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Col.
Custis's Daughter
The Old Colored Woman
who has Received Title
to a Corner of the Arlington Estate June 1866 [?]
A private bill passed the United States
senate which has quite a little History behind it. It was to
give a bedridden negro woman, eighty-two years old, title to
fifteen acres off of the northwestern corner of the Arlington
estate. The spot has been her home for half a century. Before
the war her white cottage was surrounded by tall trees and
pleasant stretches of grassland, and the place was beautiful as
well as homelike, But five years of camps and soldier
lawlessness stripped it of trees and fences and left it a
barren, poor place at best. The land now hardly feeds her little
family.
When the United States bought Arlington at
tax sale the old negro woman's land went with it, and she had
nothing to prove it was hers. But it seems she had a moral right
that is stronger that is stronger than the lower law of courts
and statute books. She was the daughter of G.W.P. Custis and the
granddaughter of Martha Washington. Col. Custis recognized her
as his child, and in 1826 [gave] her the land, on which she is
dying, for herself and her children. At the time she was freed
she had a daughter six years old, and a baby boy.
Soon after the laying of the corner stone for
the Washington Monument, when the latter was a man grown
[William Syphax], he wanted to go to Boston with the Hon Robert
C. Winthrop. He went to Alexandria to get his papers, for no man
of color could in those days travel about unless he had a master
to answer for him or papers to show that he owned himself.
The young negro [William Syphax] found in the
archives at Alexandria the paper which Col. Custis had signed
giving his mother her freedom and that of "her daughter
Bertha, six years old, and one male infant." An
octogenarian Quaker affirmed that the male child was the young
negro and he received his credentials.
But the most interesting fact in the family
history is that this old lady, who by act of Congress, is to be
allowed to end her days on her own bit of earth, was doubly
descended from the Custises. Her mother was Martha Washington's
maid. The family of Robert E. Lee inherited the respect for the
blood of the former slave woman, and they confirmed the legacy
of Col. Custis by saying that the bit of land was hers, as
though there was no deed to show in fact.
When Mrs. Robert E. Lee left Arlington, the
last farewell was spoken as she passed the old woman's cottage.
When after the war, Mrs. Lee visited Arlington, she found it a
waste. When nearly bedridden by rheumatism she rode up from
Alexandria to look over the place. As the carriage drove away
from it, she took one look at her old home and said: "I
never want to see Arlington again."
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posted 29 June 2008 |
