[Footnote 1:  See for instance in W.C.  Ford’s edition of The Writings of George Washington, II, 140-69.  Diary for 1760, 230-56.  Diary for 1768.]

The care and education of little Martha and her brother, John Parke Custis, Washington undertook with characteristic thoroughness and solicitude.  He had an instinct for training growing creatures.  He liked to experiment in breeding horses and cattle and the farmyard animals.  He watched the growth of his plantations of trees, and he was all the more interested in studying the development of mental and moral capacities in the little children.

In due time a tutor was engaged, and besides the lessons they learned in their schoolbooks, they were taught both music and dancing.  Little Patsy suffered from epilepsy, and after the prescriptions of the regular doctors had done no good, her parents turned to a quack named Evans, who placed on the child’s finger an iron ring supposed to have miraculous virtues, but it brought her no relief, and very suddenly little Martha Custis died.  Washington himself felt the loss of his unfortunate step-daughter, but he was unflagging in trying to console the mother, heartbroken at the death of the child.

Jack Custis was given in charge of the Reverend Jonathan Boucher, an Anglican clergyman, apparently well-meaning, who agreed with Washington’s general view that the boy’s training “should make him fit for more useful purposes than horse-racing.”  In spite of Washington’s carefully reasoned plans, the youth of the young man prevailed over the reason of his stepfather.  Jack found dogs, horses, and guns, and consideration of dress more interesting and more important than his stepfather’s theories of education.  Washington wrote to Parson Boucher, the teacher: 

Had he begun, or rather pursued his study of the Greek language, I should have thought it no bad acquisition; ...  To be acquainted with the French Tongue is become a part of polite education; and to a man who has the prospect of mixing in a large circle, absolutely necessary.  Without arithmetic, the common affairs of life are not to be managed with success.  The study of Geometry, and the mathematics (with due regard to the limits of it) is equally advantageous.  The principles of Philosophy, Moral, Natural, etc.  I should think a very desirable knowledge for a gentleman.[1]

[Footnote 1:  W.C.  Ford, George Washington (1900), I, 136-37.]

There was nothing abstract in young Jack Custis’s practical response to his stepfather’s reasoning; he fell in love with Miss Nelly Calvert and asked her to marry him.  Washington was forced to plead with the young lady that the youth was too young for marriage by several years, and that he must finish his education.  Apparently she acquiesced without making a scene.  She accepted a postponement of the engagement, and Custis was enrolled among the students of King’s College (subsequently Columbia)