Ona Judge

George and Martha Washington were owners of enslaved people. They were enslavers. Of course, I knew that, and over time I have learned more that made my image of them in that role less and less ignorable.

It never should have been ignorable, but that essentially is how it was taught in school. "They owned slaves, but he freed them in his will, yada yada yada." Right?

There are fault lines running beneath the image white Americans have of Washington as a "good" slave owner. The controversy about the picture book, A Birthday Cake for George Washington, is one bit of evidence I learned about not long ago.

And the story of Oney "Ona" Judge, just recently told on the Uncivil podcast, is another. Ona was born to an enslaved mother at Mount Vernon around 1773, and after Washington was elected president when Ona was 16, she spent a lot of time in New York and then Philadelphia, which had become the U.S. capital.

Pennsylvania had outlawed slavery in 1780, so what was the status of Washington's "property" while he lived there?

Lithograph of the Washington residence
in Philadelphia from the Wikimedia Commons

Philadelphia had the largest population of free black people at the time. And it had a law that said enslaved people who were kept there longer than six months were automatically free. So what did Washington do? He rotated his slaves out Philadelphia after five months, sometimes just across the border to New Jersey, and then brought them back to restart the clock. He did that for six years, breaking the spirit of the law, knowingly.

From the podcast, I learned that Washington — who wrote the words "Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth" — was also responsible for the first Fugitive Slave Law, giving owners the right to hire slave-catchers. And that he spent federal resources to try and bring back his personal property after Ona escaped to New Hampshire in 1796.

Finally, I learned that Ona was never legally free, though she was never caught and returned, nor were her children or grandchildren considered free until the Emancipation Proclamation. And that through Washington's heirs' marriage, her last descendants were legally the property of none other than Robert E. Lee. It was a small world among the white owning class of Tidewater Virginia.

There are no images of Ona Judge. But her story should be taught, too.