How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made

John Custis IV was in the upper crust of colonial Virginia. The planter and politician turned sixty in 1738, and a portrait shows him as a well-dressed gentleman peering at the viewer with disdain while clutching a book on horticulture, his passion. His lavish six-chimneyed mansion, Custis Square in Williamsburg, the colonial capitol, featured the grandest gardens in British America. He owned several tobacco plantations, an Eastern Shore estate he’d inherited from his grandfather, two islands in the lower Chesapeake and coast, and hundreds of enslaved laborers. Lesser planters depended on him for credit, and Custis was on the governor’s Council, the colony’s executive branch.

But Custis was as miserable as he was rich. His letters reveal a man who was peevish and vengeful. Custis’s marriage to a wealthy heiress, Frances Parke, had been short and stormy, and after the couple petitioned for separation, Frances died of smallpox. She left two small children, Fanny and Daniel. John Custis sent Fanny to be raised by relatives and was disappointed with Daniel, to whom he nevertheless gave a starter plantation called White House in New Kent County. Custis never remarried. Instead, he had affairs including one with Anne Moody, wife of a Williamsburg tavern owner. He also had a sexual relationship with Alice, an enslaved maidservant at Custis Square.

Alice was his property and could not escape his coercion in all its forms. Enslavers plundered £2 out of every £3 of Black labor value, and Alice’s income was food, shelter, clothing, and medical care. She lived in a corner of the finest house in the colony, but Alice had zero wealth. She and her foremothers inherited poverty and were bound to pass that to their children.

Yet Alice brought John Custis IV the happiness that had eluded him. In 1739, she gave birth to John Custis V, nicknamed Jack. Jack was enslaved under Virginia law, but he was the apple of his father’s eye. When he came down ill, John Custis IV wailed to his son Daniel that “my dear black boy Jack [is] sick; wch makes me very melancholy.” If he died, Custis wrote, “I am sure I should soon follow him; it would break my heart, and bring my grey hairs with sorrow to the grave my lif being wrapt up in his.”

By the time Jack turned five, John Custis IV envisioned his son’s future as a gentleman and decided to leave him an enviable estate. But Jack couldn’t be a legal heir. Under a 1662 law, “all children borne in this country shal be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.” Alice was enslaved, but John Custis IV was determined to include Jack in the family genealogy of wealth.

There was another obstacle: a 1723 law, which Custis supported, made it near impossible for any slave owner to free individual bondspersons. The sole exception was for “some meritorious services, to be adjudged and allowed by the governor and council” like exposing a slave uprising. And if freed, that person had to leave the colony within thirty days.

Nevertheless, in 1744, Custis petitioned the governor’s Council to grant an exception and free Jack at age twenty. While the Council deliberated, Custis designated a 250-acre estate on Queen’s Creek for “Negro John otherwise called Jack” in York County in trust with Ann Moody and her husband. Custis enlisted the help of relative George Kendall, lawyer George Wythe (who trained Thomas Jefferson) and the colony’s deputy auditor general John Blair I to ensure Jack received his inheritance.

Virginia passed several laws that reinforced the iron-strap restrictions on Black upward economic mobility. One law held that “no person whatsoever shall buy, sell, or receive of, to or from any servant, or slave, any coin or commodity whatsoever, without the leave or consent of the master or owner of such servant, or slave.” Family drama complicated the inheritance scheme further.

Daniel Parke Custis—now in his thirties—wanted to marry Martha Dandridge, teenaged daughter of a New Kent County planter. John Custis admitted that Martha was “beautifull & sweet temper’d,” but refused Daniel his permission. To help change his mind, Daniel bought Jack a horse, saddle, and bridle for his ninth birthday. Jack was delighted, but Alice could see that Daniel was using his younger brother to manipulate their father.

John Custis IV was probably suffering from yaws, a bacterial infection of the skin, bones, and joints, and near death in November 1749, he made a will. In it he passed to Daniel Parke Custis about 98 percent of his fortune including an estate called Arlington on the Eastern Shore, Mockhorn and Smith islands, Custis Square, and all the tobacco estates in the Tidewater. With that transfer he also passed ownership of over 100 enslaved people (in addition to those already transferred), and Daniel Parke Custis became the beneficiary of the labor value stolen from hundreds of enslaved laborers over nearly a century since the Custis family came to America from Holland. Virginia law said that estates must pass intact, entailing large intergenerational transfers of wealth to a small proportion of heirs. But the remaining 2 percent of Custis’s estate earmarked for Jack was still a considerable fortune.

Custis’s attempt to push wealth across a racial chasm was a fable of Jack’s future gentility. He directed that Jack was to be free and given the Queen’s Creek estate held in trust for him. John directed Daniel to build “Jack a handsome strong convenient dwelling house,” on a plan sketched by John Blair I. Custis directed the house be “comepleatly furnished within side and without . . .  with one dozen high Russia leather chairs one dozen low Russia leather chairs a Russia leather couch good and strong three good feather bed bedsteads and furniture and two good Black Walnut Tables.” John Custis IV ordered that the entire “plantation be kept in good repair and so delivered to the said negro . . . Jack when he shall arrive to the age of twenty years.” It would also come equipped with “a good riding horse and two able workable horses” to take Jack’s crops to market. Jack was also to receive a generous annual allotment of new clothes, four fat hogs and a fat beef, along with four barrels of corn as part of his inheritance. He was even supposed to own enslaved people of his own choosing—and legally own his mother, Alice. Before then, Jack and Alice were “be handsomely maintained out of the profits of my estate given him,” including a £500 trust fund and £20 per year to him and Alice. To give the estate water access, John bought a sixteen-and-a-half-acre tract near the head of Queen’s Creek in York County.

As John Custis IV lay on his death bed, Alice may have paused to reflect on thirty-seven years of working without pay, and the Parke family had impoverished her ancestors before that. Independence and economic security ten years in the future could scarcely atone for the corrosive effects of decades of sexual abuse, the knots in her muscles, wrinkles on her skin, and wear on her bones and spirit. And yet if anyone could bend the iron-like structures of law and society into a portal through which she and Jack could slip into the ranks of wealthy Virginians it was John Custis IV, who died a week after completing his will.

Jack’s cries must have awoken Alice before dawn that Saturday in late September 1751. At sunup, he couldn’t rise and join the other enslaved people working at Custis Square. Alice may have cursed the “very warm” weather for causing her son’s neck pain. She called a physician who bled Jack. But the illness was too advanced. John Blair wrote in his diary, “Col. Custis’s Favourite Boy Jack died.”

Alice mourned, but Jack was already buried by the time “Colonel” Daniel Parke Custis arrived in Williamsburg that December. After his father died, he and Martha Dandridge married in May 1750, and she’d just given birth to Daniel Parke Custis II. Alice made the mansion comfortable for Daniel’s stay but probably hesitated to ask for her £20 allowance from her late owner’s bequest or her inheritance. The deed of trust for Jack named “his heirs and assigns” as his contingent beneficiaries. Alice was his nearest surviving relative. Had John Custis V—Jack—been white, the Queen Creek estate would have been Alice’s property. But that is not how Daniel Parke Custis viewed the matter.

Daniel may have mourned his brother Jack’s death, but he also wanted his brother’s property. He claimed Jack’s 266 ½ acres, but Daniel Parke Custis discovered that his father had designated George Kendall as a beneficiary, not him. Fuming, Daniel contested Kendall’s claim but lost the case. The York County Court held that Jack was unable to inherit anything, because he was enslaved, and that Kendall was the true beneficiary. The twelve-year-old Jack had not satisfied the freedom requirement and could not be manumitted under the 1723 statute.

It affirmed that property was white, and poverty was Black. Kendall sold Daniel Parke Custis the estate that should have gone to Jack and Alice for £350. Martha Custis blamed the “small negro boy” for causing the “most violent fancy” of a demented old man eaten up with sickness and anger. It was a way of expunging Jack from the Custis family genome just as the court denied him a place in the wealth genealogy.

Alice’s final seasons of life were likely lonely and despondent, the halls of Custis Square once echoing with Jack’s laughter now tomblike. Alice remained enslaved. The promise of any wealth must have seemed like the shimmering bioluminescence on the nighttime York River—eternally alluring, but wade in to scoop up a handful, and the glowing water slips through your fingers.

Instead of her own vine and fig tree, Alice got slavery’s poverty. Instead of a place in the Custis family genealogy, Alice was forgotten. John Custis IV didn’t record her last name, and the mother of John Custis V received nothing from him. The value of Alice’s work from the time she was sixteen until 1749 was roughly £200 Virginia money based on domestic workers’ wages, to say nothing of her enslaver’s £20 annual bequest that went unpaid. In total, Alice’s stolen earnings was roughly two-thirds of the average white household wealth of a Chesapeake family at midcentury, including real estate, capital, and consumer goods. Instead of paying Alice, that income value was sunk into John Custis IV’s fashionable glassware and fine gardens, which passed to Daniel and Martha. Her labor helped preserve the value of Custis Square. For Alice, the £200 she never received was the hearth of her own she never tended, the garden she never planted, the bedstead she never slept in and the security of her own dwelling that the father of her child denied her each day and night he owned her.

Daniel Parke Custis didn’t enjoy his inheritance for long. He died after a short illness in 1757 leaving twenty-six-year-old widow Martha and two surviving children, Jacky and Patsy. Lacking a will, Virginia divided the estate in thirds, but Martha soon remarried another planter. George Washington superintended the Custis estate. Alice had died, but the property that John Custis IV had earmarked for Jack was now in the Washington family. George and Martha enslaved 577 people over their forty-year marriage, which kept people like Jack and Alice from—and most Black Americans—from climbing the wealth ladder.

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