First Family

April 17, 2023
George and Martha Washington’s grandchildren were “proud but profoundly flawed people,” according to this immersive family biography by historian Good (Founding Friendships). Martha’s wealthy first husband, Daniel Parke Custis, died in 1757, two years before she married George, who became step-grandfather to her son Jacky’s children, Elizabeth (Eliza), Martha (Patty), Eleanor (Nelly), and Wash. After Jacky’s sudden death in 1781, George and Martha adopted and raised Nelly and Wash, who “enter their young adulthood just as the country was experiencing an awkward stage in its own growth.” Good tracks the Custis girls through their courtships and marriages and details George’s “stern advice and guidance” to Wash, who had “an almost unconquerable disposition to indolence in every thing that did not tend to his amusements,” according to his grandfather. Light is also shed on how slavery helped the Custises build their wealth, and on Wash’s support—influenced by “a growing race science that codified supposed African American racial inferiority”—for the American Colonization Society, which sought to relocate free Blacks to Africa. Throughout, Good’s meticulous research and fluid prose buttress her case that the Custises were emblematic of “America’s story in its first century: military triumph and tragedy; democracy and old aristocratic ties; visions of liberty coexisting alongside the horrors of slavery.” It’s a fascinating perspective on the nation’s growing pains.

May 1, 2023
A crisp account of George Washington's stepgrandchildren and how they weathered the political shifting winds and preserved his legacy. Although Washington had no children of his own, his marriage to Martha Dandridge Custis brought to his household a new blended family thanks to her son's four children. Good, a history professor at Marymount University and author of Founding Friendships, begins with an iconic portrait by Edward Savage. The painting featured the president and his wife in the presence of Nelly and Wash, two of the stepgrandchildren who were raised in the president's home, and the author explains how the portrait helped create the reassuring image of what a first family should look like. Good painstakingly works through each of the four children's lives: the headstrong girls, Eliza, Patty, and Nelly, who entered into strong marriages and made some political waves themselves; and Wash, who struggled in adolescence and dropped out of Princeton (George noted how he displayed "an almost unconquerable disposition to indolence in every thing that did not tend to his amusements"). All of the children were fierce protectors of their famous patriarch's legacy, but they did not necessarily agree with Washington's supposed intention to free his hundreds of slaves upon Martha's death. Good offers a thoughtful discussion of Washington as a slave master, showing how many of the enslaved families had been torn apart and cruelly divvied up among Washington's households. He never freed a slave in his lifetime. The Custises "chose to re-main enslavers," and Wash fathered several children with enslaved women ("a recognized and common reality" in 19th-century Virginia). Toward the end of this well-researched narrative, Good notes how "Americans defaulted to a definition of family that they still rely upon today: family was about blood relationships." An intimate and authoritative history offering a close look at the original first family.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 15, 2023
Historian Good asserts that George Washington's descendants "preferred to stay out of the limelight." George and Martha did not have children together, but Martha had a surviving son and daughter from her first marriage to Daniel Parke Custis, and most Americans considered her grandchildren-- Elizabeth ("Eliza"), Martha ("Patty"), George Washington ("Wash"), and Nelly--to be the president's family. Good thoroughly chronicles the Custises, who frequently appear to be greedy and needy, and, in the case of Robert E. Lee, husband of Wash's daughter Mary, along with other descendants, disloyal to the nation Washington worked so hard to create. With wit and a careful eye for detail, Good capably balances the book's three narrative tracks: the lives of the Custis clan; the wars, politics, and society around them; and the lives of enslaved and free African Americans in the antebellum era. Her accounts of slaveholders and enslaved people in the lives of the Washington and Custis families are the most precise and extensive to be found. Good's invaluable family history also offers solid coverage of how women influenced politics before they had the right to vote.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.