unless the clergyman could vouch for the character of the hosts. Nor must Boucher “allow him to be rambling about at Nights in Company with those, who do not care how debauchd and vicious his Conduct may be.” Boucher, engaging, candid, and willing as ever to concede fault, in his reply promised close supervision. But he characterized his pupil as “exceedingly indolent…surprisingly voluptuous…one would suppose nature had intended him for some Asiatic prince.” In some horror the Washingtons would have read the clergyman’s confession that another pupil, Mr. Galloway—“wild, volatile, idle and good natured”—had led Jacky astray. Further, Mr. Galloway had a sister, “young and pretty,” who had caught the boy’s eye when she was in town—“about the time of the players [company of actors] being here.” Mused Boucher: “Jack has a Propensity to the Sex, which I am at a Loss how to judge of, much more how to describe.”
In a letter of the following February, Washington returned to the theme, writing that he wished to “prevent as much as possible his connecting with Store boys [shop assistants], & that kind of low, loose Company.” Again and again he stressed the importance of a good education, and his dissatisfaction with his stepson’s progress: “I cannot discover that he is much [further] in Latten,” he protested in June, “than when he left Mr. Magowan, know[s little] Arithmetic and is quite ignorant of the Greek Language, which he had begun under the Tuition of that Gentleman.”
In vain did Washington urge French, geometry, and philosophy as fit subjects for Jacky to study. He begged Dr. John Witherspoon, the president of Princeton College, for advice. Boucher, in November 1771, was complacent. Had Dr. Witherspoon examined his student, he allowed, the college president would not have found Jacky “possessed of much of that dry, useless, & disgusting School-boy kind of Learning fit only for a Pedant.” But he considered his pupil “not illy accomplished, considering his manners, Temper, & Years, in that liberal, manly & necessary Knowledge befitting a Gentleman.” He added blithely: “I ever did hold in abhorrence tha
t servile System of teaching Boys Words rather than Things; & of getting a parcel of Lumber by Rote.”
The Washingtons did not remove Jacky from the lax grasp of this insouciant master. In December 1771 the young man followed Boucher to the parish of St. Barnabas in Maryland that had been promised the clergyman, some twenty miles from Mount Vernon across the Potomac. Jacky soon became friends with Charles Calvert, another pupil, whose home, Mount Airy, a plantation of four thousand acres, lay nearby. The rambling Calvert household—Charles was one of ten children, a number that would ultimately rise to thirteen—was easygoing and hospitable, and Jacky found his fellow pupil’s eldest sisters, the Misses Elizabeth and Eleanor Calvert, delightful. Charles’s father, Benedict Calvert, though illegitimate, could boast the fifth Lord Baltimore as his sire. Sir Robert Eden, governor of Maryland, and his wife, Caroline, legitimate daughter of the peer, acknowledged the relationship. Washington could rest assured that Jacky was not consorting with “Store boys,” as he had suspected he was doing in Annapolis. George and Martha soon became regular visitors to Mount Airy; the Calverts, and Sir Robert and Lady Eden with them, visited at Mount Vernon. The elder Misses Calvert were company for Patsy. Now that Jacky was consorting with suitable company and attending steadily to his books, Washington could even hope that his ward might be brought to some understanding of “the mathematics…than which,” he had reminded Boucher in July 1771, “so much of it at least as relates to surveying, nothing can be more essentially necessary to any person possessed of a large landed estate, the bounds of some part or other of which is always in controversy.”
