In retrospect, the Yorktown victory dealt a mortal blow to British aspirations in America. When Lord North, the portly prime minister, digested the news at 10 Downing Street, he went wild with despair. “O God!” he repeated, pacing the floor. “It is all over!”64 The unreconstructed King George III refused to accept this reality and wanted to throw even more resources into prosecuting a hopeless conflict. The victory encouraged a skeptical world to believe in American independence, and the Dutch would grant diplomatic recognition in the spring. It isn’t clear whether Washington grasped the full import of the victory. He praised the battle as “an interesting event that may be productive of much good if properly improved, but if it should be the means of relaxation and sink us into supineness and [false] security, it had better not have happened.”65 As reports drifted back from London that the British had conceded the war was hopeless, Washington remained cautious, since the enemy’s presence in North America was still formidable. Throughout the conflict he had resisted wishful thinking, and now dreaded that the Yorktown victory might waylay people into premature complacency. Along with Lafayette, he went out to the Ville de Paris to see if he could parlay the great triumph into joint action against Charleston, South Carolina, or Wilmington, North Carolina, but de Grasse declined any follow-up operation.

Washington was sufficiently vexed by the Frenchman’s fitful cooperation that he decided to send Lafayette to France to agitate for a more durable naval presence. “A constant naval superiority would terminate the war speedily,” Washington told Lafayette in mid-November. “Without it, I do not know that it will ever be terminated honorably.”66 Washington also hoped for more French generosity in the form of a large loan or grant. “Adieu, my dear general,” Lafayette wrote from Boston before his departure. “I know your heart so well that I am sure that no distance can alter your attachment to me. With the same candor, I assure you that my love, my respect, my gratitude for you are above expression.”67

A coda to the Yorktown campaign must have mortified Lord Cornwallis. On October 17, the day of the surrender, General Clinton and his fleet of six thousand troops began their departure from New York, hoping to rescue him. When they arrived off Chesapeake Bay a week later, they encountered three people in a small craft who apprised them of the calamity that had occurred. Having no desire to do battle with thirty-three French ships still lingering off the Virginia coast, they turned around and went back to New York. The French admiral stayed in the area long enough to protect the Continental Army as it gathered its supplies and set sail up the bay, then headed for the long trip back to its familiar northern haunts.

The presence at Yorktown of Jacky Custis as a volunteer aide to Washington has sparked a certain cynicism among historians. Before then Jacky had contributed only modestly to the war effort, serving for two years as a delegate in the Virginia assembly, where he showed a grandiosity that sometimes vexed his stepfather. He had also invested with Washington in a privateer that prowled the Atlantic in quest of British merchant ships. Yet he had never placed his life in jeopardy, leading to snickers that he went to Yorktown to bask in a major victory without having paid his dues. If it irked Washington to see the raffish Jacky mingling with brave, hard-bitten men who had sacrificed years to the cause, he never admitted it openly.

Amid the unsanitary conditions at Yorktown, Jacky Custis contracted camp fever. Since the condition often proved fatal, Jacky expressed a last wish to witness Cornwallis’s surrender and was lifted to a high spot atop a redoubt, giving him a panoramic glimpse of the ceremonies. Then he was carted thirty miles to Eltham in New Kent County, the estate of his uncle, Burwell Bassett. Martha Washington and Jacky’s wife, Eleanor (Nelly) Calvert Curtis, were summoned to attend him. Preoccupied with the aftermath of victory, Washington couldn’t extricate himself from Yorktown until November 5, when, alerted to Jacky’s perilous condition, he hastened to Eltham. By the time he arrived, he learned that the doctors’ ministrations had failed and that Jacky Custis was dying. The young man expired a few hours later, three weeks before his twenty-seventh birthday.

For a disconsolate Martha Washington, it was an indescribably sad moment. Having already lost three children, she had doted on Jacky, and Washington alluded to her “deep and solemn distress.”68 By some accounts, Washington had a profound emotional response to Jacky’s death, clasping his bereaved widow to his bosom and proclaiming that henceforth he regarded Jacky’s two youngest children as his own. One French observer described Washington as “uncommonly affected” by the death and said his friends “perceived some change in his equanimity of temper subsequent to that event.”69 In a less sentimental vein, biographer James T. Flexner wrote bluntly that Washington expressed “no personal grief.”70 If Washington reacted deeply to the death, it is not surprising, for it meant that he would have no chance to improve his strained relationship with his stepson. It was also a sobering reminder that, after years of war, he might not return to the happy home life he had pictured.

After spending a week at Eltham and attending to Jacky’s funeral, Washington escorted Martha and Nelly back to Mount Vernon, where they dealt with the fate of the three small girls and baby boy who had lost their father. The Washingtons decided to adopt informally the two youngest children, Eleanor Parke Custis, then two years old and like her mother called Nelly, and George Washington Parke Custis, seven months old. Such informal adoptions were commonplace in the eighteenth century, when life expectancy was shorter and children often lost parents. A gay, whimsical child, Nelly would turn into a vivacious, dark-haired little girl, while the baby boy, nicknamed Washy or Tub, had blond hair and blue eyes and inherited both his father’s charm and his wayward nature. With his solemn sense of responsibility, Washington took seriously his duties toward the children and wrote in his will that it had “always been my intention, since my expectation of having issue has ceased, to consider the grandchildren of my wife in the same light as I do my own relations.”71

These two adopted children reciprocated the intense love they received and treated George and Martha more as adored parents than as grandparents. In later years, when she had to spend time with her biological mother, Nelly expressed her absolute devotion to her surrogate parents: “I have gone through the greatest trial I ever experienced—parting with my beloved grandmama . . . Since my father’s death, she has been ever more than a mother to me and the president the most affectionate of fathers. I love them more than anyone.”72 Two years later Jacky’s widow, Nelly, married David Stuart of Alexandria, a physician trained in Edinburgh. They brought up the two eldest girls from the earlier marriage, Elizabeth Parke Custis and Martha Parke Custis, and added more children to the rich private lives of the Washingtons. Despite being a childless couple, George and Martha Washington had extensive experience in raising children and actually had much more of a family life, over a longer period, than most other married couples.

Jacky Custis left behind a murky legacy. Many years later his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, who was born a year after George Washington rode off to war, told how her father would hoist her on a table and force her to sing indecent songs that he had taught her in order to divert his inebriated friends. “I was animated to exert myself to give him delight,” she wrote. “The servants in the passage would join their mirth and I, holding my head erect, would strut about the table to receive the praises of the company. My mother remonstrated in vain.” Because he had been denied a son, Jacky told his guests that little Elizabeth “must make fun for him until he had.”73 It would be hard to imagine a stepson more alien to George Washington.