Judge, Ona, 1773-1848

Ona Judge, often referenced by the Washingtons as Oney, was born at George Washington's Mount Vernon around 1774. She was the daughter of Betty, an enslaved seamstress living on Mansion House Farm, and Andrew Judge, a white English tailor whom Washington hired from 1772 to 1784. She received a post in the household: at age ten, she became Martha Washington’s personal maid. Like her mother, Ona was skilled at sewing, “the perfect mistress of her needle.” Also, like her mother, Ona and her younger sister Delphy belonged to the Custis estate, and so would pass to Martha Washington’s heirs upon the latter’s death.

When George Washington was elected president, fifteen-year-old Ona Judge traveled with seven other enslaved people to the executive residence, first in New York and then in Philadelphia. She was among the enslaved people whom Washington secretly rotated out of the latter city in order to evade the 1780 Pennsylvania emancipation law.

On May 20, 1796, as the Washingtons prepared to return to Mount Vernon for the summer, Ona Judge fled. As she recalled in 1845, “Whilst they were packing up to go to Virginia, I was packing to go, I didn’t know where; for I knew that if I went back to Virginia, I should never get my liberty. I had friends among the colored people of Philadelphia, had my things carried there beforehand, and left Washington’s house while they were eating dinner.”

After leaving the Washingtons’ household, Ona Judge secured passage on the Nancy, a ship commanded by Captain John Bolles and bound for Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Judge never revealed Bolles’s name until after he died, “lest they should punish him for bringing me away.”

Even in New Hampshire, Judge was not safe. Just a few months after arriving, she was recognized on the street by a friend of Martha’s youngest granddaughter, Nelly Parke Custis. Word of the escapee’s whereabouts reached George Washington, who enlisted the help of Joseph Whipple, the customs collector in Portsmouth. Whipple found Judge and tried to convince her to board a ship for Philadelphia. Judge replied that she would readily return, but only if the Washingtons promised to free her after their deaths. Otherwise, she said, “she should rather suffer death than return to Slavery & liable to be sold or given to any other person.” There was no seduction by a Frenchman, she assured Whipple, but rather “a thirst for compleat freedom . . . had been her only motive for absconding.”

After Washington’s death in December 1799, Judge said, the family “never troubled me any more.” She nevertheless remained a fugitive: the Custis estate could legally recapture her and her children at any time. When Judge was interviewed in the 1840s, she was still living at Nancy Jack’s home in Greenland. Legally considered a “pauper,” she received support from Rockingham County. Her husband had died in 1803, and her two daughters had predeceased her as well. Despite these sorrows, she told her interviewer how her life had changed for the better since arriving in New Hampshire: “She says that she never received the least mental or moral instruction, of any kind, while she remained in Washington’s family. But, after she came to Portsmouth, she learned to read; and when Elias Smith first preached in Portsmouth, she professes to have been converted to Christianity.”

Ona likely never again saw her Mount Vernon family. Her mother, Betty, died in January 1795. In 1802, her younger sister Delphy was inherited by Eliza Parke Custis Law, the fate that Ona had fled to avoid.

Ona Judge’s determination to escape slavery eclipsed any regret over leaving. As one interviewer noted: “When asked if she is not sorry she left Washington, as she has labored so much harder since, than before, her reply is, ‘No, I am free, and have, I trust been made a child of God by the means.’” Ona Judge Staines died in 1848.