The Indian Boys Who Made it in 18th-Century America

In the memoirs of a refugee from the French Revolution, Thomas Law, once a high-ranking administrator with the British East India Company, claims he had “married a very rich Brahmin widow,” with whom he had two sons. 

While the tale is only partly true, the full picture is far more thrilling. It’s a story of three, not two sons, whose lives traversed India, Britain, and the highest echelons of American society: the family of George Washington, the first U.S. president no less. 

Historian Rosemarie Zagarri was researching the first First Lady, Martha Washington, George Washington’s wife, when she came across her granddaughter, Elizabeth “Eliza” Parke Custis. “It said she had married Thomas Law, this British man who had immigrated…and he brought with him his mixed-race children…in 1794,” Zagarri told The Juggernaut. Zagarri spent the last 15 years piecing together the story.