07/07/2026
How did a 22-year-old enslaved woman successfully escape from and evade her enslavers—George and Martha Washington—despite a years long manhunt 230 years ago led by the first president of the United States? This is the story of freedom seeker Ona “Onley” Judge.
On May 21, 1796, Judge fled her enslavement while the first family resided in Philadelphia, PA, then the nation’s temporary capital. (Her story is among those the Trump administration had removed from an exhibit on enslaved inhabitants of the President’s House.)
For centuries, Judge’s story was eclipsed by American mythology. As an enslaved woman who escaped the Washingtons, her story disrupts the pristine legacy of the Founding Fathers and challenges sanitized narratives that ignore Black resistance and Northern slavery.
Historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar, PhD, was looking through 18th century newspapers, when she came across a runaway slave advertisement from the President’s House. It was from 1796 in Philadelphia when Washington was president.
In her book “Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge,” Armstrong Dunbar weaves a powerful tale and offers fascinating new scholarship on how one young woman risked it all to gain freedom from the famous founding father and his wife.
After being elected president, Washington reluctantly left his beloved Mount Vernon plantation in Virginia for Philadelphia. In setting up his household, he took 8 eight enslaved people, including Judge, who was lady’s maid to Martha Washington.
As the president grew accustomed to Northern ways, there was one change he couldn’t get his arms around: Pennsylvania law required enslaved people be set free after six months of residency in the state. Rather than comply, Washington decided to circumvent the law.
He secretly rotated people between Mount Vernon and Philadelphia every few months to ensure none of them could legally claim their freedom. Judge learned that the Martha Washington planned to give her to her granddaughter, Elizabeth Parke Custis, as a wedding gift.
Judge wanted to be free—and she wanted no parts of Eliza Parke Custis, who was known to have a volatile temper. Judge told an interviewer that she “was determined never to be [Custis’] slave.”
Two days after Judge fled, Washington had his steward place an advertisement in the Philadelphia Gazette and Daily Advertiser announcing that “Oney Judge” had “absconded” from the president’s house and offering a $10 reward for her recapture.
In an 1845 interview published in the abolitionist newspaper The Granite Freeman, Judge says, "Whilst they were packing up to go to Virginia, I was packing to go, I didn't know where; for I knew that if I went back to Virginia, I should never get my liberty.”
Judge noted, “I had friends among the colored people of Philadelphia, had my things carried there beforehand, and left Washington's house while they were eating dinner." She used the Maritime Underground Railroad, taking a sailboat to New Hampshire.
An obsessed Washington came close to capturing Judge twice. And when he learned she had a child—who was born free—he told his secretary and nephew, Burwell Bassett, Jr., to seize Judge and her child. Luckily, she was warned that Bassett was coming and she escaped yet again and fled the town with her child.
Judge worked as a seamstress and lived out her years in New Hampshire, where she married a free black sailor named Jack Staines and had three children. However, under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, she remained a fugitive until her death in 1848.
Sources:
https://pbs.org/video/george-washingtons-obsession-they-dont-teach-you-about-k9vxwg?source=social
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/ona-judge-escapes/
https://www.nps.gov/articles/independence-oneyjudge.htm
https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/ona-judge
https://baystatebanner.com/2026/05/07/reclaiming-ona-judges-place-in-american-history/
