She was among the enslaved people whom Washington secretly rotated out of the latter city in order to evade the 1780 Pennsylvania emancipation law. 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. Like her mother, Ona was skilled at sewing, “the perfect mistress of her needle.” 4 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.
2 Ona was later described as “a light mulatto girl, much freckled” and “almost white.” 3 Like many other slaves of mixed-race descent, she received a post in the household: at age ten, she became Martha Washington’s personal maid. 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. Ona Judge, often referenced by the Washingtons as Oney, was born at Mount Vernon around 1774. Staines’s account of her dramatic quest for freedom represents a rare moment when the voice of a person (formerly) enslaved at Mount Vernon appears in the historical record. 1 The woman, Ona Judge Staines, had fled enslavement at the Washingtons’ household fifty years earlier. On January 1, 1847, the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator published a letter from Reverend Benjamin Chase describing his recent visit with an elderly African American woman near Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
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