Vulgar History Podcast
Ona Judge Staines AKA Oney Judge, Part Two
August 21, 2024
Ann Foster:
Hello, everyone. Before the episode starts, I just want to let you know, oh, I guess if you’ll listen to this today, the day that it officially comes out, August 21st, today I’m hosting a meet-up in Edinburgh for the Tits Out Brigade. If you want to find out where and when we’re meeting, then go to VulgarHistory.com/Meetup. Next Wednesday, August 28th, I’m going to be hosting a meet-up in London, England. And if you want to RSVP for that and find out when and where we’re meeting there, again, go to VulgarHistory.com/Meetup. Just fill in the form either way, and I’ll let you know the when and the where we’re going. It really helps me to know how new people are coming because that affects where we’re going to be meeting. But anyway, I’m so excited and I can’t wait to meet some of you over there in the UK.
—————
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? And as I say at the beginning of every episode so far, we’re not actually talking about Marie Antoinette, really, this episode. What we’re doing is a slow examination of what was going on in the world to lead up to the events of Marie Antoinette’s life. And this part of the season, Season Seven, Part One, we’ve been looking a lot at what was going on in America as regards the American Revolution. But the main characters are not the men from the musical Hamilton, the main characters are women like Ona Judge, whose story we started looking at last week. I left you with quite a cliffhanger so I don’t want to do too much of an intro here because, I mean, what’s she going to do next? It’s such a story that I’m really… I was so worked up about it when I was reading this book, Never Caught by Erica Armstrong Dunbar, which is such a great, propulsive narrative, wonderful book. And like, I put down the book and I just started recording this Part One and then Part Two right away, because I just needed to share with you this story. And honestly, let’s just jump into it.
At the end of the last episode, Ona Judge decided that she was going to escape, and let’s see what happened next.
—————
So, last time we saw Ona Maria Judge, she had decided that she was going to enter her on-the-run era. She was going to peace out of this life living with George and Martha W and if she couldn’t be emancipated, she was going to effectively free herself. So, how was she going to do this? Again, as a spoiler in, like, a positive way, like she’s going to do it. The evidence for that is that my main source for this is the book Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar. So, she’s going to get away. This is great. This is what she does.
So, Ona had been living in Philadelphia for, I want to say it was seven years, I think. In that time, although the Washingtons had said like, “Oh, she’s not allowed to go to hang out with the free Black people.” I don’t know if they still thought they were trying to keep from her the information that after you’d been in Philadelphia for six months, you could be freed, although she had never been in Philadelphia for six months, she was always there for only 5.5 months. She met people, she did stuff. We’re going to find in a minute, she was sent to, like, pick up some shoes from a cobbler. She saw people, she talked to people; you couldn’t stop her from, like, secretly getting information out and getting some connections. She had contacts among the free Black population of Philadelphia who could help her with an escape because that’s what they did. We mentioned last time that this was, or maybe I’m going to mention this time, I just remember reading about it. Oh no! I’m going to tell you. I’ll tell you, let’s talk about the free Black population of Philadelphia.
Everyone among the free Black population of Philadelphia knew there was one man who could and did help runaways and that was the preacher, Richard Allen. So, Richard Allen was a Black man. He was formerly enslaved. He was, at this point, in his mid-late thirties. He had various different things he did besides just, like, super secretly helping people escape slavery. So,
He had turned an old blacksmith shop into the first church for Black Christians in the United States. Later in life, he would become the first African American to be officially ordained in the ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The organization of the Bethel Society led in 1816 to the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which elected him as the first bishop.
So, this guy is important. He’s powerful. He also runs a chimney sweep business. He has got side hustles on side hustles. And so, he ran his chimney sweep business, and this was the chimney sweep business that the Washingtons used. So, he, Richard Allen, probably would have been in their house at some point, maybe regularly. So, Ona Judge might have connected with him there, maybe they might have spoken to each other. I doubt that the Washingtons knew that Richard Allen, the guy who ran the chimney sweep company that they used, was also the guy to help sneak enslaved people out of Philadelphia. Anyway, so she met him in a chimney sweep context.
He also operated a shoe shop. So, I mentioned that he had turned an old blacksmith shop into a church, and he also operated a shoe shop. So, we know, like, this was written down in one of the receipts, like, literal receipts, that Ona Judge is known to have gone there to purchase new shoes before. So, she might have just lingered while picking up the shoes, gotten some information, dropped some information to him that she was looking to escape. And so, she had a plan. The plan was in motion. Her allies, Richard Allen and, I mean, I don’t know their names and that’s because they wanted to hide what they were doing, but the free Black population of Philadelphia… Philadelphia itself, such a character in the story. The free Black population of Philadelphia, when we get to the end of this, and we’re looking at giving awards for people who were helpful, strong allies, like, these people showed up for her. So, they got everything in place. She was like, I am out of here and they’re like, “We got this, we got you. Just wait two weeks, we’ll figure it out.”
So, she had to wait two weeks, like, knowing that she was making this life-altering, very, extremely dangerous decision because there’s the Fugitive Slave Law and everything. And she just had to pretend like everything was fine. This is where I feel like, make the movie! Make the TV show! The drama of her, knowing this is all in the works and all she could do is just, like, brushing Martha W’s hair and just watching the grandchildren and pretending like she wasn’t going to leave soon. And so, the household was busy packing for their every 5.5 months trip back to Mount Vernon and she was helping to pack like, “Yeah, I’m surely going to go on that trip with you as well. Where else would I be going?” This is a quote from Ona Judge from later on in her life when she gave an interview to a newspaper. “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.”
And so, she was busy all the time. We’ve talked a bit about what her job duties were like. She slept in the room with the one grandchild that was adjacent to Martha’s room and so she was on, like, 24-hour notice to go and help if Martha was having one of her attacks of anxiety or just whining or just being a bitch. Ona Judge had to be there for her all the time; she would accompany her on her outing, she would brush her hair, she would help her with her outfits. That’s what she was doing. But there was one duty that she was not responsible for helping out with and that was meal prep because there was a whole group of people in the kitchen who did all that stuff. And so, she could have some free time while meal preparation was happening. Also, while the Washingtons were entertaining guests, like during dinner, she didn’t have to be there with them.
That is why on Saturday, May 21, 1796, she left the house while the Washingtons were having dinner and she just got absorbed into the free Black community of Philadelphia, who had all these plans for her, they were waiting for her. She just walked outside and no one noticed her away. But I mean, eventually, I’m sure they did notice when, you know, Martha W, maybe her nightgown wasn’t laid out or her, like, wigs were in the right place. Like, someone noticed pretty quickly, “Ona Judge has peaced out of here. Where has she gone?” Such that two days later, an ad appeared in the newspaper, and this was sort of… There were often ads in the newspaper about runaway slaves, because this was a frequent occurrence, the same as in, way back, in the Marie-Josèphe Angélique saga, like, as long as there was this chattel slavery of Black people in the Americas, there were people who escaped because of course they did.
This is where… So, George Washington, his understanding of the purpose or, like, how slavery worked was he felt like… The way that he rationalized it was that he felt that Black people were benefiting from this in the sense that he sort of saw them as equivalent to maybe some sorts of animals you might bring into your house where it’s like, “They couldn’t survive on their own. They need us to help them.” They’re sort of infantilized, but also dehumanized. Like he felt slavery was good. George Washington felt, this is not me saying this, George Washington felt slavery was a good thing for Black people, because it gave them a roof over their heads and, you know, a job to do and they couldn’t live on their own. So, to him, and to enslavers like him, the fact that people would run away, just, they couldn’t compute because they’re like, “But why would they run away when this is better than the other life they could have for themselves? This is good.” And if you have to start sort of questioning the paradigm of what you’re doing, you’re like, “Wait, but if slavery isn’t good, then like, why do I own these 300 people? Oh my god!” Like, so he wouldn’t, he never quite made that turn, mentally. Martha W… Neither did she. She was a nightmare person.
Anyway, so the notice came out for Ona Judge in the newspaper. So, it said, “Absconded from the household of the President of the United States on Saturday afternoon, Oney Judge,” which was her nickname she went by. It described what she looked like, her light skin, very freckled, very black eyes, her bushy hair. And also, it said, “She had many changes of very good clothes of all sorts, but they’re not sufficiently recollected to describe,” which is wild to me. Like, okay, so first of all, it’s not wild that she had very expensive, lovely clothes because she did, because she was going to all these places with Martha, like, she was going to society events and to the theatre and stuff and she needed to be dressed to an equivalent level of the other people around there. But also, the fact that they could describe what she looked like, (her skin tone, her hair texture) but they couldn’t remember what her clothes looked like… Like, Ona Judge would know every millimetre of every dress of Martha Washington. She would know her hair, she would know everything about Martha Washington’s whole wardrobe, all of her wigs. And the fact that they couldn’t even describe what her clothes looked like because they couldn’t recollect, it’s like how negligible she was to them until she went missing.
The notice also said:
As she may attempt to escape by water, all matters of vessels are cautioned against admitting her into them, although probably she will attempt to pass for a free woman and has, it is said, wherewithal to pay her passage.
So, they’re in Philadelphia and, somewhat correctly, they’re like, “She’s probably going to try to escape via boat because that’s how people get out of Philadelphia to other places in those times.” And indeed, that’s what Ona did. There was some thought that maybe she would go to New York City, but she knew not to go to New York City because she lived there for a couple years and people would recognize her because she used to be out and about with Martha Washington and Martha Washington might not have noticed what her outfits were like, but Ona herself was distinctive-looking. She would have been a familiar face there. So, she didn’t go to New York City where people would know her. Like, this is where the free Black people, Richard Allen and his team, like, they got her. They knew what to do, they’d done this before for so many people. Ona Judge was in a different situation because she was more visible because she had been seen so much with Martha Washington, who’s such a famous person.
So, what they did, what they arranged for Ona is she left via a boat. And the way that this all probably happened, because this is how it worked for most people in the situation who were escaping, she wouldn’t have been told the details beforehand because then if she was captured and tortured, she wouldn’t have anything to tell. Like, she was only told probably, she probably met someone at a meeting place, or they picked her up. She went to the harbour and then they were like, “Okay, it’s this boat and this is where it’s going. Goodbye!” Like, because they didn’t want anyone to have extraneous knowledge or information, especially because Ona lived in that house where everyone was so close to each other, information could have left. Information could have been overheard by people. And so, the place that she was headed on her boat she learned was going to Portsmouth, which I hope that’s how you pronounce it, Portsmouth, New Hampshire in a boat called The Nancy, which I love a boat with a person name.
So, the pilot of this boat was Captain John Bowles. He ran a freight business along the eastern coast between Philadelphia and New York City. And Ona Judge, she never said who was the pilot of the ship as long as he was alive because of the Fugitive Slave Act. Like he, anyone who helped her, that’s the thing like this is so dangerous for her, but it’s so dangerous for anyone who helped her because they would also be subject to that horrible law. So, she never spoke his name publicly until more than a decade after his death to keep him safe from punishment. So, John Bowles, you know, an ally, thank you, John Bowles. So, she had paid for the ticket, maybe the free Black community had helped her pay for the ticket, or maybe she had been given, like, some spending money every now and then by the Washingtons. Anyway, somehow she got on the boat, she would have been, like… A woman travelling by herself, unusual in this situation; a Black woman travelling by herself, unusual in this situation, but she would have to impersonate a free Black person. She’d met a lot of them so she would kind of know how to act and how to dress.
So, her friends in Philadelphia had let her know when she landed in Portsmouth, who to look for, like, who was going to meet her, who to trust. And so, the Black population in Portsmouth, at this point, I don’t know what it’s like today, was small, like 2-3% of the population. It was a bustling shipping town, the people there, the free Black people helped her find lodgings and she set about to find work as a domestic worker.
So, this is also just a backtrack, Portsmouth in general. Where Ona Judge had lived for the first, what, 16 years of her life, had been at Mount Vernon, like on the plantation. So, there were so many hundreds of enslaved Black people there, as well as the white indentured servants and the white people, the Washingtons, the enslavers. And then she went, she was in Philadelphia, she was in New York City. And so, she would have been in places where there was a high proportion of Black people. That’s just what it had always been like everywhere she went. And then Portsmouth would have been, I think, again, different for her. Like, she was worldly in the sense of she had lived in three different cities, she had had different experiences, different situations, but not like this one. So, she would have stood out there probably in a different way. But her face wouldn’t be known like she was in Philadelphia or New York City.
So, the work that she would have applied for, being a domestic worker, so just, like, doing work around someone’s house, like house cleaning, cooking, watching the children, doing the laundry, that sort of stuff, which would have been extremely physically punishing work. I mean, similar to some of the work that she was doing with the Washingtons. But with the Washingtons, it was more brushing hair and, like, fixing clothes and that sort of thing, it wasn’t like scrubbing the floors and that sort of stuff. Although, she would have known people who were doing those jobs because people were doing those jobs everywhere. So, Erica Armstrong Dunbar in her book, Never Caught, she explains, like, the fact that Ona Judge chose to take arguably a more physically taxing job really speaks to her character. Erica Armstrong Dunbar says:
That Ona elected to become a domestic, that she chose to endure physically punishing work in New Hampshire rather than remain a slave says everything we need to know about how much she valued freedom.
So, the most prominent family in this area were the Langdons, who were the family of Senator John Langdon, who was like human friends with George W, they had hung out with his family often, which red flag for Ona Judge. And there’s also, I think in this place, in Portsmouth, there’s still the Langdon House is a museum or something so they were a notable family. So, Senator John Langdon had a daughter, Elizabeth, who had been good friends with the Washingtons’ granddaughter, Nelly, like as little girls, they had met, they had play dates, they had hung out together. And Ona Judge was, for most of her teens, one of her responsibilities was to watch over Nelly so she would have known Elizabeth and Elizabeth, even if she didn’t remember what Ona Judge’s dresses looked like, she’d be like, “Oh, freckle face, like very dark eyes, like that’s Ona Judge.”
So, one day, sort of inevitably, Ona Judge was just walking around, you know, to or from work or whatever and Elizabeth Langdon was there on the street, and she recognized her. And she’s like, “Oh, isn’t that Ona who was one of the slaves at the Washington’s house? I wonder if the Washingtons are in town,” because she wouldn’t have known that Ona had escaped, she didn’t read the newspaper, I guess. So, she went home, Elizabeth Langdon, and I mentioned to her parents like, “Hey, I just saw Ona, like the slave who used to hang out with the Washingtons.” The Langdons, of course, knew, because I’m sure George W had been screaming to all his friends about this, they knew that Ona Judge was a fugitive and so they sent word to the Washingtons.
The next section of my notes, I call “Javert Vibes,” because this is a bit where George W goes a bit Javert from Les Misérables, in terms of obsessively hunting down a person. So, he was still busy. Remember, he’d been the President but he had decided he was going to retire from being President. So he’s in the midst of planning his retirement, but even in the midst of all that, he still had time for slave catching. He wanted, in a real Javert vibe, like, he wanted Ona back. Because the whole thing, like, it just made him… If she hadn’t liked being enslaved to him, then maybe that meant slavery wasn’t good, and then that meant, like, fundamentally his understanding of the world would have to be challenged. And so, he’s like, “No, can’t have that.”
For PR reasons, it was hard for George W to go slave-hunting in New Hampshire, because that’s in the North and it was less fond of slavery than Virginia, for instance. He was President, moving into his retirement era, and I still want to emphasize that, like, the United States was still a precarious concept. People having faith in him was important, and having everybody on all the sides support him was important. So, if he was seen to pursue Ona Judge, then this might make people start thinking about him in terms of slavery, and that might make people notice his whole, like, 5.5-month rotation system, and that’s just kind of a bad look for him, generally, especially because he’s the one who signed this the Slave Act into law and everything.
Anyway, he just wanted to not look like he was sort of skirting the law. And the vibe that, you know, he was the President of the United States, the first president, and the whole thing about how the concept of slavery, and for people to rationalize and to do it, relied, to a certain extent, on people choosing to believe that the people who were enslaved were cool with it. One would think that sort of the best place to be enslaved would be under the President of the United States. It’s obviously terrible everywhere. So, just in terms of him wanting to, like, keep enslavement happening, he couldn’t make it look like even being enslaved to him was also bad. So, he was just like, “Let’s just let this go maybe?” But no, his bitch of a wife, Martha Washington was like, “No, Ona judge belongs to me.” Because remember, that’s the whole thing: Ona Judge’s mother, Betty had been a dower slave of Martha Washington’s first husband and when the first husband died, then Martha Washington was the one who inherited Betty and therefore Ona. And so, Martha W is like, “No, Ona belongs to me, I want to give her as a wedding present to my awful granddaughter, who is getting teenage married to an old grifter. So, George Washington, you go and catch her or else you will owe money to the Custis estate,” which is the estate of her, like, dead husband. And so, George Washington was like, “Let’s do this then.”
So, he hired the Secretary of the Treasury, Oliver Wolcott Jr to go and get Ona, which is an interesting use of, like, government people and funds to do a private thing, which you might recall, Benedict Arnold got in trouble for doing, but I guess it’s cool if you’re, like, actually the President in olden times. Not in modern times, right? Martha Washington was being a bitch about all this. George Washington, like, of course, he was mad about it, of course, he wanted Ona back, but it was mostly PR reasons why he didn’t. So, he wrote a three-page letter, just like an angry, like, written-out, incel podcast about how mad he was about how ingrateful she was being to him. And also, the way that he was sort of trying to rationalize the fact that she didn’t want to live enslaved to his wife, he was like, “Well, she must have been manipulated into doing this by someone else because she is not the sort of person,” not that he sees her as a person, but he’s just like, “She’s not someone who would get an idea of her own in her mind. She would never want to do this. She must have been manipulated. I think she had a boyfriend who was a mentally unstable Frenchman, and that’s who is behind all of this,” which is quite a leap.
Like, first of all, just to think, like, “Oh, she must have been tricked into,” this, which again, Marie-Josèphe Angélique also had that thing where she actually was working with her boyfriend. But here, the fact that George W was just like, “No, Ona could never have done this herself. It has to be a boyfriend. And not just a boyfriend, a mentally unstable Frenchman,” which the vibes are very much like “My boyfriend, George Glass in Canada.” And so, he’s just like, “Yes!” And in this three-page wild letter, he was like, “Yeah, and I think she’s probably been abandoned by this boyfriend now, and she’s probably begging for work and penniless. So, actually, coming back to the Washingtons,” he thought or claimed, you know, “that actually would be better for her because she’s probably her life is probably terrible away from us.”
And so, he got this guy, who was it? The Attorney General? No, the Secretary of the Treasury, Oliver Wolcott Jr, to contact Portsmouth customs officer, Joseph Whipple. So, this is like, again, using government resources to get her, which again, is a sort of thing that got Benedict Arnold in trouble in the first place, but it’s cool when you’re George Washington. And he offered various suggestions to get Ona, which were all, like, high-key illegal, actually, because the Fugitive Slave Law that he, George Washington, had signed into law like three years ago, said that when a runaway slave is caught, they need to be brought before like a judge who would then, you know, say, “You have to go back to your owner or whatever.” But he’s like, “With Ona judge, what if we capture her, but don’t bring her in front of a judge, and just low-key bring her back to the Washingtons so just, like, no one hears about any of this.” And if you’re an American person who’s listened to all this so far, and if you haven’t heard of Ona Judge in this whole scenario, like this, this is why. [laughs] George Washington, in the moment of all this happening, was just like, “How about no one ever hears about this? Great.”
So yeah, he offered money to the customs officer Joseph Whipple for doing this. So just, you know, sort of, bribery using government funds or whatever. And Joseph Whipple who is, in the context of the like white men in the story, I’m going to say, okay. He was like, “All right. I’ll do this, I guess because he’s the President for like a couple more weeks.” But also, he’s like, “I’m going to do this my own way. And not the way George Washington is saying because George Washington has gone full Javert about this and he’s unhinged about the situation, like, vis à vis, you know, the French boyfriend or whatever.”
So, this guy Whipple, he just kind of like put word out, he’s just kind of like, “Ona judge, she’s like somewhere here in Portsmouth, there’s not that many Black people. And I know the free Black people here are looking for work.” So, he had this kind of like, I’m going to say, clever plan in terms of schemes. So, he just said a word that he wanted to hire a domestic servant. And he was the customs official so he’s one of the wealthier people in town. So, this is a pretty good job. And so, word spread around town and then Ona judge heard about this. And she’s like, “Oh, this sounds like actually a good job. I will apply for this job.” So, she went to meet him for a job interview. And so, when they met, he started out doing like a job interview, like a fake job interview, but he started asking all these leading questions. Eventually, when he started being like, “So, do you have, do you have a boyfriend or husband? Like, perhaps a mentally unbalanced French boyfriend or husband?” And she was like, “Oh, God damn it. Like this is a trap. George Washington has set this all up.” And she’s like, “Fuck.” But then she also saw the Whipple is, like, again, in the context of white men in the story, okay. She saw that he wasn’t going to, like, grab her and throw her on a boat or whatever. So, she’s like, “Listen, like, can we just talk about this?” And he’s like, “Yeah,” he just wanted to reason with her.
So, what he was trying to do was to be like, “You know, being a slave, isn’t that better than being a domestic servant? It’s less physical work. And also, don’t you want to go back to the Washingtons? Isn’t that a thing you want to do Ona Judge?” And she was just like, she gave him a piece of her mind. She’s just like, “Listen, under no circumstances, will I ever return to slavery.” I’m paraphrasing part of what she said in interviews later on. She’s like, “I will not return to where I could be sold or given to any person, I’d rather die than return.” And so, I feel like he took a pause there like, “Okay, okay.” So, then he counter-offered, he’s like, “Well, what if you went back to the Washingtons? Because if you like, be their slave again, maybe after they die, maybe they’ll free you,” which is like a thing sometimes people did. And she’s like, “That sounds not true.” But she also knew that she needed to get out of this fake job interview situation. So, she’s like, “Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you. I hear you. Sure. Let’s think on this.” And so, she left, but with no intention of like, going back to the Washingtons ever. And so, he’s like, “Okay, great. This is the ship that you should get on, it’ll take you back to Virginia.” And she’s like, “Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Okay, yeah, that’s the ship. And that’s the time it’s leaving, mm-hm, mm-hm.” And then obviously, like the next day or whatever, she did not catch that ship. And Whipple was waiting by the ship like, “Hey, why did she not show up?” And then he’s like, “Oh, oh. You know what? Makes sense. Why would she want to return to the life of enslavement?” He’s like, “I get it. Because I’m like, an okay white man in the story.” But he had to explain this to George Washington, this unhinged president.
So, she went back and he’s I feel like I didn’t write down, but I think he might have been like, “Eugh, how to explain this, let’s just kind of do this through a third party,” which was Wolcott, the Secretary General or whatever. And so, George Washington heard about this, and he fired Wolcott from his job for like, even this job was being Secretary of the Treasury or whatever, but because he didn’t catch a slave, he was fired from the job. So again, George Washington, I feel like his use of government hiring practices, his human resource management, is questionable. So, George Washington cut Wolcott out as a middleman and wrote back to Whipple, the okay person. He wrote another just, like, deranged letter being like, “Put her on a ship. Pick her up with your hands. Throw her on a ship. Send her back to me.” Whipple again, he took like a month before responding. And his letter was kind of like, “Mmm, yeah. Those are words you said. And that is a concept that you suggested.”
Anyway, George Washington got busy transitioning into his retirement era. And the whole thing, sort of like, the final thing that got Ona Judge to decide to escape was when she found out that she was going to be given as a wedding present to Martha Washington’s, like, nightmare granddaughter. So, Martha Washington was like, “Well, I have to give something as a wedding present. Should I give this, like, Mixmaster toaster? Should I give this beautiful set of glassware? Or should I give a human being? Yes.” And so, she sent Ona Judge’s younger sister, Delphy, in her place. So, that’s how that went.
Meanwhile, Ona Judge, like she got her way out of that attempt to send her back into enslavement and she’s just like living in Portsmouth. She’s just being this, like, hot, young, single girl, lots of freckles just, like, hanging out. She knew that because of the society in which she lived, she needed a husband, like, she needed for protection and for survival, and because two incomes are necessary to make do in the life she was living as a Black woman, and also for a Black man. Like, free Black men were constantly disrespected, trapped in the web of racial discrimination but because they were men, they carried some power. And so, Ona needed that for security and even to potentially prosper, like, she needed to be part of a power couple.
So, she quickly found a guy. And like Martha Washington’s nightmare granddaughter, Ona met and married somebody pretty quickly. So, the guy who she met, the lucky man was named Jack Staines and he was a sailor. So, in this situation, being a sailor was a way for Black men to earn wages unavailable to them elsewhere. Because of the racism of colonial America, there were a lot of jobs that Black people like just couldn’t get. So, of the jobs Black men could get, being a sailor was seen within the free Black community as sort of a position of honour and respectability. So, this is kind of like the highest that Ona could reach in terms of trying to find, like, a successful Black husband. And this is partially because, like, they would go off to sea for six months or whatever, but at the end, they would come back, and they’ll get these lump sum payments, which was enough money that they could purchase land or a home, which was unachievable for most Black men in this place and time. This did also mean like, you know, when Jack was away, Ona Judge would have to fend for herself against… Like, because she was still technically a dower slave belonging to Martha Washington who was, like, people are still looking for her, right? So, it’s like, “Okay, this is maybe, like, the highest calibre husband I can find in the free Black community, but also pros and cons. He will be away six months out of every year.”
Anyway, they got engaged and Whipple, the okay white man, heard news of the engagement and he’s just like, “Hmm, okay.” I’m not sure what his motivation is here. I guess he just still felt like he owed something to George Washington or something. Anyway, so I do want to also mention that Ona Judge, as an enslaved person, like, enslaved people could not get married. That was not the thing you were allowed to do because you weren’t considered a person and only people can get married. So, already she’s doing something that she never would have been able to do pre-escaping. Anyway, they were doing everything, like, by the book. They announced their engagement, they went to get their paperwork to get married but Whipple convinced the clerk in Portsmouth to delay their paperwork, maybe until he could tell George Washington about it, unclear. But they were just like, “Well, fuck that then.” And so, they went to a nearby place called Greenland, not the country, a city and/or town Greenland, New Hampshire, and they just got their documents done there and they got married.
So, this is where Ona Maria Judge becomes Ona Maria Judge Staines, which is the surname that she went by for the rest of her life. They moved into a home together. She became pregnant and their first child was a daughter named Eliza. And then because of the way that slavery laws worked, et cetera, because it was inherited through the mother. So, technically, her daughter was now also technically a dower slave to Martha Washington’s husband’s estate.
Two years passed, and they’re just, like, being a young couple, working hard, you know, she’s being a single mom for a while when he’s away at sea, and they’re just getting by and living this life that was so much beyond what her life could have been had she not fled. She’s able to have a job, earn her own income, get married, have a family, live in this house. She’s figuring it out. They’re a young, newlywed couple in their twenties. But after two years, George Washington, he’d now been retired for a while, he’d like settled into his retirement, and he was just like, “You know what? I feel like there’s some loose ends. What was that thing I meant to do? Oh, that’s right. Catch Ona Judge.”
So, he recruited a new helper, who is Martha Washington— Now, I didn’t… Goddamn Martha Washington. Like, I went into this story wanting to learn about Ona Judge and just, like, Martha Washington just steals the show with her, like, Karen haircut. Every one of Martha Washington’s relatives seems to be a nightmare person. Were they all? I mean, it seems like. But if anyone listening out here is a descendant of them, I hope I hope your ancestors, some of them, were okay. So anyway, Martha Washington’s nephew, Burwell Bassett Jr, which is a real Southern name, that’s who George W got to hunt down Ona judge. He still claimed, George W, you know, Ona Judge had been enticed away by an insane Frenchman. Like, that’s still what he thought happened. And, you know, Whipple had been like, you know, “Maybe you could negotiate with Ona Judge. These are some options.” And George Washington is like, “I will never negotiate with an enslaved person. I want her back here, brushing my wife’s hair,” or whatever.
So, Burwell Bassett Jr headed to New Hampshire, where he pretty easily tracked down Ona because she was she’s not hiding in someone’s attic somewhere. She had a job, she had a husband, she had a house. He found her in the sense of he, like, knocked on her door and she answered. And wouldn’t you know it, this is one of the times where her husband Jack was away at sea. And Burwell Bassett Jr was like, “Well, hi!” You know, just trying to do like a real Southern gentleman, like, sweet as sugar thing. And he’s just like, “Well, why don’t you just come back to the Washingtons’ in Virginia? I’m sure you won’t face any repercussions.” And Ona is like, “Mmm, sounds fake.” Just was like, “No, I choose to not go with you. No.” And he was like, “Well, what if I promise you that if you return, the Washingtons will free you? Wouldn’t you want to come back and be freed by them?” And she’s like, “No. Still no.” A quote from her later, she explained what she said to him, she looked him in the eye and said, “I am free now and choose to remain so.”
So, if the Washingtons had thought, because remember George Washington had thought that she was, like, lured away by this Frenchman who then abandoned her, and she was like penniless and living on the streets. It’s like, no, she’s actually like working; she’s a functioning member of society. She’s doing just fine. So, if they thought that, like, waiting two years, she would be desperate and wanting to come back… Because remember again, the way that a lot of people rationalize the existence of slavery was thinking that like these people, the Black enslaved people, needed white people to feed them and to tell them what to do and without them, they’d just be lost and stranded. And that’s, like, foundational for them to rationalize that, like, these are not also people. So, George Washington is just like, “Well, no. She needs to come back here. Like the whole concept of slavery depends on this.” So, if he had thought that she would be, like, weakened and more wanting to come back after all this time, it was in fact the opposite because she had now been free for three years and that had prepared her for this battle. She had lived the life of a free person and she’s just like, “This is what I want. This is what I choose. Why would I ever go back?”
So, Burwell Bassett Jr left her home, and he’s just confused because he’s just, like, used to enslaved people. The only Black people he interacted with, I assume, were enslaved people and they did what he told them because they were enslaved by him. And so, he’s just like, “This woman said no to me and that’s confusing.” So, he went back to send a letter to George Washington to ask for instructions like, “What do I do? She said no. What do you do about that?” He was staying with Senator Langdon, who we talked about before. And I guess they’re just, like, sitting around drinking their whiskey or, like, what do Southern people drink? They’re like… what? Their lemonade. And then smoking their cigars. And he’s just like talking to Senator Langdon, “Like, this woman said no. So, I guess next I just need to go and like grab her and like throw her on a carriage and bring her back. So, I guess that’s what I’m going to do,” he said out loud.
Senator Langdon’s household staff comprised some free Black servants, which again, these people, it’s like when there was the other stuff in Part One where Ona Judge or the other enslaved people heard what people said, it’s like you might forget that they’re there, the enslaved people. You might not notice what their outfits look like, but like, they hear you and can tell other people what you said. So, thank goodness, one of Senator Langdon’s servants heard this plan and he got word back to Ona Judge that they were going to come and grab her and take her away. So, she grabbed her baby, hired a stable boy to commandeer a horse and carriage and headed, again, for Greenland, not the country, but the place where she had gotten married such that when Burwell Bassett Jr returned to her home, she was gone. This is, like again, in the movie that is the story, he comes back and he sees, it’s just like the house. It’s, like, clearly she lived in it; there’s the plate on the table and there’s, you know, some laundry over there. It’s like someone lived here, someone actively was living here, but now they’re gone. Like, she clearly had just fled and he’s just like, “Well, shoot! Dog gone.” I don’t know what he said.
So, he had to, Burwell Bassett, return to Virginia to let George Washington know he as well had failed in his mission to capture Ona Judge, like, everyone kept failing. And then shortly after that, George Washington died of one of the various maladies that he had. As per his will… So, he had like a late-in-life, vague abolitionist thought, which was he was like, “Is slavery what I want? Not sure.” So, in his will, he had said that 123 of the enslaved people at Mount Vernon would be eventually freed, but he was only able to emancipate the ones who belonged to the Washington estates, so not the dower slaves, not like, Ona’s family, the ones who belong to Martha. Martha Washington is just there, just kind of like, running the plantations herself, I guess. Still being just sort of like, I don’t know, she’s in Virginia, which is all she ever wanted to just be there and sit on the porch and drink her lemonade or what’s that… mint juleps. And the enslaved people, like, if you imagine that there’s whatever 300 something enslaved people at Mount Vernon and 123 of them were told like, “You are going to be gradually freed from slavery, but JK, not the other half of you,” like, there is some tension there among the enslaved people about the whole situation.
Things happened, like some fires were set, presumably by some of the enslaved people in, kind of, protests. And so, what Martha W did is she signed a document one year later, one year after George died, freeing George W’s slaves right away. Like, he had signed that they were going to be eventually freed in, like, a long-term thing, but she was like, “They can go. They can stop burning down the plants and they can go. I’ll just keep my slaves.” And the thing with her, I mean, not to give her any credit at all, because she is, as I said in Part One, a cunt. But she also couldn’t have freed her dower slaves, even if she wanted to, not that she did, because she had inherited just one-third of her first husband’s estate, which meant one-third of the slaves, the other two-thirds of the slaves weren’t her “property,” they were to be passed on, them and their children, to her surviving grandchildren. So anyway, even if she wanted to free some of them, she died pretty much right away after that, transferring her property, including all these slaves to her heirs, so all of her nightmare relatives, grandchildren, their children, et cetera.
None of this truly affected Ona’s day-to-day life. She later said when she was interviewed that after George Washington’s death, “The family never troubled me anymore.” So okay, in that sense, it did affect her life because she was no longer being actively hunted. But like, she wasn’t freed because of their death. She was still technically a fugitive, Martha Washington’s first husband’s family, the Custis estate, they could legally recapture her and her children at any time. But they weren’t hunting her like George Washington was so she just kind of like, what can you do? She just got on with it. She’s like, “I’m just going to live my life. Here we go.”
So, she and Jack had two more children, a girl named Nancy. In the biography I read by Erica Armstrong Dunbar, she suggested maybe named after the ship Nancy that had sailed her to freedom, but also, Ona’s sister Betty had a daughter called Nancy so, maybe also named after her niece that she never got to see anyone. And then she had probably a son, probably called William, because later there’s a man called William Staines, who’s around the right age, and he became a sailor like his dad. But then her husband Jack passed away after six years of marriage.
So, now we’re in 1803. And Ona, the whole thing, like you needed the two incomes to get by in this situation, in this world that they were living in. So, she didn’t have the income to support herself and her three children. And so, she turned to her friends, Jacks family, and they were the ones who she hid with the first time that George Washington sent somebody to send her down. She went to the Jacks family again, and this time to the extent that she moved in with them. And so, they were a free Black family as well. And I believe that the patriarch of that family had died. So, it’s just kind of like women supporting each other, helping to raise all their children. Ona Judge, by now, is around 30 years old. And so yeah, just kind of cohabitating, kind of like in the TV show, Family Matters, just adults with various children who belong to different ones of them, all just kind of like raising each other. There’s a grandma there too, no Steve Urkel allegory.
But then over the next 10 years, like, it became financially unfeasible for her to continue to support her children because society was not there to support a single free Black woman in this situation. There was not enough support there for her, especially without another income, without a husband. So, in 1816, her two teenage daughters, Eliza and Nancy, were sold into indentured servitude, which is like what Ona Judge’s biological father had been, where you just… Unlike enslavement, this is where you have a certain term, you say it’s, like, one year or six years or whatever. And you just agreed to be a servant for that period of time in exchange for money. So, in exchange for food and shelter, her two daughters went to do this and around the same time, this is probably when her son William went to sea as well.
So, everybody in the Jacks household, the Staines-Jacks household, were just, like so many of us are now today, just trying to make money every which way you can. So, they tried to bring an additional income however they could. Both of her daughters were known for their artistic ability and sold sketches to wealthy families. I would love to know if any of those are still around, maybe in somebody’s attic somewhere. But I think that’s sort of lovely that Ona’s mother, Betty, had been this really skilled embroidery person, like a seamstress, dressmaker. And then Ona was also doing that sort of work as well, like sewing and stuff. And then her daughters are artistic in this other way of drawing, just to sort of see the familial connection.
So, the daughters, neither of them ever married and eventually, they moved back in. And so just like the Jacks and the Staines women were just doing odd jobs, domestic work, literally any side hustles they could figure out to bring in additional income. Her oldest daughter, Eliza Staines, died in 1832, aged 34, from an illness, oldey-time illness. Nancy, her younger daughter died one year later. So, Ona was now in her late fifties. Her son, if William was still around, he was off being a sailor. Both of her daughters had died.
During this time, like, in her time as a free person, she’d learn how to read and write, and she became a very religious person. She became a Christian. She explained later that when she was living with the Washingtons, they didn’t teach her, she was not provided with an education, whether a religious education or just reading, writing, and math, she didn’t get any of that. But then she took that upon herself to learn these skills. And her Christianity became really, really important to her. And I also see some connection between that and the fact that it was this Reverend, Reverend Richard Allen, who had been so foundational in helping her to escape as well, if she felt sort of like a connection, if she saw the Christianity, like the power of that through him. And presumably, her faith helped her through this time of, you know, having so many financial troubles, of her two daughters dying. She said in an interview later on, “The ability to read the Bible and participate in religious events made [her] wise unto salvation.” So, I would hope also not just her faith, specifically giving her that sort of inner strength, but also being part of a church community and having the support from other people around her.
I do love that in the same interview, which I’m going to explain what the interviews were, but in one of them, just speaking of religious stuff, she threw some shade at George Washington in this interview. She said she had never heard him pray. She said, “Martha Washington used to read prayers, but I do not call that praying.” So, she was just kind of saying, like, the two of them were actually not actually religious, which is very interesting to me because of the way that the United States government and the Founding Fathers, and it’s all, even today, it’s still so connected with, like, the government and Christianity are so co-mingled. Like in the Peggy Shippen episode, we talked about Benedict Arnold, it’s like “He sold his soul to the devil by turning against George Washington,” and stuff. So, the fact that George Washington himself wasn’t even particularly religious… notable.
So, what are these interviews I’m talking about? In 1845, Ona was interviewed for The Granite Freeman, which was an abolitionist newspaper. So, this is leading up to… Because slavery was slowly abolished between the time that she was enslaved up until the time she did this interview, more and more places in the North were abolishing slavery, but the South, it was still happening, and that’s what would lead up to the American Civil War of the 19th century. So, Ona Judge was interviewed by Reverend Thomas Archibald for this newspaper and this article appeared on the 49th anniversary of her escape. She was in her early seventies at the time she gave this interview and at this point, she no longer feared being returned to Martha Washington’s heirs. Like, she was able to speak out and discharge Washington basically with impunity. So, this is where we got a lot of her first-person information. This is why we know more about her than any of the other Mount Vernon slaves because she shared her story in this way.
So, she gave that interview in 1845. Two years later, 1847, she gave another interview for The Liberator, the leading abolitionist newspaper of the era. She was asked in one of these interviews if she regrets running away, as she had seemingly laboured so much harder since she left enslavement, just how physically demanding her work was as a domestic servant. And then everything that happened, just like, struggling financially, her daughters dying, everything. It’s like, “Do you regret having run away?” And she replied, and I’ll quote her words, “No, I am free and have I trust been made a child of God by the means.”
So, she died on February 25, 1848. As Erica Armstrong Dunbar wrote in her book, “Ona Maria Staines was carried away, not by slave catchers, but by her God.” I didn’t want to… I really want to focus this, these episodes on Ona herself. But the book really talks more about what happened to her sister, Delphy, AKA Philadelphia, later on, which is like she also eventually was freed. She also got married, she also had children. So, while Ona’s children died, her siblings had children and so her lineage lives on in those ways. She never saw her sister or her family again and that was a great sadness for her. But that trade-off of being free was worth it for her. But Erica Armstrong Dunbar writes in the book about how Ona Judge probably would have found such comfort and solace in knowing that her sister eventually also got to live this free life.
So, talking about her legacy, visitors to Portsmouth, New Hampshire can learn about Ona on tours hosted by the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire. And there’s also, you can get a tour of Langdon House, which is where the Senator Langdon lived, which is part of the historic New England, I guess, you know, the houses that are maintained. On June 19, 2021, Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the emancipation of Black enslaved people in America, a Virginia State historical marker honouring Ona Judge was unveiled on Mount Vernon Memorial Highway near the Mount Vernon Estate in Fairfax County, Virginia. As of April 2024, Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire announced they will be unveiling a new mural commemorating Ona Judge Staines on its Portsmouth, New Hampshire headquarters as part of a local history through art initiative.
Speaking of arts initiatives… So, I was looking up to see how she’s being commemorated, which is like increasingly more, especially since 2020, I think. Well, I guess she’s being commemorated more especially since maybe 2000 and it’s been picking up a bit more steam as more people hear about her story, especially after this biography was published. So, there is a memorial for her in Philadelphia that is commemorating the enslaved Black people who lived with the Washingtons in Philadelphia and it’s at this site called President’s House. So, most of the information I got about this was from Hidden City Philadelphia website, and I’ll put the link to that in the show notes because there’s lots of details there.
So, this house where this memorial was is now on the site of the Masters-Penn Mansion, which is the house where also Benedict, Benedict Arnold and Peggy Shipman had lived. And then George Washington and Martha W lived there with their nine enslaved people. And then after he stopped being president, the next president, John Adams also lived there. So, it’s called President’s House because two presidents live there. This house itself is eventually torn down. But in 2000, plans were set in motion to build a huge, new almost, like, campus comprising all kinds of memorial things to lots of American Revolution-era stuff, specifically a new building to house the Liberty Bell, which is this bell that is important to American history. So, when they were like, okay, “We’re going to dig up the site, we’re going to move the Liberty Bell into this new building, here.” And as they were doing that, they did an archaeological sort of like investigation to see like, “Well, what’s underneath here?” And so, they found that part of the site of the new proposed Liberty Bell building was on top of the footprint of the slave quarters that George W had commissioned when he lived in that house. And so, Ona herself had lived in the bedroom with one of the grandchildren, Moll, the other woman, enslaved person did also. But there were other enslaved people too. So, when George W moved into that house, he had commissioned slave quarters to be built to house his enslaved stable workers, as well as the white coachmen. So, I guess near where the horses were.
Anyway, so this became an important thing in the news of the era. People from Philadelphia who were around then maybe heard about this. So, construction was underway, but it’s like, “Ooh, we’re building this new building for the Liberty Bell on top of the George Washington, like, the slave quarters that he had commissioned. You know, we’re making this thing to like celebrate America and freedom, but also, it’s on the site of where George Washington built slave quarters, next to the house where he lived with enslaved people.” So, construction was underway… I’m going to try to share the story involving just as many of the names of historians as I can because this is part of— I find this really exciting. It really shows the power of history and of historians and how the present and the past really coexist together.
So, a historian named Edward Lawler wrote an article about, like, “Hey, so they’re building this new place for the Liberty Bell and FYI, just so you know, like part of where it’s going is on top of where George Washington built slave quarters.” And a certain amount of people read that history journal that he published that in and they were like, “Oh, eugh! This is kind of a bad look, isn’t it?” Word spread and so some people started asking the planners of this project, which is called, the overall thing is called Independence Park, is the whole sort of campus of historical buildings. And they were like, “Hey, do you want to incorporate maybe like an interpretive display into the Liberty Bell building to just sort of be like, ‘Oh hey, where you’re standing is where George Washington had slave quarters built because he kept enslaved people’?” And the Independence Park planners were like, “No, because this is the Liberty Bell building and we don’t want to, you know, confuse people by also talking about slavery. So, why don’t you build like a slave interpretive center, like 800 miles away in some other city?” And they were like, “But isn’t the whole history of America fundamentally connected to enslavement? And isn’t it sort of like whitewashing to not talk about it?”
Another historian, Gary Nash, spoke about this whole thing on a radio show and then more people heard about it. Public reaction was swift and angry. Gary Nash was one of the people who founded a group called The Ad-Hoc Historians, which was a group of scholars from the Philadelphia area and the purpose of their group was to incorporate slavery history at this site and to not pretend that that wasn’t there. So, this group advocated the National Park Service to acknowledge the connection between slavery and the Liberty Bell site. Simultaneously, this is like some scholars, academics, historians doing this, but at the same time, a powerful grassroots movement developed just like among the Black community in Philadelphia.
So, an attorney named Michael Coard formed a group called Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, ATAC, who pushed for a plan to recognize the lives of the enslaved at this site. He put together a petition with 15,000 signatures that they gave to the Independence Park Project team, urging them to build a memorial at this site to commemorate the enslaved people who lived with George Washington. And so, it started being an annual thing on July 3rd because July 4th is, like, Independence Day, is that what it’s called in America? July 3rd, there would be every year demonstrations at this site led by the ATAC, just to sort of, like, keep the pressure going to say like, “We need to remember this history and you need to commemorate it. Don’t build this site pretending like you’re not building on top of literally the slave quarters.”
Thanks to the ongoing years-long efforts of the academics, activists and journalists, pressure mounted to the point that the Philadelphia City Council and the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed resolutions and that just sort of forced the National Park Service to come up with a plan. In 2003, the mayor at that time, John Street, announced that the city would dedicate money to build a slavery memorial at this site. And the new park superintendent, like the previous one was just, like, not on board, but a new person and ally, Cindy MacLeod, was on board with this as well. So, they looked to find who would they hire. I think first they hired a firm to do the monument, and they had a reveal of these plans to the, you know, interested parties, like largely the Black community of Philadelphia, who are all just like, “No thanks, not a fan of that.” So, they went back and called for different options. And ultimately, a Black-owned architecture firm, Kelly Maiello, won the competition to design this new monument. The monument is so interesting looking, just from the pictures I’ve been looking at. So, it’s called President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation. It was designed by Emmanuel Kelly.
And so, what it looks like… It looks like a house, but just sort of like the outline of a house, like, there are walls, but they don’t really connect so you could walk in and out, in and around it. So, it’s described as:
An open-air pavilion that shows the outline of the original buildings and allows visitors to view the remaining foundations. The memorial was a joint project of the City of Philadelphia and the National Park Service.
And so again, like honestly, just like, look up pictures of this, I’ll post a link to it on Instagram. It’s just a really interesting, it’s sort of… It’s an outside thing. And it’s a house, it looks, I think it’s like red bricks, it’s kind of like part of a wall, but then a big space and then the next part of a wall. So, you can really walk on almost like a maze. So,
The innovative monument broadly represents the structure and dimensions of the President’s House, the Masters-Penn mansion and features reenactments displayed on video monitors perched above brick walls resembling fireplaces.
So, these videos, one is about Ona Judge, for instance, and these were written by Lorene Cary and filmed by Louis Massiah. And just at the, on one side of it, there’s sort of a big concrete wall, I guess monument, sort of a big wall. And the name of Ona Judge and the other eight enslaved people who were enslaved there are all carved right into the walls, you can see their names. And I think this is so lovely; there are some bronze footsteps embedded in the stone floor of the memorial, which symbolizes the brave escape of Ona Judge. They’re sort of, like, feet the size of what her feet probably would have been like. In 2020, ATAC founder, Michael Coard, reflected on the 10th anniversary of this monument, saying “There’s nothing more productive than telling the truth about the sad past in order to lay the foundation for a happy future.” And, you know, on this podcast, we talk about so many people and some of them are commemorated via tombs or monuments or things. Most of them aren’t. And this one I think is such a lovely tribute to Ona Judge, but also just representing all of the enslaved people whose stories we don’t know as well, and their importance, and how there was so much… How their impact and their lives were not discussed and not shared and not talked about for such a long time.
So, before we get to the scoring, we have, if you’re new listeners of the podcast, on the show, we often have the stories of people who are just kind of on their own and struggling and no one ever really helps them. So, in the rare instance where I get a story where somebody, like, has a friend, somebody actually helps them out, we commemorate that by giving an award. So, the first award is the Lady Jane Seymour Memorial Award for Outstanding Supporting Performance. And that’s for someone who just, like, really has somebody’s back. The higher honour is the Jewelled Tortoise Award for legendary ally or friend behaviour, for somebody who’s just, like, truly ride or die for one of these people.
I have to give the Jewelled Tortoise Award to basically everybody who helps her escape. Richard Allen, the free Black community of Philadelphia, to the guy who piloted the ship called Nancy, all the people in Portsmouth and in Greenland, the clerk who gave them the marriage license, the guy in the house, the Langdon House, who overheard that she was going to be taken and then he spread the word. The way that this community wrapped itself around her to protect her and to allow her to continue living life as a free woman, I think it’s so powerful and so important and I’m really glad that she, there was this community who really, like I said, just really wrapped themselves around her and looked out for her and really allowed her to live this life she wanted to live. So, everyone else in this list is, like, a person’s name, but I’m just going to say [typing on keyboard] “Everyone who helped Ona Judge escape/the free Black population of Philadelphia and New Hampshire.” Just typing it into my document because it’s official because they, I love, I love that and they kept supporting her as best as they could. But just the way that she wanted to escape, she let them know and then they arranged it all for her. It’s just, it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful. I love that that was there for her.
So, in terms of this podcast, I always score the people we talk about in four different categories. The categories were chosen. I mean, it’s just sort of a fun way to wrap up an episode, but it’s also a way to… Different people thrive in different ways and so everyone does well, almost everyone does well, in at least one of the categories. It’s rare people get high scores in all the categories. So, let’s just see how Ona Judge is going to do.
Already it’s hard for me because the first category is Scandaliciousness. And this is about a person who causes a scene, who the people in society are like, “Herman, my pills!” And I think, like, just being a Black enslaved woman who escaped was scandalous, was very shocking to people like Martha Washington. So, that’s scandalous. But at the same time, it’s reasonable and heroic, like, to the people who are helping her. Like, she wasn’t causing scandal for the sake of just being, like, a wild and crazy person, she just did a thing that was sort of unexpected to some other people. I’m going to give her I think a 5. A 5 out of 10 for Scandaliciousness because escaping is inherently, it was a very scandalous, dangerous thing to do. A lot of people were shocked by what she did, confused, and she did it without the help of the insane French boyfriend. But also, I feel like her whole life, she just wanted to be free. And then when she was, she was a wife and a mother, and she went to church. Like, she was… I don’t think she would want to be thought of as a scandalous person. And I don’t think she was in any other way.
Schemieness, I’m going to give her a 10 out of 10. Schemieness, in the context of this podcast, it’s a word that sometimes has a negative connotation, but here it’s always positive. It’s just a person with a plan, a person who sees what’s going on and can sort of adapt and be flexible about it, but also who literally comes up with a plan. And while she had lots of helpers to, you know, book the ship and stuff, she was the one who figured out, like, did she talk to Richard Allen when he was there with his chimney sweep business, or when she was going to his like shoe shop? Like, the way that she made that contact, let them know that she wanted to do this. But then also the schemieness of once she’s left on her own, you know, when Jack was off at sea, and then Burwell Bassett Jr. came by and she’s just like… The way that she outsmarted the guy with the fake job interview, the way that she just refused to go with him. And then she just, like, peaced out and made herself vanish, like, super schemey. She was, she was going to do whatever it took to achieve a free life and to stay in it.
Significance is also with her, a multi-layered thing. Like, I think she’s very significant in the sense of, hers is the only story we know this much detail about of an enslaved person at the Mount Vernon Plantation, which is significant because that’s where George Washington lived, and he was the first President of America. Her narratives in these abolitionist newspapers were significant because that just kind of helped people to better understand what slavery was like and to get people to join the cause to end slavery. So, they’re significant in that way. Like, the fact… The monument that there is, like, the plaques about her and stuff. Like, I think she’s so like she’s significant on her own, but she’s also significant in a representational way of, kind of, all of the enslaved people whose stories we don’t know. And many of them also escaped and we don’t know the stories and lots of them weren’t able to escape. And so, she just, because we know as much about her as we do, because she gave these interviews, because there’s records of letters and diaries and the newspaper advertisements and stuff, she becomes significant on her own, but also just representing all the people whose stories are not known in this way. Anyway, I’m going to give her 10 for Significance. I think she’s a hugely significant figure and I hope that her story gets more and more widely known.
The fourth category that I score everybody on is the Sexism Bonus, which is where I consider how much did living in a patriarchy, how much did sexism get in the way of her thriving and reaching her full potential? And this is all tied together because it’s, like, the méssage noir situation, it’s like racism plus sexism, like, that’s specifically faced by Black women. For her, like it’s just interconnected in this, you can’t disconnect the two things. I will say, like, looking at her husband’s life, you know, there’s still… In terms of opportunities for black people in let’s say New Hampshire in 1800, Black men had a bit more option of jobs they could do like he could become a sailor, which was pretty well paid. Black women, a bit less options of what sorts of jobs like often it is, it’s sort of like domestic work, enslaved people, not that there were enslaved people in New Hampshire very much, like, no options at all. So, she had a bit less options by virtue of being a woman. The sorts of jobs that she did when she was enslaved were gendered. And then she also faced the risk of sexual violence to a greater extent than the male enslaved people did, I would presume, not that Ona Judge, as far as we know, encountered any of that specifically, but that was always sort of a threat. That was always a thing that could happen to her. I mean, I think, all in all, I’m going to give her a 5. Like, we’re just looking at sexism, it’s a 5. There was so much stacked against her in all of society, but I don’t… Sexism was not the major one.
So, when we add this all up, she gets a score of… 30 altogether. And to compare that to other people on our list. I’m just curious, especially people whose stories are similar or just other people from, like, Black history or American history. So, a score of a 30. The Queen of Sheba, legendary figure from African history, has a 31 so I like that she is sort of adjacent to that. Nefertiti from Egyptian history has a 31.5. Just looking around here and with a score of 30, there was a woman who I did a couple of years ago in the Internationale season named Rani Didda, who was a queen in, like, medieval India, basically, I guess, Kashmir technically, who was… people didn’t expect her to thrive as much as she did, but she did. So, this is where she lands. In terms of American history, Louisa May Alcott has a 29. Like, I feel like this is the neighbourhood where it’s kind of people who are not specifically scandalous people, but they’re just kind of people who own their life story and did what they did. Deborah Sampson/Robert Shurtleff has a 28.5, in terms of people around in the American Revolution era.
And then, because you might have forgotten, but I never do, that this season is technically, How Do You Solve A Problem Like Marie Antoinette? Like, overall, what we’re doing in this part of the season is we’re building up the world, the world of revolutions that are happening in the 18th century to ultimately build up to the French Revolution and what happens to Marie Antoinette. And so, that’s why I have a segment this season called Nothing But Net, where I like to see how do the people we talk about, how are they connected to Marie Antoinette by how many degrees of separation. And this one, you might have forgotten. In Part One of this Ona Judge saga, when she was living, I think at the President’s House and she was in charge of watching over the grandchildren, Nelly and Wash. Nelly was interested in music and she had a music tutor for a while named Andrew Reinagle, who was an accomplished musician himself, who had hung out with Mozart back when he was in Europe. Mozart knew Marie Antoinette. So, from Ona Judge, and Reinagle, Mozart to Marie Antoinette, that is, I believe, three degrees of separation of Ona Judge to Marie Antoinette. You know, I feel like these stories, they must be so different, they must be so separate. But in fact, at this time, especially between America and France, like, there are so many connections between people.
Anyway, Ona Judge, an icon, a legend. I’m really glad that I learned about her, and I have been so excited to share this story with all of you and I’m glad I finally got to.
—————
So, I do need to let you know something. This is the end of Season Seven, Part One. This is not the end of Season Seven, far from it. There are going to be… I’m not going to tell you how many parts there are going to be to Season Seven, but we’re going to take a little pause, we’re going to take a little moment. We’ve been doing all this American Revolutionary talk and Americans, I know that there are many of you out there listening and I’ve talked about your history now and now we are going to move on to talk about other things.
Season Seven, Part Two is called “Meanwhile, Back in France” and we’re going to be looking at France. I’m going to dust off my Jerry Orbach as Lumière from Beauty and the Beast French Accent because there are some words I’m really excited to say. We’re going to be looking at France in the next part, but that’s not going to be right away. In fact, next week, well honestly, I mean like let’s be real. I try to always be transparent with all of you about what’s going on and what’s happening. But, like, the real talk is like I have a full-time job, and I am doing these podcasts every week, and I am writing a book, and I am, as you listen to this, currently on a much-needed holiday, which is actually a research trip. So, like, is it a holiday?
Anyway, we’re going to be in reruns for a little bit, but I really love this. We’ve got such a deep archive of episodes. I mean, I’ve been doing this show for almost five years, and I really like being able to dust off those old episodes and kind of revisit and, like, reconsider things like the scores that I gave when the show was starting, and I had less people to compare against other people. And so, we’re going to be playing a classic episode next week, which was the first episode of Season Two. The theme of that was “Women Leaders and the Men Who Whined About Them,” pertinent in this current political climate. Perhaps men have been whining about women leaders since, as we’re going to see, Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Roman days. That’s right. We’re going to be revisiting Cleopatra next week and I do think her score bears revisiting. So, that’s what we’re going to be looking at next week.
But you know, I have things to tell you. We’re not just going to leave you like that. So, one of the things I’m going to tell you is that I am on this trip, on this research/fun trip. And if you want to keep up with what I’m seeing and doing, I’m posting blogs and vlogs and all kinds of things for free on my Patreon page, which is Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. If you want to see me visiting Holyrood Palace and seeing Rizzio’s death bloodstain, seeing the portrait of Frances Howard at the National Portrait Gallery in London, seeing llamas in Germany, you can see all that stuff there, and it’s entirely free. You just have to become a member to see those posts. So, go to Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter or open, I think, just the Patreon app on your device and then you can also just look me up there. There’s a link in the show notes so you can see all that stuff and vicariously enjoy my trip along with me.
I also have a Substack, which is a newsletter where every week I post an essay about women from history. It’s VulgarHistory.Substack.com. If that’s your jam, if you like reading essays, if you want to see what my writing is like, if you’re like, “Ann Foster, you’re writing a book. What will that be like?” You’ll get a good hint by looking at these essays.
You can also support the podcast on Patreon, pivoting back to Patreon. Again, if you become a member for free, you can see all of my travel blogs and things. But if you’re there and you want to stick around, you’re like, “Oh, you know what? Like, I would like to stick around here a bit more in a financial way.” If you pledge at least $1 or more a month, you get early, ad-free access to all episodes of Vulgar History. If you pledge $5 or more a month, you get the early, ad-free access as well as bonus episodes of Vulgarpiece Theatre, which are two-to-three-hour long episodes where myself and friends of the podcast, Allison Epstein and Lana Wood Johnson talk about various costume dramas. Our discussions get heated, and it’s always a good time. There’s a really good archive of past episodes there. But also, we’re going to be doing new episodes soon, TBD, stay tuned. I’m a little busy. But once I have time, we’re going to meet back up and do some more of those. There’s also episodes you can access at that $5 or more a month level, So This Asshole, where I just talk about shitty men. Anyway, that’s all happening at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter.
And we also have, if you’re like, “While I’m listening to podcasts, I like to wear beautiful jewellery.” Guess what? We’re brand partners with Common Era Jewellery. So, Common Era Jewellery is a woman-owned small business that makes beautiful jewellery inspired by women from history and also from classical mythology; they make beautiful pendants, they make beautiful rings. They make them in solid gold, as well as in more affordable gold vermeil. 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. We’re talking, I mean, next week, I don’t know, I usually like to tease, but I’m literally telling you what’s happening next week. Next week, we’re talking about Cleopatra. There’s a Cleopatra pendant, there’s a Cleopatra, I think ring you can get from Common Era if you’re so moved after listening to that story, you just want to, like… Honestly, it’s dangerous for me because… Dangerous in the sense of like, whenever I revisit these stories, I’m like, “God damn it, I love these women!” Then look up to be like, “Is there a Common Era necklace of that woman?” And then I’m just like, “Ohhh, should I get it?” Anyway, CommonEra.com/Vulgar or use code ‘VULGAR’ at checkout when you’re buying your beautiful jewelry from Torie, which is the name of the owner of that company.
You can also support this podcast by buying Vulgar History merchandise. We’ve got T-shirts, we’ve got stickers, we’ve got mugs, we’ve got travel mugs, we’ve got (in one design) an apron, that’s the Peg Plunkett design. I went a little wild with choosing what options I wanted for the Peg Plunkett because I just started imagining everyone in her establishment would have this design on. So, I was like, “Yeah, the apron! Peg Plunkett’s chef would wear one.” Anyway, you can get merch at, if you’re in America, VulgarHistory.com/Store. It takes you to our TeePublic store, which is great. You can choose which design you want on what sort of thing and ship it to yourself in America for affordable shipping. If you’re outside the US, Redbubble is what I would recommend. So, VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com, and it’s the same thing, you just choose a design you like and decide what you want to put it on, like a pin or a magnet or a sticker. Yeah. We do have some Season Seven merchandise up there. We have Public Universal Friend’s, catchphrase, “The friend hath need of these things,” on a tote bag. We also have the Peg Plunkett design, the Irish pub theme designed by Karyn Moynihan, who was also our guest for the Peg Plunkett episode. And if you have suggestions for other Season Seven merch, let me know. I mean, the next part we’re getting into France. And I just think, like, there’s going to be some good ideas I bet you’re going to have for some French-themed, French revolutionary-type merchandise.
You can get in touch with me if you have comments or feedback or suggestions or whatever. If you go to VulgarHistory.com, there’s a little button there where you can email me. And you can also send me a message, my DMs are open. I’m on Instagram and Threads @VulgarHistoryPod. Anyway, I’m also, as you listen to this, enjoying a really fun trip and I’m excited to tell you all about it on the podcast when I get back.
Anyway, until next time, all my friends and next time again, Cleopatra comin’ at ya! 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
—
Sign up for updates on the Vulgar History meet-ups in Edinburgh and London!
—
Get 15% off all the gorgeous jewellery and accessories at common.era.com/vulgar or go to commonera.com and use code VULGAR at checkout
—
Get Vulgar History merch at vulgarhistory.com/store (best for US shipping) and vulgarhistory.redbubble.com (better for international shipping)
—
Support Vulgar History on Patreon
—
Vulgar History is an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which means that a small percentage of any books you click through and purchase will come back to Vulgar History as a commission. Use this link to shop there and support Vulgar History.