The Indian Boys Who Made it in 18th-Century America
A British nabob’s mixed-race kids became U.S. citizens, attended Harvard and Yale, and earned plaudits. How?
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.