The president of King’s College, the Reverend Myles Cooper, welcomed Jacky Custis and his personal slave Joe to the school. An accomplished scholar and poet, versed in classical tongues, Cooper had strengthened the college by adding new professors and a medical school and expanding the library. He had also turned the school into a hotbed of Tory sentiment as the colonies became polarized by the controversial taxes imposed by London. The school stood on the Hudson River, one block west of the common, where radicals congregated to spout anti-British venom. Myles Cooper, with no patience for such critics, branded the radical Sons of Liberty the “sons of licentiousness, faction, and confusion.”²⁴

There is no suggestion that Washington had any qualms about depositing Jacky in a school known for its Tory views. He must have alerted Cooper candidly to Jacky’s wanton history, because he told the president that, if Jacky spent too freely, he hoped Cooper would “by your friendly admonitions . . . check the progress of it.”²⁵ College life was shot through with class differences, and Jacky basked in his privileged station. Thanks to his wealth, the cosseted boy enjoyed social equality with his professors, who seemed to know his status and cater to it. Instead of socializing with other students, Jacky boasted of dining with President Cooper and his tutors. “I believe I may say without vanity that I am look[e]d upon in a particular light” by the faculty, Jacky told his mother. “There is as much distinction made between me and the other students as can be expected.”²⁶ He also bragged that he and Joe had their own suite of rooms, with a large sitting room and two small bedrooms. At times Jacky wrote about King’s College as if it were a swank resort staffed with servile employees hired to wait upon him, assuring his mother that “there has nothing been omitted by my good friend Doctor Cooper which was necessary to my contentment in this place.”²⁷ After Washington returned to Mount Vernon, Jacky promised that he would prove a credit to his family. The young man’s cozy relationship with the faculty suggested that things wouldn’t turn out exactly as Washington had planned.

The concern over Jacky paled into insignificance, however, beside mounting trepidation over Patsy’s medical condition. Charles Willson Peale remembered the palpable atmosphere of fear at Mount Vernon, writing that “we used to walk together to enjoy the evening breeze” and “danced to give exercise to Miss Custis . . . who did not enjoy good health. She was subject to fits and Mrs. Washington never suffered her to be a minute out of her sight.”²⁸ Washington’s diaries for early 1773 are rife with emergency visits by Dr. Rumney. During one particularly distressing time in late January, the doctor camped out at Mount Vernon for almost a full week. Then on Saturday, June 19, 1773, Patsy Custis died a sudden, painless death, leading her stepfather to make a terse entry in his diary: “At home all day. About five o’clock poor Patcy Custis died suddenly.”

The next day, a shaken Washington wrote a note eloquent in its brevity to his brother-in-law Burwell Bassett:

Dear Sir: It is an easier matter to conceive than to describe the distress of this family, especially that of the unhappy parent of our dear Patcy Custis, when I inform you that yesterday remov[e]d the sweet, innocent girl into a more happy and peaceful abode than any she has met with in the afflicted path she hitherto has trod. She rose from dinner about four o’clock in better health and spirits than she appear[e]d to have been in for some time. Soon after which she was seized with one of her usual fits and expir[e]d in it in less than two minutes without uttering a word, a groan, or scarce a sigh. This sudden and unexpected blow, I scarce need add, has almost reduced my poor wife to the lowest ebb of misery, which is increas[e]d by the absence of her son (whom I have just fixed at the College in New York).²⁹

After five years of torment, Patsy had gently slipped away. It was unusual for a person with epilepsy to die so peacefully, suggesting that Patsy may have had a heart problem or some other condition associated with her epilepsy.

A private man who never flaunted his deep emotions, George Washington nonetheless gave way to a tremendous outpouring of grief. One observer remembered him kneeling by Patsy’s bed as he “solemnly recited the prayers for the dying, while tears rolled down his cheeks and his voice was often broken by sobs.”³⁰ In a week of sweltering heat, the heartbroken Washingtons decided it was wise to bury Patsy on the family property the next day. The coffin, draped in black, was buried in the brick vault down the hill from the house on the Potomac side. Martha assumed a black mourning cape for a full year. Her husband knew that, between her daughter’s death and her son’s absence, she was unspeakably bereft, and he canceled a western trip to stay near her.

When Patsy died, Jacky’s fiancée, Nelly Calvert, was staying with the Washingtons, and her presence proved providential, for she stepped into the huge emotional void left by Patsy’s death, becoming like a second daughter. She lingered at Mount Vernon for a week, fostering a lasting intimacy with Martha. Jacky wrote a tender condolence note to his mother, telling her to “remember you are a Christian” and saying of his lost sister that her situation was “more to be envied than pitied, for if we mortals can distinguish between those who are deserving of grace and those who are not, I am confident she enjoys that bliss prepar[e]d only for the good and virtuous.”³¹

Patsy’s death had a profound impact on the finances of her stepfather, who had been unable to shake his indebtedness to Robert Cary. Through skillful management, Patsy’s estate had appreciated to sixteen thousand pounds, and half this amount went to Jacky and half to Washington by way of his wife. Later in the year Washington instructed Robert Cary to take the inheritance and discharge his large debt. Once again, as with his father and his brother Lawrence, Washington had profited enormously from a death that caused him grievous sorrow.

Beyond their obvious sadness, it is hard to overstate the impact that Patsy’s death would have on George and Martha Washington in the coming years. The sudden financial windfall, by relieving pressure on Washington, allowed him the luxury of participating in the American Revolution without financial worries. In fact, it enabled him to take part on the gentlemanly terms that suited him, as he dispensed with a salary. The effect on Martha was no less consequential. She would spend about half the war in her husband’s company, which would have been impossible if Patsy were alive. The sickly girl could never have managed the long coach journeys, or the continual tensions of a military camp, or being left alone. Patsy Custis’s death, paradoxically, set up George and Martha Washington for their shining moment in history.

The inheritance also allowed Washington to launch the second major transformation of Mount Vernon, and he ordered sixty thousand bricks and nearly fifteen thousand shingles for this ambitious effort. In 1773 the main house was still a plain, nondescript building, small and unadorned and not particularly attractive. Now Washington decided to double the mansion’s size, adding those trademark features—a cupola, the pediment over the west entrance, the spacious piazza on the river side—that we associate with it today. Never a professional architect, Washington admitted that he was “a person who avows his ignorance of architectural principles and who has no other guide but his eye to direct his choice.”³² Because he added rooms and wings as needed, the house lacked the elegance of a preconceived design and was marred by some clumsy touches. The facade wasn’t quite symmetrical, and the pediment sat awkwardly on the window tops—errors the more refined Jefferson would have avoided. Nevertheless the house would gain undeniable grace and beauty, and the large colonnaded porch would stand out as a landmark in southern architecture. The piazza, with its spectacular view of the Potomac and wooded hills beyond, turned into Washington’s favorite haunt, the place that Abigail Adams hailed as Mount Vernon’s “greatest adornment.”³³