Vulgar History Podcast
Ona Judge Staines AKA Oney Judge, Part One
August 14, 2024
Ann Foster:
Hello, everyone. Before we start today’s episode, I just wanted to let you know and/or remind you if you heard one of my announcements about this before, but I’m going on the road! I’m going to be taking a trip to the UK to research my book about Caroline of Brunswick and since I know some of you live there, I’m hosting meetups for Tits Out Brigade members in Edinburgh, Scotland, and also in London, England. So, I’m going to be hosting this meetup in Edinburgh on Wednesday, August 21st, and I’m going to be hosting a meetup in London on Wednesday, August 28th. If you want more information, if you want to go on the list to learn details about when and where we’re going to be meeting, you can RSVP at VulgarHistory.com/Meetup to let me know you’re interested so I know how many people are coming and I can let you know where we’re going to be and when. Can’t wait to go over there, can’t wait to meet with those of you who are able to make it. It’s an exciting time.
Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and this is Season Seven, How Do You Solve A Problem Like Marie Antoinette? Part One of this Season Seven has been primarily talking about stuff that happened in America surrounding the American Revolution because the American Revolution had a lot of overlap of people and philosophies and it had a really big effect on what eventually would become the French Revolution. The French Revolution had a real profound effect on Marie Antoinette in the sense of… she was killed by the French revolutionaries. So, we’re doing a slow rollout towards Marie Antoinette.
I want to say I’m just really… People have been sending me, when Marie Antoinette is kind of like in pop culture, like when the season first started, there was this viral sound on TikTok about “Let them eat cake” when this influencer was at the Met Gala. And then there was the Olympic opening ceremonies, controversially, the whole thing with the decapitated Marie Antoinettes and then Gojira was singing the revolutionary song. Chappell Roan recently was appearing dressed as Marie Antoinette. So, as much as I’m like, “Oh no!”, you know, I was thinking, like, we’re doing a slow roll of getting towards Marie Antoinette. But Marie Antoinette’s not going anywhere, she’s in the zeitgeist. So, when we do eventually get to our Marie Antoinette episode, you know, I feel like inevitably there’s going to be something in pop culture about Marie Antoinette that we can connect it all to.
But for now, we’re doing this American Revolutionary-era stuff, and that’s why this week we’re talking about Ona Judge. This is a story, I read the incredible book Never Caught by Erica Armstrong Dunbar, and it was one of those books, like, as soon as I finished reading it, I think I turned on my microphone to record this story because I was so hype on the story, I was so excited to share it with you. It’s going to be a more-than-one-part episode because there’s so much to talk about. And I want to mention, so this is in this season part, this is the third enslaved Black woman who we’ve talked about. We started Season Seven with Marie-Josèphe Angélique. Midway through we talked about Sally Hemings and now we’re talking about Ona Judge.
During the Sally Hemings episode, I shared some information that I had just learned that had just been announced about Ancestry.com and the new resources that they have for people today, Black people in America who want to research their enslaved ancestors. And after I announced that a listener named Evelyn, let me know about another project. So, this is called the Brister English Project. So, the Brister English Project is dedicated to,
Illuminating the rich heritage of American descendants of chattel slavery, fostering self-discovery and unity through genealogical exploration.” Their mission is “to provide an inclusive, supportive platform that celebrates ancestral roots, strengthens cultural bonds, and inspires future generations to embrace their unique legacy with pride and purpose.
[The Brister English Project] provide direct assistance in building family trees, offer a comprehensive database of free genealogy resources, and conduct educational workshops for the Black community. [Their] goal is to bridge the gap between the past and present by making genealogical research accessible and meaningful.
So, you can learn more and support their work because they do. You can donate to help them with what they’re doing at BristerEP.org. The link is in the show notes if you want to learn more about them and what they’re up to. But you know what, we’re going to jump right into this. We’re talking about American heroine, Ona Judge.
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So, Ona Judge. Now, I do want to say why I’m going to be calling her Ona Judge. And that’s because partially that’s how she’s best known, but also because the main source I used for this episode is a biography of Ona Judge called Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge, by Erica Armstrong Dunbar. And Erica Armstrong Dunbar did, she says in the epilogue, like, a decade-plus of research on this and if she’s saying Ona Judge, I’m going to say Ona Judge. The thing is that Ona Judge went by Oney Judge, and sometimes you see her written up as that, but I’m just going with what Erica Armstrong Dunbar did because she is the expert on this topic.
Also, as per her author’s note in this book, she says:
I prefer to use the term ‘enslaved’ when referring to people who are held in bondage because it shifts the attention to an action that was involuntarily placed upon millions of Black people. However, throughout the text, I chose to use the word ‘slave’ for the purposes of narrative flow.
I’m going to echo that for this episode, wherever it just kind of makes sense in a sentence, I’m going to be using ‘enslaved,’ but I will be saying ‘slave’ sometimes, the same way she did in the book, the same way her book has that in the title. It’s just sort of, I don’t know, for narrative flow. Anyway, I am so hyped to tell you this story. This really reminds me to how I started doing this podcast, Vulgar History, because I would read these biographies, I’d learn about people, and all I wanted to do was talk to everyone in my life about them, but now I have this outlet, thank goodness, because I really need to go through this and tell you all this stuff.
I also want to mention that a bit ago, I did do this survey of some American listeners. I posted it on the Patreon, I was on Instagram there for a minute. So, I’ve got responses from almost 400 people, mostly just asking “Who from history have you heard of?” So, I know, because we’re talking about American history, I know a lot of listeners are American, and I’m just curious to know how much of this history you know, how many of these figures are really famous to you or not?
And so, I will say, this story does include George Washington, a person who 99.2% of people said they’d heard of, as well as Martha Washington, his wife, who 95.7% of people had heard of. So, these are some of the highest numbers, like, the most recognizable person on the survey was George Washington. Second place, Thomas Jefferson, not in this story… I’m just thinking… I’m sure he’s around, I’m pretty sure he’s not in the story. Martha Washington is the third most heard of person amongst Americans. So, like, George and Martha Washington, famous. But then the main character, Ona Judge, 9.4% of people had heard of her. I know you love these statistics, but I just want you to understand that, like, 392 people said they had heard of George Washington, 37 had heard of Ona Judge. So, let’s just try to right this out. All of you are now going to know who Ona Judge is, and it’s such an interesting story. I’m really excited to share it with you if you haven’t heard this story before.
So, Ona Maria Judge. Now, this may be Ona Mariah Judge. I know sometimes in oldy-times, the name Maria is pronounced Mariah, I’ll say Maria. It’s not going to come up a lot, her middle name. So, she’s born in June [raps to the tune of “Aaron Burr, Sir”] “Se-se-seventeen, seventy-three.” Let’s just put this in context of other people that we have been looking at this season, who’s around, who’s been born around the same time. So, she was born 1773, this is around… So, Zheng Yi Sao, the Chinese lady pirate born two years later, 1775. Marie-Louise Christophe, who we talked about in the episode over… a bit ago, when I had Vanessa Riley on, talking about the book she wrote, The Queen of Exiles, about the Queen of Haiti. So, she was born 1778. People who’ve looked at Charlotte Badger from New Zealand, born 1778. So, these are, these people are all being born. Also, the American Revolution started 1776. So, she’s born just around when that is all starting. Actually, let’s just double-check to tie this all back to our main heroine. So, Marie-Antoinette born 1755, so this is, like, 20 years later. I’m going to throw one more person in here who is Peggy Shippen because there’s a bit of overlap in their story, she was born 1760. So, this is like 13 years after the birth of Peggy Shippen and everything. Some of the stuff in the story is very specifically like a decade after Peggy Shippen, still in America.
So, she was born just before the American Revolution officially started but, you know, it had been percolating for quite a while. Her mother’s name was Betty, no last name, who was around 35 years old at this time. She was enslaved, Betty, that’s part of why she doesn’t have a last name. Ona Judge’s biological father was a man called Andrew Judge. And this is how we know, this is why she has a last name, because her father claimed her, was willing to give her the last name. So, Andrew Judge was a white guy, he was an English tailor who came over from England as an indentured servant. We’re going to come up with some similarities of people between the story and the one that we started off the season with, Marie-Josèphe Angélique in Montreal. So again, like we’ve got like white people come over to be indentured servants. Meanwhile, Black people are enslaved people. So, Andrew Judge was a tailor, Betty was a seamstress. So, they probably would have gotten to know each other on the plantation where they both lived which, spoiler, is called Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington.
So, in the book, Never Caught, Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s book, she sort of theorizes, because we know lots of things about Ona Judge actually, much more than we know about any other of the enslaved people who were on this plantation. But we don’t know exactly the context of how she was conceived. So, who knows if Betty and Andrew Judge had a consensual affair or what was going on, but they probably were in each other’s orbit because he was a tailor doing, you know, sewing. Betty was a very talented seamstress and embroiderer, and so they would have met each other that way. Andrew Judge leaves the story at the end of this paragraph. Once his indentured servitude era had ended, he left Mount Vernon and he never went back and he never visited them, and that is that.
His parting gift to Ona Judge was, perhaps, he had some influence over her unique first and middle name. The name Ona is a name that comes up in both some African cultures, also a Gaelic name. So, who knows which or both of those meanings, is why they chose that name for her? No other enslaved person at Mount Vernon had this as their given name. So, already she’s unique and even more exceptional, she had a middle name, Maria or Mariah. Enslaved people, it was rare at Mount Vernon would have a last name, let alone a middle name.
So, Betty, her mom, had a while ago, she had an older half-brother. Betty had had a son whose name was Austin, who was something like 14 years older than Ona. Betty also had some other children around closer to Ona’s age. Tom Davis and Betty Davis and their father was the white indentured weaver, Thomas Davis. So again, both just making connections, consensual or not, just in the, I don’t know, like, the fabric room or whatever, they had similar jobs. Ona also had a half-sister whose name was Philadelphia, who went by Delphy, no last name, father unknown. So, Betty’s situation— Oh, she was also an expert spinner, just for the record. Ona would also inherit/learn these skills from her and on this podcast, we have a great respect for the textile arts.
So, Betty was one of the favourite slaves, belonging to Martha Washington, the wife of George Washington. The way that she had become Martha’s slave is that… So, Martha Washington, before she was married to George Washington, was married to a different guy, whose name was Daniel Parke Custis, and then he died without a will after a short time. Martha W, which is what we’re going to call her, AKA Revolution-era Karen (and I mean that all love to all the people named Karen, who I know, who are my friends). But in these stories of American history, I really am picking up on some blueprints for some things that one sees in American present and one of those is the Karen archetype and Martha Washington, I think, is the original Karen.
Anyway, so after her first husband died, Martha not-yet Washington, Martha Custis, she received what was called a dower share of his estate. So, this meant that until she died, she was entitled to use a third of her dead husband’s wealth. So, this included six plantations and close to 300 enslaved people. So, as a widow, she’s one of the wealthiest widows in Virginia, she had some children, she’s just, like, a widow with a bunch of money, some young children, and she needs a husband. And two years after Daniel died, she got married again to George Washington. George W, who we’ve talked about before. In the Peggy Shippen episode, he kind of made numerous cameos there. We’re going to get more into what he was like in this episode.
So, at the time that they got married, George and Martha, he was a colonel/prominent landowner. He didn’t have any children of his own and he and Martha never had children together. So, he just kind of needed, I don’t know, I feel like it was sort of like people see now even in politics in America. It’s like, you can’t be a politician unless you’re married, and your wife took your last name, and hopefully you have children. Wasn’t that a whole thing with Bernie Sanders? He had to marry his longtime, common-law person just because it’s, like, you can’t run for office and not be married. Anyway, George W needed this and he’s like, “Oh great, here’s like a woman with children. I’ll marry her. She’s also rich… doesn’t hurt.” So, this is still happening in Virginia.
So, after I did my survey of American listeners, I will reveal… Well, this isn’t really a reveal. Everyone knows that my understanding of geography is not strong, particularly when it comes to the United States of America, but there’s a real North-South divide in this story and in the context of this story, Virginia is very much the South. So, this is where all these plantations are, this is where Mount Vernon is, I think, asterisk, we’ll get to that. Anyway, she was living in Virginia with her 300 enslaved people and her young children and then they moved 100 miles from Custis home to George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate. Let me just verify… There are so many Americans listening and I want to say things correctly because I’m going to be trashing your founding father and I want to not have any factual mistakes… Mount Vernon, Virginia, yeah. This is in, I’m going to presume, the South. So, this is where they are, Mount Vernon. It’s still a historical site, I think, it’s like a house you can visit, I think.
So, Ona Maria Judge was, so she was described, and we don’t know… The descriptions of her mostly from, as you might guess from the name of the book that this biography is drawn for, she does eventually escape enslavement. So, we kind of know what she looks like just from the descriptions in the, like, “Wanted! Escaped slave” posters, but we know that she was light-skinned, she had freckles, she had dark black eyes and “bushy hair.” So, she and her siblings spent their childhood, her, you know, Betty’s other children, the half-siblings, Delphy and everybody else, in a communal space in Mount Vernon, known as the quarters or the house for families. Very young children were not able to be helpful as slaves yet and they kind of got in the way if they went up to the house, so they just sort of hung out together, mostly unsupervised, except for some older slave women who were there too, because they had gotten kind of too old or just for medical reasons not able to do any other work.
And then when Ona Judge was 10 years old, she got called up to the mansion house to come and personally serve Martha W. This is probably partially because her mother, Betty, was one of Martha W’s favourite slaves. So, maybe Betty put in a good word for Ona, maybe Martha just assumed Ona would also, like, have the same traits that she would find appealing in a slave. This was the year 1783. So, I do want to highlight the fact that this all happened… The American Revolution was happening, but it wasn’t, like, revolutionizing Ona Judge’s life, nor the other people there. They’re still just doing their jobs, like, the revolution started, it ended. Now she’s10, like, what’s life going to bring for us now?
What did affect her is that George W. had been off leading the army for eight years. The American Revolution happened, and he was in his fifties. The time when the war had aged him, he had various medical and health issues, and he was just kind of over it. So, 1783, he resigned as general, and he wanted to just, like, retire and go live a normal, civilian life. But his friends, AKA all the characters from the musical Hamilton, wouldn’t let him do that because they were like… Okay. So, the Patriots with the Continental Army had won the American Revolution, the British people had left, but they were still really, the country was shaky. It wasn’t really firm, it wasn’t really finalized. It could easily be undone. And so, all the cast members from Hamilton, by which I mean Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis of Lafayette, like all the guys, Hercules Mulligan presumably, they’re all just like “George W, we need a strong leader. The new country is not doing well. We need someone like you to become, I don’t know, let’s call it the President of the United States.” George Washington was finally like, “Eugh, fine.” It’s a bit of, like, Empress Cixi vibes for people who listened to the Internationale season of Vulgar History, where she kept trying to retire and just, like, do watercolour painting, and then she kept coming back because no one else could lead as well as she could.
So, George Washington is like, “Fine, I will run to be President of the United States, the first-ever President of the United States.” He ran and then he won, he won. He became the President of the United States. This meant that he, Martha W, and their whole household, or most of them, would have to move to the capital of the United States, which at this point did move around a lot. I didn’t know that, but at this point, the capital of the United States was New York City, which is the North. So, they didn’t choose all of their inside people to come with them. They chose, I believe, nine of them, which included Ona Judge, who by now is 16 years old.
So, Martha and George Washington are giving me, like, the least pleasant customers in a Target, just like complaining, entitled, like, they don’t want to be there so it’s like, “Well, then why are you here?” He didn’t really want to be president. She super didn’t want to go to New York City. They both just wanted to chill out amongst their slaves in Virginia, and just live that six plantation-owner life. But anyway, so Martha apparently complained constantly to everyone about how much she didn’t want to move to the North. Ona Judge being her right-hand person would have to hear a lot of this and just… Like, Martha Washington, I can appreciate your family’s moving and you don’t want to do it, like that episode of Bluey. But for Martha Washington to be, so like, everyone’s writing about it, like she was complaining to everybody all the time. And just to be like, “Oh, I don’t want to take this trip.” It’s like, you know who also probably doesn’t want to leave her family and the only place she’s known? Your 16-year-old, teen slave here.
Anyway, so Ona Judge just kind of listened to all this because she was not an experienced traveller. She had never left there before, and she was about to be separated from her mother for the first time and her siblings, except for one, her older brother Austin, was also going to be one of the slaves coming with them to New York City. But there was, I’m sure, as there was in a lot of situations in the life of many people who were enslaved, not really space for her to sit with these emotions because Martha Washington was just running around being all “Herman, my pills!” like literally, and that was taking up everyone’s attention. It was stressing everybody out.
So, at this point, New York City was the second largest city in America, population around 30,000 people. It was a place where the wealthy people were really opulent about it, but also there was a great diversity within its public spaces. People of all genders, white people, enslaved Black people, free Black people, all resided within the city limits. If you’re going to the marketplace or whatever, you’re going to cross a more diverse type of population than what Ona Judge would have seen in Mount Vernon, for instance.
Freedom and opportunity were there, were possibilities for people in the North. So, other places in the North (Pennsylvania, Massachusetts) had already started enacting gradual abolition laws. New York was not on that page yet, but the North in general, this is where we kind of see this North-South split that kind of was there from the beginning of America, and that would eventually turn into the Civil War in the 1800s. And when I say gradual abolition laws, these are sorts of laws that are like, okay, well, when people die, then maybe their children won’t be slaves also. It’s not just like everyone is free. It’s sort of gradual. So, this concept, like, Ona Judge is coming to a place where these discussions are at least happening, but it made George and Martha W worry because they didn’t want their slaves to be freed. They didn’t want abolition for their slaves. And this is why they were careful about who they brought with them to New York City. They only picked the slaves who they thought of as, like, the most loyal and the least likely to try to escape.
So, Ona Judge was one of only two enslaved women to make this trip. The other was named Moll, who was a 50-year-old seamstress. They would both serve Martha W as her housemaids/personal attendants. Ona Judge, her job would involve things like drawing Martha’s bath, preparing her bed clothing, brushing her hair, tending to her when she’s sick, and travelling with her through the city on social calls as her assistant. Moll’s job was more nanny-adjacent; she would care for the grandchildren who lived in the home. So, Martha W’s children had died from her first marriage, but those children had been adults and had children. So, there were grandchildren in the situation. It’s George and Martha W, and then the grandchildren Nelly and Wash, which is short for Washington. This is also, I think, the origin of this era, and these sorts of people, are the origin of American political figures having very interestingly, unusually named children.
So, Ona Judge. She’s on the move, she’s travelling with Martha W up to this new place, en route to New York City. They stopped in Philadelphia, just like in the Peggy Shippen episode, the fifth girl in Sex and the City; Philadelphia, showing up. I don’t think there are as many riots, but like, Philadelphia listeners, you must feel the way that Edinburgh listeners did during the Mary Queen of Scots season, your city is just all over this saga. So, Philadelphia. This was Ona’s first experience of a place where enslaved people and also free Black people could co-mingle. So, Philadelphia was one of the first places to get real about abolition and stuff, and this is partially the influence of our friends, the Quakers, who had, I think by this point, 10 or 20 years ago, made a rule that any Quaker who engaged in the traffic of human souls would be kicked out of being a Quaker. And for Quakers, it’s really important to be a Quaker. So, all the Quakers were like, “Got it, that’s what we’re doing.” And so, their influence spread around other Northern areas.
Oh, I didn’t mention… So, when Ona Judge was born, she was born in the month of June in Virginia, and it was snowing, which is… I mean, I live in Canada, and even where I live in, like, central Canada, snow in June would be unusual. But snow in June in Virginia feels to me sort of like a portent, like something world-changing is about to happen. And the day before Ona Judge and the Ws left Philadelphia, there was a solar eclipse, so Sunday, May 24th, 1789. So just astrologically speaking, there’s a lot of portents happening. We just had the solar eclipse here in the year 2024. What would she have thought of that? Like, the Washingtons did not provide education for her, either reading or writing, obviously not astronomy, astrology, science, but also not religious education or anything. So, I don’t know what she thought when there was a solar eclipse.
Anyway, so the whole entourage arrives in New York City. They move into a house on Cherry Street. So, it’s the Ws as well as the grandchildren, and then the nine enslaved people, including Ona Judge, and then they also hired 14 white servants, including more housemaids, because, like, this is a big house. The First Family, Ona Judge and Moll couldn’t do literally every woman’s job in that house. So, the servants lived in small, shared quarters with the enslaved people from Virginia. So, this is probably the first time that Ona Judge had shared quarters with free white servants. So, again, she’s just getting this, just seeing the wider world, meeting different kinds of people.
One of the jobs that she had, was she was in charge of arranging or just overseeing the leisure time activities for Martha W’s grandchildren (George W’s step-grandchildren) Nelly and Wash, who at this point were 10 and 8 years old. Nelly was very gifted musically, and for a time she had a music tutor named Alexander Reinagle, who was a composer and performer, who had met Mozart when they were both, like, teen musicians. So, he’s got that sort of prestige. And I wanted to especially mention that because Mozart knew Marie Antoinette, so bear this in mind, for when we get to the “Nothing But Net” section. You might be like, “Ona Judge. How connected could she be to someone like Marie Antoinette?” But she’s, what, like one or two steps from Mozart so this is the world she’s living in.
To no one’s surprise, revolutionary Karen, the original Karen, Martha Washington, hated it in New York City. She complained all the time, and she referred to her time in the North as her “lost years.” She and George W had to constantly like have people over and host parties, because he was the President, and she hated having people over, she hated having to do stuff, she wanted to just, like, be living out her Gone With the Wind fantasies in her six plantations amongst her 300 slaves, but instead she had to be in New York City. But while they were hosting parties and having dinners and stuff, that was where Ona Judge got a little bit of free time for herself, because her job was watching the children or going around with Martha W while she was running her errands or whatever. When dinner parties were happening, because Ona wasn’t involved in the food preparation, she had some time for herself in this really crowded house where everybody was stepping on top of each other. So, during this time, she could hang out with the other servants and enslaved people. And maybe if she was running errands, she could meet cool, new New York City friends, including free Black people, which she did, because we know later she had friends there.
So, in terms of George W bringing slaves to New York City, this was not weird at the time. Even though slavery was kind of not as prevalent there as in Virginia, for instance, it was still happening. So, like, the governor of New York owned eight enslaved people. New York City resident Aaron Burr owned five, despite both of those guys, the governor and Aaron Burr were both involved in the New York Manumission Society, which was like, I don’t know, guys just like smoking cigars and being like, “Should we have abolition of slaves? I don’t know. Merp-merp-merp.” So, being an enslaver was a sign of being an upper-class person. So, these guys did, and they were cool with George W bringing his slaves with him.
But as we talked about a bit, one of the episodes a while ago with Nikki Taylor talking about her book about the Black women, the rebellion of enslaved Black women, or even in the Marie-Josèphe Angélique episode, people in the North who owned enslaved people didn’t own a great number of them because there wasn’t space, there wasn’t plantations. So, most slaveholders in New York City had one or two because there’s nowhere to put more than that. And then George W is a guy, again, he doesn’t want to be President. He also just wanted to live out his Gone With the Wind fantasies, just like sitting on the front porch with a plantation with a fan or whatever and he was sick all the time, this guy.
So, one month after they arrived in New York City, he became extremely sick. I don’t know what this disease is or what this situation is, but a large tumour grew on his leg. Not a cancerous tumour, but just like, is tumour, is that just a word to me? Just, like, giant, swollen lump thing. So, he was unable to sit. He was in constant pain, and it kept getting worse. Everyone is like, “Well, he’s clearly going to die,” but no one can know that because he was the president, and the country was so fragile. So, Ona Judge and everybody had to keep it a secret. Eventually, they blocked off the street so nobody could even come by the house to hear him. I don’t know, screaming with pain. Anyway, he got leg surgery, which he survived. I mean, what you know of Martha W’s character, I think you can imagine, she was already unhappy, and now she’s frantic about this, especially because her first husband had died young and her adult children had died young. She was not doing well; she hated being there, her husband was almost dying. And so, Ona Judge, this teenage girl, her task would probably also involve a lot of soothing Martha’s nerves, bringing her tea, running her bath, brushing her hair.
So, the family relocated to a larger home on Broadway, which gave everyone at least a bit more space. And then a few months later, George W fell sick again, this time with a fever, which coincided with an influenza epidemic that was going through the city. He came down with a virus that was a gateway for pneumonia during this illness. He lost most of his hearing, but then he got better. Again, this guy’s constitution, he’s just always getting better.
Anyway, that summer, the W family packed up the household to return to Mount Vernon for an extended visit, which is wild to me. Not that they wanted to go back to the place that they wanted to be, to the home that they preferred, but is that… In the summer? Like, isn’t the summer where you’d want to not be in the South? Isn’t it, like, unpleasantly hot then? But I guess they’re true Southerners and that’s where they thrive. There was not air conditioning yet. So, they came back, and Ona Judge returned. She had lived this very contained life up until this point at Mount Vernon. Like, that was her world, and she didn’t leave it, and she didn’t know other kinds of ways of being. Now she’d been to Philadelphia, she’d been to New York City, and she was changed, like, she could never go back to the person she was before. And I would think going back there, she would see her mom and her sisters and everybody, but it might look different to her, perhaps.
So, then 1790. So, all this stuff is happening and it honestly delights me to just skip over all the American history stuff that I feel like American listeners all learn in school that has to do with what were the Founding Fathers doing? For some reason, they all decided to move the capital of America from New York City to Philadelphia. Sure. This meant that the Washington household had to move to Philadelphia, Quakertown.
So, they had been living in New York City for 1.5 years, other than the trip to Virginia for the summer. When they did visit Virginia, BTW, one of her sisters, her sister, Betty Davis (not the actress, Bette Davis, but her sister, Betty Davis) had had a daughter. And so, one got to meet her new niece, Nancy. Anyway, so they’re… Again, not to anyone’s surprise. Martha Washington, who spent all her time saying how much she hated New York City, now that she had to go to Philadelphia, she was like, “Oh, I’m mad to be leaving New York City. I’d rather stay in New York City.” Because she just, she was just a complainer. She’s one of those people, she’s a verbal processor and just… She’s never not complaining. Like, how exhausting to be her husband, to be her grandchild, to be a friend who visits her once a year, but to be Ona Judge and having to spend every waking minute, like, sleeping in a room connected to hers. Yikes. So anyway, so she was bitching about all this.
So, when they went from New York City to Philadelphia, they had heard that there was a lack of white labourers in Philadelphia. And people were saying they’re like, “Oh, the white paid servants are lazy, and they don’t work as well as the like enslaved Black people,” so they were like, “Oh no, we need good labourers.” So anyway, they brought more slaves with them this time, including the people who had been there before, Ona Judge, Moll, Ona’s brother, Austin. And so they moved into 190 High Street, AKA Market Street in Philadelphia, AKA the Master’s Penthouse, AKA, where Benedict Arnold and Peggy Shippen had lived for a hot minute around 10 years before this. I was like, “Look at me noticing connections in American history!” So, it’s the same house. 10 years ago, Benedict Arnold had started doing his, like, being a bad spy lifestyle in this mansion. 10 years later, George W, Martha, and Ona move in.
So, this household contained all the same people George W, Martha, Nelly, Wash. And then more people were added because the house was bigger. So, it included George W’s chief of staff, and the wife of the chief of staff, and the chief of staff’s toddler, and the chief of staff’s own eight slaves and 15 white servants. So, there were between 25 to 30 residents in this place and George W had to have slave quarters built so that there’d be space for all these people. And that’s going to come back later. Well, basically just the fact that he had slave quarters affects the current monument where this house was, but I’ll talk to that later, that’s teasing you for some information for later.,
Anyway, so in this new house, the grandchildren each had their own room. Ona slept in one of the rooms, I think with Wash, and Moll slept in the room with the other one, Nelly. And I just want to note that Ona Judge, so later in life, part of how we know so much about her is she gave two very in-depth interviews to newspapers much later in life. So, this is why we know more about her than any other enslaved person from George Washington’s retinue. And so, she never accused George W of being sexually predatory with her, although I would think being a young, Black woman, a young enslaved Black woman in this household, there’s all the other, there are lots of opportunities for shitty people to assault her, but she never spoke about that happening. Perhaps the fact that she was Martha W’s, like, preferred right-hand person protected her a bit, but also the fact she slept in the same room as Wash, the young grandson, instead of sleeping in larger quarters with more people that maybe protected her from George W potentially, but also other men’s unwanted attention. But again, it’s so many people living in a pretty small space.
So, again, like she would be interacting very closely with not just the other enslaved Black people, but also the free white people and they would share information, they would see what each other was up to. Like, she would be here watching her white colleagues get paid more for their work, be able to move around the city with relative ease, make decisions about their lives, to be allowed to do things like get married versus the fact that she knew that that was not permitted for her.
And then, April 1791. Martha W learned something very concerning to her. What had happened was this law that she hadn’t realized worked in this way, and a lot of the enslaving people in Pennsylvania didn’t realize this either. So, the attorney general, I didn’t write down his name, who cares? So, he had enslaved people and three of them had run away. He went to capture them, he found them, and when he went to arrest them, they quoted back to him the law of Pennsylvania, saying, “No, no, no, there’s this new law. We’re actually going to claim our freedom. So goodbye,” and they were right. So, he had to let them go.
So, the law was this, effectively. All enslaved people in Pennsylvania, if you were in Pennsylvania for more than six months, even if you didn’t usually live there, if you were just visiting there for some reason and you were an enslaved person, you were required to be emancipated after six months. This attorney general person, he wasn’t from Pennsylvania, he just had been there for more than six months and his enslaved people found out about this and they were like, “See ya!” And Martha Washington was just like, “Oh fuck, what?” So, she’s like, “I have to let George know.” He was away on a business trip. And she was like, “Okay, this is like super-secret information. I can’t let any of the enslaved people in this house know they are allowed to be freed if they’ve been in Pennsylvania for more than six months.” For they had been in Pennsylvania for nearly six months at this point. But this is a house, as I believe I have described a few times, where everyone is on top of everybody. You can’t keep a secret when the rooms are close together and everyone talks to everybody. So, quickly everybody learned about this law.
So, George W found out about the law, and he was like, “Ooh.” Now, this is like a real contemporary American politician sort of vibe. He’s like, “Oh, that’s the law for everyone else, but not for me,” and he rationalized that by saying like, “I only live in Pennsylvania as a condition of my employment AKA being President of the United States. Actually, I’m a citizen of Virginia and in Virginia, it’s cool to have slaves.” So, [chuckles] his loophole, he figured out, and this is the part where I just want to scream about this to everybody, but first I have to explain the rest of the story and that’s why I’m doing on the podcast and not just like yelling on the street.
So, what George Washington did is he decided that every almost six months, like when they’re at 5.5 months, they would just move all the household back to Mount Vernon, hang out there for a bit, and then return to Pennsylvania so it would, like, reset the clock. So, the slaves would never be there for six months, they’d be there for like 5.75 months so they would never get the six months and they could never be freed. But even he knew that this was, like, a pretty slimy thing to do. He’d only been the president of this still-fragile, could fall apart at any moment, new country for two years, and he knew that like Philadelphia, the Quaker influence, people there probably wouldn’t appreciate him doing this. So, he just kind of was like, “Let’s keep this on the down low. Let’s just go on trips and pretend like we’re not doing it on purpose.”
So, just to be clear, the reason that George and Martha W didn’t want their slaves to run away was because they were considered property the same way their furniture was. Keeping them was protecting an investment that they planned to pass down to Martha W’s heirs because the way the law worked as well, the reason why Ona Judge was born enslaved is because any children born to an enslaved person, to an enslaved woman, they become enslaved themselves. Anyway, that’s why they were so mad about it. Also, they were assholes. So, they’re like, “Oh god, it’s a ticking clock.” Okay, so they’re looking like, “Okay, who’s been here for how long?” Austin. He’d been there for almost six months. They’re like, “We’ll send Austin back to Mount Vernon, but don’t tell anybody why.” And they thought that they were okay with Ona Judge and some of the other younger enslaved people because they thought this law only applied to adults, but guess what? It also applies to teen slaves, and I guess child slaves. So, Martha W was like, “Okay, Ona and I are just going to go on a quick trip to New Jersey, no reason. Doo-doo-doo.” And this plan, this plan of moving, making sure the slaves never stayed in Pennsylvania for six months, they did this for five years. Like, this worked as long as it did.
Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, Ona is living in her Pennsylvania era. And this is the city that, because again, the Quaker influence, the city had promised to end slavery and was in the midst of doing so. She also had more, not freedom, but she had free time and she was given permission to do fun things; she was allowed to attend the theatre with her brother Austin, like, not just accompanying Martha W, but going with her brother. She apparently attended the circus every time she could, sometimes the slaves would be given a small financial gift and they were allowed to go shopping. They were there for five years and she was always with Martha W at social events. So, Ona Judge, who sounds like a memorable-looking person with the light skin, the freckles, the bushy hair, the black eyes, like, and she was always with Martha W. So, she was a recognizable person among both Black and white Philadelphians. She was forbidden by the Washingtons from hanging out with the free Black people of Philadelphia.
Around the time she was there, the Free African Society had started up. That was the first mutual aid society in Philadelphia, and it worked to help emancipate slaves and for people who had just become free to help get them places to live and jobs and clothes and things. And they’re like, “You’re forbidden to talk to them,” but it’s like against the city version of the house with everyone on top of everyone. Inevitably, she would interact with them. Free Black communities in Philadelphia were organizing, and creating churches, schools, and social societies, all within like a block of where Ona was living. Like, she couldn’t not talk to them if she’s like running to the store to buy some apples or something, she’d pass somebody.
As these five years passed in Philadelphia, she would have seen other enslaved people, not any of the people in her household because they were moving out every 5.5 months, but other people. So, she saw, she knew that this law was happening. She saw other enslaved people become free and she didn’t try to escape at this point herself. And Erica Armstrong Dunbar theorizes, there’s lots of reasons. Like, Ona Judge might have misunderstood the law to think because she was so young, maybe she wasn’t eligible for this law, or maybe she just suspected or she knew if she was caught, she could be sold to a more cruel owner. Like, Martha W was a cunt, but at least she knew what she was in for. Like, her fate was at least she knew kind of what to expect tomorrow if she stayed with the same house where she was.
1793, yellow fever hit the town. Now, this is a disease I don’t think we’ve talked about on this podcast. The symptoms are horrible. So first, if you’re wondering, “Do I have yellow fever?” Hypochondriacs, trigger warning, skip ahead a minute. First, you feel headaches, chills, sharp pains, stomach upset, you get jaundice, that’s why it’s called yellow fever, your skin gets a yellow pallor. Then followed by the spewing of black vomit and internal bleeding. Now, this sounds like exorcist-adjacent, but this ripped through the town. Everybody was getting it, including the… So, this is why the W family, including Ona Judge, peaced out of there. They’re like, “See you later, Pennsylvania. It’s 5.5 months. We have to leave anyway,” they went to Mount Vernon to just avoid this whole situation. And going back to Mount Vernon, she, Ona got to meet her sister. Betty had had another daughter, and this niece was named Oney after Ona because that was her nickname. So, it’s like her niece named after you. She gets to visit her family, so nice.
But then, December 1794, Austin… So, he had a wife, or I guess a partner because enslaved people couldn’t get married, he had a partner and children. He had a family at Mount Vernon. He was going back to visit them, probably it was his 5.5-month anniversary as well. But he ran into an accident while he was on the trip, and then he died. That was December 1794. One month later, January 1795, their mother, Betty, back at Mount Vernon, grew ill and died as well. So, Ona Judge was now in her early twenties, she’d been in Philadelphia for a while. Her mother had died. This whole time her brother had been there with her, but now she was probably feeling more alone.
And then… Time to introduce a new character into this story, who is Betsy Parke Custis, who I didn’t list on my survey. But I’m curious how famous she is in the US. I don’t know. So, this is Martha W’s other granddaughter. Like there was Nelly and Wash, who are these, like, eternal children who are constantly in this house, but she had this other granddaughter, Betsy Parke Custis. So, Betsy was a scandalicious-type person, which what you know of Martha W was not the sort of granddaughter she really wanted.
So, Betsy had… She was, I think, 19, and she had taken a suitor, who was this guy who was 20 years older than her, named Thomas Law, who came over from England, and he was involved in “land development,” basically a grifter. But they needed George W’s permission to get married because he was the President. Betsy’s parents were dead so she’s like, “Hey, Martha W, can I marry this much older man?” By the way, he arrived in America with two of his three children who are biracial, and the result of a relationship he had when he was in India, working for the British East India Company. And so, George W was like, “This is your mans, this is who you’re choosing?” but eventually he agreed. One of the concerns he and Martha both had was that Betsy might go back with Thomas Law to England and they didn’t want her to leave. So, he strongly suggested that they stay in America, and Betsy got married to Thomas Law in Virginia in 1796.
Simultaneously, George W was deciding… He’d never wanted to be president, and he’s like, “I’m over it. I didn’t want to do this job. I’m tired of being President. I just want to go live out my Gone With the Wind life in Virginia.” So, he wanted to retire. So, at this point, they, the W household, including Ona, had been living in Philadelphia for seven years, you know, never more than 5.5 months at a time. And this is kind of the home she was used to. Like, she grew up in Mount Vernon, she was in New York for a while, but this is the place where she became a young woman, this is the place where she kind of grew into herself. And so, she didn’t really want to leave. Unlike Martha W, she was not in a position to just, like, whine and complain about it all the time, but also, she had to think about what she wanted to do next. She had no real attachment to Mount Vernon. Like, she had grown up there. Her family was there every 5.5 months she got to visit her nieces and stuff, but it’s just like, is that she had seen this bigger, more exciting world full of more opportunities and what freedom could look like and that was what she wanted.
On top of this, so Betsy was this 19-year-old kind of scandalous woman who was like, “Yeah, I’m just marrying this guy. He has these children, and I’ll just manage a household, I guess.” But Martha W knew Betsy was unprepared for marriage; she was 19 years old, and she needed help setting up her household. And so, she’s like, “Wedding gift for you Betsy: Ona Judge, my slave.” So, she bequeathed Ona to Betsy as a wedding gift. And then Ona found out about this. Like, I’m sure Martha W was like, “Oh, you know, we’re going to keep this quiet,” but it’s like, everyone talks to everyone so there are no secrets of the household. Ona found out. And she was just like, like… Okay, Betsy.
Betsy Parke Custis had a “stormy reputation.” She was different from Martha W, who’s more just kind of like a Karen-type, like a “Can I talk to your manager?” type. Betsy was more like a chaos person. So, she’s known for her stubbornness, her complete disregard for protocol, which in some contexts you’re like, “Oh, that sounds like a cool person to party with.” But it’s in this era and situation, it’s also kind of like the worst possible person to be enslaved to. Family members had joked, “In her tastes and pastimes, she’s more man than woman and regrets that she can’t wear pants.” Now, I mean, I always love a good pants moment, but it’s, they’re not really saying that. They’re more just saying, like, she has a really strong personality. And so, Ona knew her. This was Martha W’s granddaughter, like, they had visited there, she’d seen her as a nightmare. Who’s that girl from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Viola something? Like, Ona Judge had seen her being a nightmare child, and now she was a nightmare married teenager. She knew what she was like. Ona would know the people who were already enslaved in the household where Betsy grew up, she would know what it was like to work for her. And also, Betsy’s new husband, Thomas Law, was shady AF. The fact that he had these half-Indian children proved that he had sex with non-white women and wasn’t concerned about the gossip that this might cause, so there could maybe be some, like, sexual danger for Ona Judge as well.
So, in Philadelphia, she had seen freedom. This is a quote from Erica Armstrong Dunbar:
Ona Judge had seen freedom, felt freedom, and experienced freedom in the smallest of ways. She had also seen escaped slaves, and knew how dangerous that could be if someone recognized them.
So, she had heard, like, it was obviously dangerous and scary to escape slavery, like, we saw that with Marie-Josèphe Angélique. And in the North especially, literally, like with Marie-Josèphe Angélique. If you do this in the winter, the winters are cold, frozen rivers could get in your way, where you couldn’t go where you want to go, death by hypothermia if you’re not dressed for it appropriately. But then escaping in the summer, also risky. Heat stroke, dehydration, mudslides, like running through the woods, like this is a pretty… It’s always dangerous, it was always dangerous. But this is like the late 17… This is 1796. Like, this is pre-Underground Railroad situation, like you had to figure this out for yourself.
And also, for the record, the Washingtons were maybe… Like, it was more like the devil you know versus the devil you don’t know, but they were also shitty enslavers. We know from factual ways (letters and diaries and things) that there was a situation where there was, one of the enslaved people displeased George Washington, and so he sold this guy to the Caribbean. He would resort to brutal whipping when he didn’t like somebody’s attitude. And George Washington had also, as President, signed into law the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, which said, “An enslaver or his agent could legally seize a runaway slave, put them before a court, and then force them to return.” Part of this law also said, “Anyone who helped a slave escape would be fined $500,” which was an awful lot of money back then. The person who helped would also be imprisoned and could be sued by the enslaver. So, Ona Judge was just like, “I’m going to escape.”
—————
To be continued. We will talk more about Ona Judge next week.
I do want to mention that I have been sharing these announcements about this trip that I’m going on, I’m trying to think when you’re listening to this episode, that I am currently on. If you want to keep up with what I’m seeing during my trip to the UK, I’m posting blogs and also vlogs or videos on my Patreon for free at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. So, those posts are available to anyone who becomes a member of my Patreon and the sorts of stuff that I’m going to be seeing. I mean, we’ll talk about it there but, like, some of the stuff that I plan on seeing is the portrait of Frances Howard, an exhibition about the wives of Henry VIII, the statue of Boudica that’s in London, John Knox’s grave in Edinburgh. Also in Edinburgh, just everything at Holyrood Palace, the secret sex stairs, Rizzio’s death blood stain, and I’m also (and you’ll learn more about this if you follow me on Patreon) going to see some llamas. I am really excited about all of it and if you want to experience this all vicariously, yeah, Patreon.com/AnnFosterWiter. You can become a free member and see all the stuff that I’m posting about my very exciting trip.
I also want to mention I have a little Substack which is Vulgar History À La Carte. So, every week I post a lot of stuff from history so every week I post. What I’m doing is kind of brushing off some old essays I had written about various women from history and just kind of, like, updating them a little bit, fixing some of the grammar, changing some of the pop culture references. Substack is really popping lately. I’m a writer at heart (you know, I’m writing a book) and I’m a writer/talker, so podcasting is really good for me, but I really like having this outlet from my writing as well. So, that’s also free. VulgarHistory.Substack.com, you can see all the stuff that I’m writing about there.
I mentioned the Patreon before, which again, like free: you can join the Patreon for free and see all my travel blogs and stuff. If you want to support me financially on Patreon, you get a little bit more as well. So, if you pledge at least $1 a month, you get early, ad-free access to all episodes of Vulgar History. If you pledge $5 and more a month, you get all that and also access to bonus episodes of Vulgarpiece Theatre, which is where I talk about costume dramas with Allison Epstein and Lana Wood Johnson. We’re currently on summer hiatus/me-writing-a-book hiatus, but we will be back in the fall with more fun, you know, two- to three-hour discussions of various costume dramas. I also have episodes there for the $5 a month or more members, So This Asshole where we talk about shitty men from history. I’m too mad at George Washington to do a post about him, but I have done one about Thomas Jefferson if want to hear me just being really mad. And then also there’s The After Show where sometimes I have bonus talks with some of our guests when I can’t stop talking to them.
We have a wonderful brand partner, Common Era Jewellery. This is a woman-owned small business that makes beautiful jewelry inspired by women from classical history as well as from classical mythology. The mythology of ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient Rome. Their designs feature women who have been defined as “difficult,” a lot of them. So, people we have talked about on the podcast: Cleopatra is there, Agrippina, Livia from I, Claudius, Boudica is there. People from mythology like Medusa, Aphrodite, for my sapphics there’s a Sappho design. Anne Boleyn is also there because you can’t not have Anne Boleyn if you’re talking about difficult women. Anyway, the pieces are available in solid gold as well as in more affordable gold vermeil. You can get pendants; you can get rings. Vulgar History listeners can always get 15% off all items from Common Era by going to CommonEra.com/Vulgar or using code ‘VULGAR’ at checkout.
If you want to support this show directly via merch and also just mystify people around you by wearing shirts with real deep-cut inside jokes on them, we sell merch. So, if you’re in the US, you can go to VulgarHistory.com/Store, which takes you to our TeePublic store. If you’re outside the US, I recommend going to our Redbubble shop, which is VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. We have, so far, two designs from Season Seven; we have Public Universal Friend’s cult leader-adjacent catchphrase, “The friend has need of these things,” which I think is cute on a tote bag. And then also designed by our merch designer/podcast guest Karyn Moynihan, we have Peg Plunkett’s Pub, which is a beautiful Irish pub-themed T-shirt, which I plan on and have been wearing during my trip around the UK, just having some Peg Plunkett energy there, and also so people, when I do my meetups, you recognize me because you just know me as a voice.
Anyway, you can get in touch with me if you have thoughts or feedback, especially about these American History-adjacent episodes. I found it really interesting at first when I was researching the American History stuff. I had my survey of Tits Out Brigades and I was messaging with a bunch of people. Like, I asked on Instagram, “Who’s from the US? Where do you live? What do you know about this person?” And most people are like, “Not much.” So, I’ve chosen some less famous people from American History who I hope will become increasingly more famous, not through this podcast, but just in general. I think they’re people who deserve to be known about and talked about. So, you can get in touch with me if you go to VulgarHistory.com, there’s a little email form. Or you can also message me where I am on Instagram and Threads @VulgarHistoryPod.
Anyway, I also want to mention one other very important thing, which is that I want to shout out a production that’s currently going on in Edinburgh as part of the Fringe Festival. So, this is a play called The Edinburgh Seven and it was written and directed and is acted by… The people involved in this production include members of the Tits Out Brigade. So, the show is being performed through to August 24th with shows on most days, like today through to then.
The play The Edinburgh Seven is a riveting exploration of the first seven women to go to medical school in Edinburgh and the United Kingdom. The historic group set against the backdrop of the Surgeons Hall riot unravel their fight for acceptance and recognition. This portrayal not only honours their legacy but also serves as a timeless reminder of the ongoing global fight for equality and education and beyond.
If you want to go and see this play, if you’re in or near Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival, tickets are only £8! What could be more affordable? Performances are at Thistle Theatre in Riddles Court, and you can learn more about this play by going to their Instagram @EdinburghSeven2024. I put a link in the show notes so that you can find more about their play and/or buy tickets.
If you want to support them, like if you’re not there, you’re not able to see the play, but you want to support them in this play. It’s expensive to be young people or any age people. It’s expensive to put on a play when you’re not supported by, you know, major sponsors. So, they do have a GoFundMe that’s helping to pay for things like food and lodging for them while they’re in Edinburgh doing this play. I put a link to the GoFundMe in the show notes as well if you want to support them.
Anyway, yeah, until next time everybody keep your pants on and your tits out.
Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Ann Foster, that’s me! The editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. The Vulgar History show image is by Deborah Wong. Transcripts are written by Aveline Malek. Find transcripts of recent episodes at VulgarHistory.com.
References:
Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar
The episode image is an interpretive panel from Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia PA.
Learn more about the Brister English Project, a non-profit passionate about connecting American descendants of chattel slavery with their ancestry.
Buy tickets to The Edinburgh Seven at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival
GoFundMe to support The Edinburgh Seven Fringe show
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