Slavery at Mount Vernon: Ona Judge Escapes

On a May evening in seventeen ninety-six, a young woman named Ona Judge walked out of the President's House in Philadelphia during dinner. The Washingtons were eating. The servants were occupied. Ona Judge, who had been Martha Washington's personal attendant since childhood, who had traveled with the family, who had lived in the executive residence of the new republic's president, simply left. She was twenty-two years old. She was enslaved.

She reached Portsmouth, New Hampshire, aboard a merchant vessel. She found work in the homes of abolitionist families there. She married a free Black sailor named John Staines. She had children. She became a member of a church.

George Washington learned of her escape and did not accept it. He contacted his nephew Burwell Bassett Junior, who traveled to New Hampshire in seventeen ninety-nine to negotiate her return, appealing to her sense of duty and offering to free her after Martha Washington died. Ona Judge refused. She told a local senator who relayed the conversation that she would rather have freedom now than freedom promised later.

Washington died in December seventeen ninety-nine. The terms of his will freed his enslaved people after Martha Washington's death. Martha freed them in December eighteen hundred, reportedly afraid of living surrounded by people who had reason to want her dead.

Ona Judge outlived both Washingtons. She was interviewed twice by abolitionist newspapers in her old age, in eighteen forty-five and eighteen forty-seven. She died in eighteen forty-eight, having lived free for fifty-two years. She never returned to Virginia.

At the time of Washington's death, three hundred seventeen people were enslaved at Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon's own historians and archaeologists have spent three decades documenting their individual names, family relationships, housing, and acts of resistance. Ona Judge is the best-documented story. There are three hundred sixteen others.