First Family

The children of Martha Washington’s son by her first marriage were born into life in the public eye, well-known as George Washington’s family. By turns petty and powerful, glamorous and cruel, the Custises used Washington as a means to enhance their own power and status. As enslavers committed to the American empire, the Custis family embodied the failures of the American experiment that finally exploded into civil war. Cassandra Good is a writer and historian focused on gender and politics in early America. Carolyn Eastman is an historian of early America with special interest in eighteenth and nineteenth-century histories of political culture, the media, and gender.