Traveling to History: Two
The World of "Never Caught": On The Trail of Ona Judge
By James F. Lee
When Ona Judge slipped away from the President’s House in Philadelphia in 1796, George and Martha Washington were shocked at her ingratitude. How could a slave as highly regarded, well-fed, and clothed as she was, “… brought up & treated more like a child than a Servant…” give up her place in the president’s household? And for what? The Washingtons couldn’t comprehend that slavery was a mental state as well as a physical one – or indeed that slaves even had a life of the mind.
Judge’s story is told in Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s book “Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge,” a stunning narrative drawn from Washington’s voluminous recordkeeping and correspondence, archival and newspaper research, and Judge’s own words. Ona Judge was born at Mount Vernon in 1773, the daughter of a white man and Betty, a bi-racial enslaved seamstress. Mother and daughter were dower slaves, the property of Martha Custis Washington.
Using Dunbar’s book as our guide, my wife Carol and I set out on a journey tracing Judge’s steps, curious to see what remained of her world. We drove to Mount Vernon on a cold, blustery spring day, where we signed up for the “Enslaved People’s Tour,” led by guide Betty Brown. During the tour, she earnestly told us the stories of several enslaved people at the estate, and was kind enough to answer our questions about Ona Judge.
Judge, she explained, was “light-skinned and freckled,” a matter of enormous importance
in the hierarchy of plantation life because lighter-skinned slaves were often chosen to serve the family in the main house.
“We know from other descriptions that she was attractive, which, added to the fact that she was “handy,” “useful,” and good at sewing, would have been a good start at making her a good personal servant.” Mary V. Thompson, Research Historian at Mount Vernon, said in an email.
It is likely for these reasons that when Judge was about 10 years old, Mrs. Washington selected her as her personal attendant, responsible to dress her mistress and care for her wardrobe.
Household slaves might be spared a life of unrelenting physical labor, deprivation, and brutal punishment. They were better clothed and fed than field hands and laborers, but there was still an enormous price to pay: household slaves’ lives were devoid of privacy, and they were constantly on call to serve the needs of their masters. Many labored seven days a week. And for enslaved women, proximity to male members of the household put them in constant fear of sexual assault.
No original slave dwellings exist on the estate. Brown said that “chances are good” that as a child Judge lived with her mother and siblings in one of the plantation’s slave cabins near the upper garden across the lane from today’s greenhouse. Later, looking at the replica slave cabin at Mount Vernon’s Pioneer Farm, we tried to imagine Judge’s family living in such a place. Poorly insulated, wooden clapboards daubed with Virginia clay, dirt floor and rude fireplace, these cabins housed ill-clothed people with barely a blanket to keep them warm.
“They are more miserable than the most miserable of cottages of our peasants,” a visitor from Poland wrote in 1798.
Brown led us to the site of the House for Families, a multi-family dwelling that once stood near the mansion, where many of the household slaves lived before new slave barracks were built in 1792. It is possible Judge lived there. If so, she would have made the short walk every day to attend to Mrs. Washington’s wardrobe, perhaps wearing a simple gown of her own making, or hand-me-downs from the Washington family.
When she was about 15, her life changed dramatically.
Washington’s election as the first president meant that he had to move his family to New York City, the country’s first capital, taking with him several household slaves, including Ona Judge. Neither of the two New York City mansions that Washington resided in during the first 17 months of his presidency survives. When the capital city moved to Philadelphia in 1790, where it would remain for the next ten years, Ona Judge accompanied the Washington household there as well. Philadelphia was the largest city in the county, home to a large, thriving, free black community. It was also an abolitionist stronghold.
The President’s House in Philadelphia was located on Market Street between Fifth and Sixth Streets, (on present-day Independence Mall), a three and-a-half story brick mansion that no longer stands. We walked from our hotel to Market and Fifth to see the National Park Service (NPS) open-air exhibit “The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation.” Partial exterior walls, window frames, and replica fireplaces give a sense of the first-floor layout. Information panels on the walls and videos tell the story of slavery in the United States, and of the enslaved people who lived in this house. One panel explains the rather sobering fact that four of the nine enslaved people who lived here tried to escape during Washington’s presidency. Another panel, “I am Free now” uses Judge’s own words to describe her escape.
Whilst they were packing up to go to Virginia, I was packing to go, I didn’t know where; for I knew if I ever went back to Virginia, I would never get my liberty…
It is a paradox that this house site stands on what is now Independence Mall and next to the Liberty Bell. That contradiction wasn’t lost on Lisa Pierce from Camden, N.J., visiting the exhibit with her family.
“For me as a living, breathing African American, this is overwhelming… to know they had slaves here and that this is what our nation is built off of,” she said. Pierce found inspiration in Judge’s courage. “To consider leaving and not knowing where you were going,” she said.
Standing in what was the State Dining Room, History professor John d’Entremont from Randolph College, said, “… This site attempts to resurrect the voices of the people who were not powerful. Their voices were just as strong, but very few people heard them … At least some of the people who come to see the Liberty Bell will stop [here] out of curiosity and learn something.”
Judge was one of about 30 people occupying the house during the Washington presidency. A panel at the NPS exhibit suggests she slept at the foot of Martha Washington’s bed, so I asked Coxey Toogood, Historian at the Independence National Historic Park, where Judge lived in the crowded mansion. “Logically, she would have slept in the back wing, where the Washingtons and grandchildren had bedrooms,” she said in an email. This was on the second floor above the kitchen. Toogood said it is also possible she lived in a top-floor garret room, where other servants and enslaved people lived.
Judge’s duties here, as at Mount Vernon, included dressing Martha Washington, mending and altering her clothes, and caring for two of the Washington’s grandchildren. She accompanied the president’s wife to official functions, social visits, and shopping trips, and assisted the president’s wife in hosting social gatherings at the President’s House.
Despite her life as Martha Washington’s shadow, Judge’s world expanded enormously in Philadelphia. Erica Dunbar mentions, for example, that Judge attended the theater and the circus with money she was given by the Washingtons. During such outings, she probably came into contact with free blacks and abolitionists, from whom she might learn that slaves in continuous residence in Pennsylvania for six months or longer could legally claim their emancipation. Washington was aware of this law, too. His aide, Tobias Lear, quietly devised a scheme that would briefly rotate the president’s household slaves, including Ona Judge, back to Mount Vernon or other locations every six months, so that the clock of slavery would start again upon their return to Philadelphia.
As Washington ‘s second term neared its end, Judge knew that her next journey to Mount Vernon would have no return northward. She also came into possession of news that Mrs. Washington was going to give Ona Judge away as a wedding gift to her granddaughter, Eliza Law, a woman Judge knew well and disliked.
The time for decision had come.
On the evening of May 21, 1796, Ona Judge left the Washington’s Philadelphia mansion and sought sanctuary within the black community. With their help, she escaped aboard a ship bound for Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The Washingtons were furious, offering a $10 reward for her return.
What prompted her flight? Was it her impending move to the irascible and mercurial Eliza Law, a sense of betrayal that her mistress would so callously give her away? Or was it a more general desire for freedom? Ona Judge lived in a gilded cage, but it was a cage nonetheless. Whatever her reasons, Judge showed great courage in her decision. Escaped slaves not only risked severe punishment if caught, they made a deliberate choice to leave family and friends behind. In Ona Judge’s case, she left her younger sister, Delphy, behind at Mount Vernon. As Dunbar puts it, “the beast that slept in every slave’s soul was awakened.”
To learn more about Ona Judge’s life in Portsmouth, New Hampshire click here.
