A Son’s Tribute (February 1966 | Volume: 17, Issue: 2)

A Son’s Tribute

AH article image

Authors: David G. Lowe

Historic Era:

Historic Theme:

Subject:

February 1966 | Volume 17, Issue 2

In 1953, at Freeman’s Auction House in Philadelphia, three large paintings of Revolutionary War scenes were offered for sale. They were obviously the work of an untrained hand, and in all three the mounted figure of George Washington was the lotus of the somewhat primitive composition. The battles they depicted were not identified with any certainly, no one knew when they had been painted, and the name of ihe artist was not given. The crowd at Freeman’s showed litlle interest in the battle scenes, and the bidding was sluggish. They were finally sold to an agent representing Mr. and Mrs. Rockwell Gardiner, antiques dealers of Stamford, Connecticut. The price for the three was $600. Hut as soon as the Gardiners saw the paintings they felt certain that they had made a discovery of historic importance. For they suspected thai lhe lhtce paintings were from the hand of George Washington Parke Custis and that the canvases of red and green and gold spoke of an extraordinary link between the American Revolution and the Civil War.

Few men in American history have so completely bridged the gap between iwo eras, touched with their own hands two distant epochs, as did Custis. He was the adopted son of one great Virginian, the “Father of His Country,” who made the union of the American colonies possible, and the father-in-law of another, who led lhe armies of the rebellion against that union, which lie felt had become oppressive.

Custis’ father, John Parke Custis, the son of Martha Washington by her first marriage, died of “camp fever” in the closing hours of the Revolution, leaving four young children. George Washington—who had rushed’ from Yorktown to be at the dying man’s bedside—announced on the spot (so it is said), “I adopt the two younger children as my own.” George Custis was then six months old; the other child adopted by Washington, Eleanor (“Nelly”) Parke Custis, was about two years older. Their mother, Eleanor Calvert Custis, a granddaughter of the fifth Lord Baltimore, was quite able to take care of them, but she consented to the wishes of the childless Washingtons, who longed to have children at Mount Vernon.

“Little Wash,” or “Tub,” as he was called, was America’s first presidential child. Living with the first First Family when the federal capital was in New York and in Philadelphia, he met all the great men who came to visit the President and was fourteen when he saw Washington lay the cornerstone of the Capitol. He adored the General, and all his life gloried in the epithet, “the child of Mount Vernon.” After Washington’s death in 1799, he continued to live there with his eminent grandmother until she died in 1802.

Custis, then a young man of twenty-one, moved to Arlington—or Mount Washington as he first tailed it—a