When George Washington was sworn in as America’s first president in 1789, his wife Martha did not accompany him to the nation’s capital in Manhattan. Instead, she remained at the family estate in Mount Vernon, complaining to all who would listen, including to the household slaves, who were well accustomed to dealing with Mrs. Washington’s moods — especially a teenage girl named Ona Judge.
Ona was born at Mount Vernon in the summer of 1773, the daughter of a house slave and an English-born indentured servant. Her responsibilities as Martha Washington’s personal attendant included helping with her dress and grooming as well as accompanying her on social calls, and it was a sign of the trust the family put in her that she was part of the small group of house slaves that made the move to New York when Martha finally agreed to join her husband — and then, when the seat of government was moved the following year, to Philadelphia.
That shift created a problem. While New York law condemned all slaves within the state to a lifetime of bondage, any slave who was brought into Pennsylvania would be granted freedom after six months, which the president did not realize until nearly the last moment. While Washington was on a tour of the southern states in the spring of 1791, his personal secretary, Tobias Lear, wrote to inform him of a visit from the attorney general, Edmund Randolph, whose own slaves had simply declared their freedom and left.
Washington was sure that state law didn’t apply to him, but just in case he had Martha begin planning a trip to Mount Vernon — not letting the slaves know, of course, the real reason they were headed back to Virginia.
In her new book, “Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave,” Erica Armstrong Dunbar combines the known facts of Ona’s life in service to the Washingtons with vivid descriptions of the physical and emotional conditions early American slaves faced.
Refusing to return to Virginia, Ona walked out of the Executive Mansion on the evening of May 21. The mansion’s steward, Frederick Kitt, placed ads in Philadelphia papers offering a $10 reward for the return of the “light Mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes, and bushy black hair . . . slender, and delicately made, about 20 years of age.” By then, however, she was already on a boat to Portsmouth, NH.
A few months later, Ona was recognized on the street by Elizabeth Langdon, daughter of New Hampshire Sen. John Langdon and a frequent guest of the Washingtons in Philadelphia. She told her father, who wrote to the president informing him of the sighting.
Though the Fugitive Slave Act, which Washington himself had signed into law, established clear protocols for the capture and return of runaways, he decided to bypass the legal system and lean directly on federal employees to help recover his personal property. He turned to Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott Jr., having him contact a customs officer in Portsmouth named Thomas Whipple.
Whipple was supposed to capture Judge and put her on a boat back to Washington. Though he was able to draw her out of hiding with a phony offer for a job as a domestic, Judge refused to go back. Whipple offered to negotiate on her behalf with Washington for her eventual freedom, and she finally agreed to be transported back south — then simply didn’t show up for the boat.
Washington had no interest in freeing his slave, but would wait until 1799 before trying to recapture her again. This time, he sent one of Martha’s nephews to Portsmouth, but Ona — now married to a black sailor named Jack Staines — was able to go into hiding in a neighboring town.
Ona Staines spent most of her life in New Hampshire in poverty. Jack died six years into their marriage, leaving her with three small children. By 1816, her son had left home to become a sailor and her teenage daughters were forced into indentured servitude. They would move back in with her afterward, but both died of illness in their early thirties. And yet, when she was asked by an interviewer in 1845, a few years before her own death, whether she ever regretted her decision, Ona was adamant: “No, I am free, and I have, I trust, been made a child of God by the means.”