IN SEARCH OF THE RUNAWAY SLAVE WHO DEFIED GEORGE WASHINGTON
A powerful new book about Ona Judge, a slave who fled the first family’s holding, reflects on what freedom meant to those kept in bondage
The costumed characters at George Washington’s gracious estate at Mount Vernon are used to handling all manner of queries, whether about 18th-century privies or the first president’s teeth. So when a visitor recently asked an African-American re-enactor in a full skirt and headscarf if she knew Ona Judge, the woman didn’t miss a beat.
Judge’s escape from the presidential residence in Philadelphia in 1796 had been “a great embarrassment to General and Lady Washington”, the woman said before offering her own view of the matter.
“Ona was born free, like everybody,” she said. “It was this world that made her a slave.”
It’s always 1799 at Mount Vernon, where more than one million visitors annually see the property as it was just before Washington’s death, when his will famously freed all 123 of his slaves. That liberation did not apply to Ona Judge, one of 153 slaves held by Martha Washington.
But Judge, it turned out, evaded the Washingtons’ dogged (and sometimes illegal) efforts to recapture her, and would live quietly in New Hampshire for another 50 years. Now her story — and the challenge it offers to the notion that Washington transcended the seamy reality of slaveholding — is having its fullest airing yet.
Judge is among the 19 enslaved people highlighted in “Lives Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington’s Mount Vernon”, the first major exhibition here dedicated to the topic. She is also the subject of a book, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge, by Erica Armstrong Dunbar.
Most scholars who have written about Judge’s escape have used it as a lens onto Washington’s evolving ideas about slavery. But Never Caught, published on Tuesday by 37 Ink, flips the perspective, focusing on what freedom meant to the people he kept in bondage.
“We have the famous fugitives, like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass,” Dunbar, a professor of black studies and history at the University of Delaware, said in an interview in Mount Vernon’s 18th-century-style food court. “But decades before them, Ona Judge did this. I want people to know her story.”
It is in the meticulous ledgers of Mount Vernon that we first see Ona Maria Judge, who was born around 1773 to an enslaved mother and a father who was a white indentured servant. At age nine she was brought to live in the mansion house, eventually becoming Martha Washington’s personal maid.
When Washington became president, Judge followed the first couple to New York and then Philadelphia, home to a growing free black community.
Free blacks, Dunbar writes, aided Judge’s escape in the midst of a presidential dinner, after she had learned that she was to be given to Martha Washington’s granddaughter, Eliza. And it was free blacks who helped her catch a sailing ship to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where she married, had three children and lived on the edge of poverty.
In two interviews published in abolitionist newspapers shortly before her death in 1848, Judge testified to the desire for freedom that drove her to run away from the Washington household, where she had “never received the least moral or mental instruction,” she said.
Judge’s story, Dunbar said, explodes any notion of “privileged” house slaves, or of the Washingtons’ benevolence, whose far from passive role in perpetuating slavery is told in detail.
Dunbar describes how the Washingtons manoeuvred around Pennsylvania’s 1780 gradual abolition law, rotating their slaves in and out of the state every six months. And she recounts their shock at the “ingratitude” of Judge, who fled “without any provocation”, the president wrote.
After hearing that Judge was in Portsmouth, Washington, offering a story that she had been “enticed away by a Frenchman”, discreetly sent a federal customs officer to bring her back, circumventing procedures laid out in the 1793 fugitive slave law he himself had signed.
When Judge agreed to return on condition that she be freed on Martha’s death, George Washington dismissed her demand as “totally inadmissible”. However much he might favour general emancipation, he wrote to the customs officer, granting Judge any say in her fate would only “reward unfaithfulness”.
In August 1799, Washington tried again to capture her, but was foiled when Judge received a tip about the plot and disappeared.
Four months later Washington was dead, freeing all his slaves in his will. Judge and the others held by Martha Washington remained her legal property.
Dunbar calls Washington’s act “no small thing” but does not see the former president, who had no biological children to disinherit, as the hero of the story.
“When it was safe, he emancipated his slaves,” she said. “He dealt with it after his death. And you know what? That’s what all the founders did with slavery: they kicked the can down the road.”