First Family: George Washington's Heirs and the Making of America

On February 22, 2024, historians Cassandra Good and Carolyn Eastman presented a lecture on the Washington family, celebrity, and the development of the new United States. While it’s widely known that George and Martha Washington never had children of their own, few are aware that they raised children together. In Good's book First Family, we see Washington as a father figure and are introduced to the children he helped raise, tracing their complicated roles in American history. The children of Martha Washington’s son by her first marriage—Eliza, Patty, Nelly and Wash Custis—were born into life in the public eye, well-known as George Washington’s family and keepers of his legacy. 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—all the while being celebrities in a soap opera of their own making. Cassandra Good is a writer and historian focused on gender and politics in early America who currently serves as Associate Professor of History at Marymount University. She is the author of the prize-winning Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early American Republic and her newest book, First Family: George Washington's Heirs and the Making of 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. She is Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author most recently of the award-winning The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The United States’ First Forgotten Celebrity. The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.