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  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Foreword

  One: Betty’s Daughter

  Two: New York–Bound

  Three: New York in Black and White

  Four: The Move to Philadelphia

  Five: The Blacks in the Family

  Six: Life in Philadelphia

  Seven: The Wedding

  Eight: The Fugitive

  Nine: Slavery and Freedom in New Hampshire

  Ten: A Close Call

  Eleven: The Negotiator

  Twelve: Mrs. Staines

  Thirteen: The Survivor

  Epilogue: Ona’s Sister: Philadelphia Costin

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  For my mother

  Frances Chudnick Armstrong

  &

  My husband

  Jeffrey Kim Dunbar

  Author’s Note

  I MET ONA JUDGE STAINES in the archives about twenty years ago. I was busy conducting research on a different project about nineteenth-century black women in Philadelphia, and I came across an advertisement about a runaway slave in the Philadelphia Gazette. The fugitive in question was called “Oney Judge,” and she had escaped from the President’s House. I was amazed. I wondered how could it be that I had never heard of this woman? What happened to her? Was George Washington able to reclaim her? I vowed to return to her story.

  Those of us who research and write about early black women’s history understand how very difficult it is to find our subjects in the archives. Enslavement,1 racism, and sexism often discarded these women from the historical record, and as historians we are frequently left unsatisfied with scant evidence. Much of the earlier historical record was written by other people, typically white men, who were literate and in positions of power. Fortunately, Ona Judge Staines left the world just a bit of her voice, and, hopefully, time will reveal new information about this incredible woman. Although she remained in hiding for more than half a century, I don’t believe that she ever wanted to be forgotten.

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  1. I prefer to use the term “enslaved” when referring to men, women, and children who were held in bondage because it shifts the attention to an action that was involuntarily placed upon millions of black people. However, throughout the text, I chose to use the word “slave” for the purpose of narrative flow.

  Ona’s Family Tree

  This family tree shows the relationships, as far as they are known, between Ona Judge’s mother, Betty, and her children and their descendants.

  Foreword

  SPRING RAIN DRENCHED THE STREETS of Philadelphia in 1796. Weather in the “City of Brotherly Love” was often fickle this time of year, vacillating between extreme cold and oppressive heat. But rain was almost always appreciated in the nation’s capital. It erased the putrid smells of rotting food, animal waste, and filth that permeated the cobblestone roads of the new nation. It reminded Philadelphians that the long and punishing winter was behind them. It cleansed the streets and souls of Philadelphia, ushering in optimism, hope, and a feeling of rebirth.

  In the midst of the promises of spring, Ona Judge, a young black slave woman, received devastating news: She was to leave Philadelphia, a city that had become her home. Judge was to travel back to her birthplace of Virginia and prepare to be bequeathed to her owner’s granddaughter.

  Judge had watched six spring seasons come and go in Philadelphia. Each spring she watched the rain fall on a city that was slowly cleansing itself of the stain of slavery. She watched a burgeoning free black population grow such that by the end of the century, it would count nearly six thousand people. Although a slave, Judge lived among free people, watching black entrepreneurs sell, along with other provisions, their fruits, oysters, and pepper pot soup in the streets. On Sunday mornings she witnessed the newly erected “Bethel” church welcome its small but growing black membership. And what she didn’t witness firsthand, she would have heard about. Stories about organizations such as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, who helped enslaved men and women find or protect their freedom, and beyond. Philadelphia represented the epicenter of emancipation, allowing black men and women the opportunity to sample a few of the benefits that accompanied a free status.

  As a slave in Philadelphia, Ona Judge was actually in the minority. In 1796 fewer than one hundred slaves lived within the city limits. Not only did her status as an enslaved person separate her from the majority of free black Philadelphians, but she was further distinguished by the family she served. Judge was owned by the first president of the United States and his wife, George and Martha Washington.

  Judge’s sojourn from Mount Vernon in rural Virginia to the North began in 1789 when she accompanied the presidential family to New York, the site of the nation’s first capital. In November of 1790, the capital moved to Philadelphia, where Judge encountered a new world, one in which, on occasion, she strolled through the streets, visited the market, and attended the theater without her owners. The rigid laws of Southern slaveholding were difficult to integrate into a free Philadelphia, and when told she’d be given away to the famously mercurial granddaughter of the “first lady,” she made a very dangerous and bold decision: she would run away from her owners. On Saturday, May 21, 1796, at the age of twenty-two, Ona Judge slipped out of the president’s mansion in Philadelphia, never to return.

  Very few eighteenth-century slaves have shared their stories about the institution and experience of slavery. The violence required to feed the system of human bondage often made enslaved men and women want to forget their pasts, not recollect them. For fugitives, like Ona Judge, secrecy was a necessity. Enslaved men and women on the run often kept their pasts hidden, even from the people they loved the most: their spouses and children. Sometimes, the nightmare of human bondage, the murder, rape, dismemberment, and constant degradation, was simply too terrible to speak of. But it was the threat of capture and re-enslavement that kept closed the mouths of those who managed to beat the odds and successfully escape. Afraid of being returned to her owners, Judge lived a shadowy life that was isolated and clandestine. For almost fifty years, the fugitive slave woman kept to herself, building a family and a new life upon the quicksand of her legal enslavement. She lived most of her time as a fugitive in Greenland, New Hampshire, a tiny community just outside the city of Portsmouth.

  At the end of her life, Ona Judge made another bold decision: she would tell her story. She granted interviews to two reporters for abolitionist newspapers, the first of which, with Thomas H. Archibald, appeared in the Granite Freeman in May of 1845, almost forty-nine years to the day of her escape. Judge’s second, and final, interview appeared in 1847 on New Year’s Day in the Liberator, the nation’s most powerful abolitionist newspaper. Judge’s interviews are quite possibly the only existing recorded narratives of an eighteenth-century Virginia fugitive. Her oral testimony allows us to learn about the institution of slavery not only through the lens of white abolitionists and slave owners, but through the voice of a fugitive.

  It is my pleasure, indeed an honor, to reintroduce Ona Judge Staines, the Washingtons’ runaway slave.

  One

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  Betty’s Daughter

  List of slaves at Mount Vernon, 1799. Courtesy of Mount Vernon
Ladies’ Association.

  In June of 1773, the unimaginable happened: it snowed in Virginia.

  During the first week of June, the typical stifling heat that almost always blanketed Virginia had not yet laid its claim on the colony. Daytime temperatures fluctuated from sultry warmth to a rainy chill during the first few days of the month. Even more peculiar yet, on June 11, it snowed. As he did most days, Colonel George Washington sat down and recorded the unusual weather, writing, “Cloudy & exceeding Cold Wind fresh from the No. West, & Snowing.” His diary went on to note, “Memorandum—Be it remembered that on the eleventh day of June in the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy three It rain’d Hail’d snow’d and was very Cold.”

  The men and women who lived on George and Martha Washington’s estate must have marveled at the peculiar snow, but whatever excitement the unusual weather brought was most certainly replaced by concern. Shabby clothing and uninsulated slave cabins turned winter into long periods of dread for the enslaved men and women at Mount Vernon and across the colony of Virginia. Although the intense heat of summer brought its own difficulties, winter brought sickness, long periods of isolation, and heightened opportunities for the auction block. To exacerbate matters, the selling of slaves frequently occurred at the beginning of the year, connecting the winter month of January to a fear of deep and permanent loss. The snow in June, then, could only be a sign of very bad things to come. For the nearly 150 slaves who labored on the Mount Vernon estate in 1773, a mixture of superstition, African religious practices, and English beliefs in witchery must have intensified a sense of fear. Things that were inconsistent with nature were interpreted as bad omens, commonly bringing drought, pestilence, and death. As for what this snow portended, only time would tell.

  Sure enough, eight days after the snow fell, Martha Parke Custis, daughter of Martha Washington, fell terribly ill. The stepdaughter of George Washington, just seventeen, had long struggled with a medical condition that rendered her incapable of controlling her body. Plagued by seizures that began during her teenage years, “Patsy” Custis most likely suffered from epilepsy. The early discipline of medicine was far from mature, offering few options for cures outside of bleeding and purges. Her parents had spent the last five years consulting with doctors and experimenting with unhelpful medicinal potions, diet, exercise modifications, and of course, deep prayer.

  Their faith was tested on June 19 when Patsy Custis and a host of invited family members were finishing up with dinner a little after four o’clock. Although sickly, Washington’s stepdaughter had been “in better health and spirits than she appeared to have been in for some time.” After dinner and quiet conversation with family, Patsy excused herself and went to retrieve a letter from her bedroom. Eleanor Calvert, Patsy’s soon-to-be sister-in-law, went to check on the young woman and found her seizing violently on the floor. Patsy was moved to the bed, but there was very little anyone could do. Within two minutes, she was gone.

  The June snow and Patsy’s death combined to create an eerie feeling of uncertainty. House slaves understood that Martha Washington would need to be handled with more care than usual, especially since this was not the first child that she had lost. Two of her toddlers had succumbed to the high childhood mortality rates of colonial Virginia, and Patsy’s death left the devastated mother with only one living child. George Washington wrote to his nephew, breaking the news of his stepdaughter’s death and his wife’s emotional distress, stating, “I scarce need add [that Patsy’s death] has almost reduced my poor Wife to the lowest ebb of Misery.” George Washington wasn’t the only one attuned to Martha’s emotional state. Slave women who worked in the Mansion House tended to the devastated Martha Washington, taking great care to respect their grieving mistress, while helping the household prepare for Patsy’s funeral.

  Yet while the mistress Martha Washington wept over the loss of her daughter, a slave woman named Betty (also known as Mulatto Betty) prepared for an arrival of her own. Born sometime around 1738, Betty was a dower slave; that is, she was “property” owned by Martha Washington’s first husband, Daniel Parke Custis. As a seamstress and expert spinner who was among Mrs. Washington’s favored slaves, the bondwoman had a long history with her mistress, one that predated the relationship between Colonel Washington and his wife and one that had seen Martha endure great heartbreak. In 1757 Betty watched her mistress survive the sudden loss of her first husband, followed by the death of her four-year-old daughter, Frances. She also watched Martha reemerge from sorrow’s clutch. Betty continued to spin and sew as her mistress took control of the family business, which included six plantations and close to three hundred slaves that fed Virginia’s tobacco economy. With the death of her husband, Martha Parke Custis stood in control of over 17,500 acres of land, making her one of the wealthiest widows in the colony of Virginia, if not throughout the entire Chesapeake.

  Before her move to Mount Vernon, Betty worked in the Custis home known as the White House on the Pamunkey River in New Kent County, Virginia. Two years after the death of her owner, Betty learned that her mistress was to remarry. She most likely received the news of her mistress’s impending second marriage with great wariness as word spread that Martha Custis’s intended was Colonel George Washington. The colonel was a fairly prominent landowner with a respectable career as a military officer and an elected member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. His marriage to the widowed Martha Custis would offer him instant wealth and the stability of a wife and family that had eluded him. For her part, the young widow had managed to secure a surrogate father to help raise her two living children. She had also found a partner with whom she could spend the rest of her days. Nevertheless, a huge yet necessary transition awaited Martha Custis as she prepared to marry and move to the Mount Vernon estate, nearly one hundred miles away.

  For Betty, as well as the hundreds of other slaves that belonged to the Custis estate, the death of their previous owner and Martha’s marriage to George Washington was a reminder of their vulnerability. It was often after the death of an owner that slaves were sold to remedy the debts held by an estate. Betty and all those enslaved at New Kent had no idea what kind of financial transactions would transpire, which families would be split apart, never to be united again. For enslaved women, the moral character of the new owner was also a serious concern. When George and Martha Washington married in January of 1759, Betty was approximately twenty-one years old and considered to be in the prime of her reproductive years. She was unfamiliar with her new master’s preferences, or more importantly, if he would choose to exercise his complete control over her body. All of the enslaved women who would leave for Mount Vernon most likely worried about their new master’s protocol regarding sexual relations with his slaves. But of greater consequence for Betty was the future for her young son, Austin. Born sometime around 1757, Austin was a baby or young toddler when his mistress took George Washington’s hand in marriage. To lose him before she even got to know him, to have joined the thousands who stood by powerlessly while their children were “bartered for gold,” as the poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote, would have been devastating.

  As she prepared to move to Mount Vernon, Martha Washington selected a number of slaves to accompany her on the journey to Fairfax County. Betty and Austin were, to Betty’s relief, among them. The highest-valued mother-and-child pair in a group that counted 155 slaves, they arrived in April of 1759.

  Betty managed to do what many slave mothers couldn’t: keep her son. Austin’s very young age would have prohibited the Custis estate from fetching a high price if he were sold independently from his mother. Perhaps this fact, in addition to Betty’s prized position in the Custis household, ensured that she would stay connected to her child as she moved away from the place she had called home.

  As Martha Washington settled into her new life with her second husband at Mount Vernon, a sprawling estate consisting of five separate farms, Betty also adapted, continuing her spinning, weaving, tending to he
r son, and making new family and friends at the plantation. The intricacies of Betty’s romantic life at Mount Vernon remain unclear, but what we do know is that more than a decade after giving birth to Austin, Betty welcomed more children into the world. Her son, Tom Davis, was born around 1769, and his sister Betty Davis arrived in 1771. Unlike Austin, these two children claimed a last name, one that most likely linked them to a hired white weaver named Thomas Davis.

  George and Martha Washington placed their most “valued” and favored slaves inside the household. Martha Washington allowed only those slaves she felt to be the most polished and intelligent to toil within the walls of the main house, and that included Betty, whose skills as a clothier ranged from knowledge of expert weaving to the dyeing of expensive and scarce fabric. Betty and a corps of talented enslaved seamstresses not only outfitted their masters but also stitched together clothing for the hundreds of slaves at Mount Vernon.

  Now, in 1773, fourteen years after she watched her mistress experience the death of her first child, Betty witnessed her mistress come undone once again. The loss of her daughter Patsy left Martha Washington almost inconsolable and stood in contrast with Betty’s relative good fortune. Martha Washington had lost young Frances in 1759, just as Betty was blessed with the arrival of her son Austin. Now, the circumstances were nearly identical, for as Martha Washington grieved over the loss of her daughter, Betty began preparing for the arrival of another child. June snow served as a marker of death for the Washingtons but issued a very different signal to Betty. It marked the beginning of a life that would be as unusual as summertime winter weather. Sometime around or after the June snow of 1773, Betty gave birth to a daughter named Ona Maria Judge. This girl child would come to represent the complexity of slavery, the limits of black freedom, and the revolutionary sentiments held by many Americans. She would be called Oney.