Item
Agent
Ona Judge Staines (ca. 1773-1848)
- Name
- Ona Judge Staines (ca. 1773-1848)
- Date of Birth
- 1773
- Date of Death
- 1847
- State Assigned Gender
- Female
- Hometown or Region
- Mount Vernon, Virginia
- Freedom Status
- Transition
- Occupation
- seamstress
- Biography
- Ona Judge was born to an enslaved woman owned by the Washington-Custis family and a travelling tailor named Andrew Judge in 1773. When her master George Washington was elected as the first president of the United States in 1789, he brought her along with six other enslaved people to wait on his family at the then-capital in Philadelphia. She would live and work for them for seven years, going back to Virginia twice a year so that her masters could avoid the Gradual Emancipation Act of 1780. Upon realizing that Martha Washington planned on gifting her to her granddaughter, Eliza Custis, as a wedding present, Judge decided to use her contacts in Philadelphia to escape to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The Washingtons made several attempts to bring her back but to no avail, ultimately stopping only to avoid a public scandal. Ona Judge would live out her life in Portsmouth with her husband and three children, eventually passing away in 1848 at the age of seventy five.
- Revolution Observed
- While Judge was only three years old when the American Revolution began and ten when it ended, she was still able to witness the "afterbirth" of the new nation. Despite having fought for freedom from oppression from their colonial powers, the white leaders of the United States were hesitant to eradicate the institution of slavery from their new country. As the former slave of the first president, Ona Judge had a first-hand understanding of the ethical and legal acrobatics that the burgeoning nation was performing as they tried to establish a land of liberty but maintain an economy based on slave labor.
- Student Researcher
- Eva Burkhardt
- Connected Historical Actor(s)
- George Washington, Martha Washington, Frederick Kitt, Rev. T. H. Adams, Sen. John Langdon, Capt. John Bolles, Benjamin Chase, Eliza Custis Law, Burwell Bassett Jr., John Langdon, John Jack, Elias Smith, Judge Woodbury, Austin, Paris, Hercules, Christopher Sheels, Richmond, Giles, Moll (enslaved of the Washington Philadelphia townhouse)
- Source(s)
-
TH Adams, “‘Washington’s Runaway Slave, and How Portsmouth Freed Her,’” Frank W.
Miller’s Portsmouth New Hampshire Weekly, June 2, 1877.
● George W. Boudreau, “‘I Had Friends among the Colored People of the Town’: The
Enslaved Women of the President’s Household and Philadelphia’s African American
Community,” in Women in George Washington’s World, ed. Charlene M. Boyer Lewis
and George W. Boudreau (University of Virginia Press, 2022), 185–211.
● Erica A. Dunbar, “‘If I Knew That If I Went back to Virginia, I Should Never Get My
Liberty’: Ona Judge Staines, the President’s Runaway Slave,” in Women in Early
America, ed. Thomas Foster (NYU Press, 2016), 231.
● Erica Dunbar, Never Caught : The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway
Slave, Ona Judge (Simon & Schuster Inc. , 2017).
● Fritz Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery: A Documentary Portrayal (University
of Missouri Press, 1997), 115.
● Philip D Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, “Arming Slaves in the American
Revolution,” in Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age, ed. Philip
Morgan and Christopher Brown (Yale University Press, 2006), 183.
● Philip D. Morgan, “‘To Get Quit of Negroes’: George Washington and Slavery,” Journal
of American Studies 39, no. 03 (December 5, 2005): 403–29.
● Mary V. Thompson, “Elizabeth Parke Custis (1776–1831) - Encyclopedia Virginia,”
Encyclopedia Virginia, August 26, 2024,
https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/custis-elizabeth-parke-1776-1831/. - Click here to review material history sources connected to Ona Judge Staines