I am certain, he has ever bestowed a serious thought of the consequences; by which means his education is interrupted.”  To avoid this danger, Washington took his ward to New York and entered him in King’s College, but the death of Patsy Custis put a termination to study, for Mrs. Washington could not bear to have the lad at such a distance, and Washington “did not care, as he is the last of the family, to push my opposition too far.”  Accordingly, Jack returned to Virginia and promptly married.

The young couple were much at Mount Vernon from this time on, and Washington wrote to “Dear Jack,” “I am always pleased with yours and Nelly’s abidance at Mount Vernon.”  When the winter snows made the siege of Boston purely passive, the couple journeyed with Mrs. Washington to Cambridge, and visited at head-quarters for some months.  The arrival of children prevented the repetition of such visits, but frequent letters, which rarely failed to send love to “Nelly and the little girls,” were exchanged.  The acceptance of command compelled Washington to resign the care of Custis’s estate, for which service “I have never charged him or his sister, from the day of my connexion with them to this hour, one farthing for all the trouble I have had in managing their estates, nor for any expense they have been to me, notwithstanding some hundreds of pounds would not reimburse the moneys I have actually paid in attending the public meetings in Williamsburg to collect their debts, and transact these several matters appertaining to the respective estates.”  Washington, however, continued his advice as to its management, and in other letters advised him concerning his conduct when Custis was elected a member of the Virginia House of Delegates.  In the siege of Yorktown Jack served as an officer of militia, and the exposure proved too much for him.  Immediately after the surrender, news reached Washington of his serious illness, and by riding thirty miles in one day he succeeded in reaching Eltham in “time enough to see poor Mr. Custis breath his last,” leaving behind him “four lovely children, three girls and a boy.”

Owing to his public employment, Washington refused to be guardian for these “little ones,” writing “that it would be injurious to the children and madness in me, to undertake, as a principle, a trust which I could not discharge.  Such aid, however, as it ever may be with me to give to the children especially the boy, I will afford with all my heart, and on this assurance you may rely.”  Yet “from their earliest infancy” two of Jack’s children, George Washington Parke and Eleanor Parke Custis, lived at Mount Vernon, for, as Washington wrote in his will, “it has always been my intention, since my expectation of having issue has ceased, to consider the grandchildren of my wife in the same light as my own relations, and to act a friendly part by them.”  Though the cares of war prevented his watching their property interests, his eight years’ absence could not make him forget them, and on his way to Annapolis, in 1783, to tender Congress his resignation, he spent sundry hours of his time in the purchase of gifts obviously intended to increase the joy of his homecoming to the family circle at Mount Vernon; set forth in his note-book as follows: