Today, I'm Celebrating Oney Judge
Here's why you should, too.
I first learned about Oney Judge (sometimes spelled “Ona”), one of the more than 400 people enslaved by George and Martha Washington, on a trip to Mount Vernon about thirteen years ago. Before that, I knew next to nothing about George and Martha, beyond the fourth-grade mythmaking. You know, wooden teeth, cherry trees, “father of our country,” yadda yadda yadda.
As we walked through the old colonial home on the plantation grounds, the tour guide that day told us George and Martha had no children of their own, but that George had nobly "raised" Martha’s kids from her first marriage. I remember thinking, Wow, pretty progressive for the 1700s; way to go, George!
Then I looked into it some more, once I got home again.
Turns out it wasn’t enlightenment that inspire George to raise Martha’s kids. It was ruthless strategy and relentless white narcissism, the two things America is built upon and continues to be driven by to this day.
The Marriage, the Money, the Lies
Martha Dandridge was married off young, by her family, without her say, to Daniel Parke Custis, a wealthy, much older planter and slaveowner. That marriage wasn’t about love. It was about land and legacy. It was about Martha as almost-property herself. When Custis died in 1757, Martha, just 26, was left with four young children and massive wealth, including more than 17,000 acres and nearly 300 enslaved people.
Among them was a fairskinned woman named Betty, a seamstress. Betty was almost certainly the daughter of Daniel Parke Custis, the result of his rape of one of the enslaved African women on his plantation. That’s not speculation—that’s a historical pattern, and a consensus among scholars of American slavery.
That means when Betty, already half white, later gave birth to Oney Judge, her daughter by a white indentured tailor named Andrew Judge, the white-passing Oney was the literal granddaughter of Daniel Custis. And enslaved.
Let that settle in. Take as much time as you need.
The little girl George and Martha Washington enslaved was literally Martha’s step-granddaughter, and the biological niece of Martha’s daughter, also named Martha but called Patsy, who was close to her same age.
Philadelphia Changes Everything
At age 10, Oney was moved into the mansion to become Martha’s personal servant, right after Martha’s daughter Patsy died of epilepsy. Patsy died in Martha’s arms. Oney bore a striking resemblance to the deceased girl. So Martha dressed her up, doted on her, kept her close. Part slave, part doll, part replacement daughter. To me, this is one of the most fascinating relationships in American history, the one between Martha Washington and Oney Judge.
Oney was allowed to play with Martha’s children, and their friends. But she was not allowed to eat at the same table with them, nor allowed to attend classes with them in reading, Bible study or music. In fact, Oney was forbidden to read and told she could not be Christian because she was African. Martha likely knew her biological relationship to her own children, but never freed Oney. Never acknowledged what she was: family.
Meanwhile, George carried on the habit of raping slaves, just as Martha’s first husband had done. Martha was so distraught over his seeming total disinterest in her physically that she lamented in letters to friends about George’s preference for slave women. George was tall, athletic, considered handsome in his time, whereas Martha was dowdy and considered unattractive. He’d married her for her money and that was it.
When George became president, the family relocated to Philadelphia. Pennsylvania law at the time said any enslaved person living there for more than six months must be freed. So what did the Washingtons do?
They rotated their enslaved staff in and out of the state every few months to skirt the law. George Washington, the “father of our country,” used a legal loophole to keep teenagers in bondage. He and Donald Trump would have gotten along just fine.
But Oney was paying attention. She met free Black people in Philly when she went to the market to do the household shopping. They invited her to their church. She learned to read. She became a Christian. She read the Bible front to back and compared its messages to what she saw in the Washington household, and she was not impressed.
And when she overheard Martha planning to gift her to her granddaughter Eliza as a wedding present? That was it. She was done.
The Escape
On May 21, 1796, while the Washingtons were having another loud and drunken dinner, Oney Judge slipped out. She had friends—Black and white abolitionists—who helped her board a ship to Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
She was 22 years old. And she was free.
She married a free Black sailor named Jack Staines. They had three children. Her husband died at sea. She eventually lived in a small cabin in Greenland, New Hampshire—poor, but sovereign.
George and Martha never let it go. Martha complained in letters to friends that she felt Oney was most ungrateful, for “we treated her like family.” George launched multiple attempts to recapture her, using federal contacts and even attempting to kidnap her.
At one point, she was spotted by a U.S. senator in New Hampshire, who undertook to alert George. But that senator’s daughter, who had met and befriended Oney as a child, warned Oney, against her father’s wishes.
Oney went into hiding and never got caught.
“I am free, and have been so for nearly fifty years. I never would be a slave again.”
— Oney Judge, in an 1845 interview with The Granite Freeman
And She Told the Truth
In 1845, when she was in her 70s, a New Hampshire abolitionist newspaper interviewed Oney Judge. She’d outlived the Washingtons. Outlived slavery in the North. Outlived the lie.
When asked why she gave up “a life of comfort” with the Washingtons, she answered plainly: “Because I wanted to be free.”
She said she didn’t have much—but what she had was hers. And she didn’t hold back: She called George Washington debauched. Said he was not a real Christian. Described the Washington household as sinful and disgusting.
So, yeah, happy 4th of July. Remember this: The “father of our country” was not the noble hero you learned about. He was a striving jock who married an ugly girl only for her money. He raped enslaved women. And he used the power of his presidency to chase down a teenage girl who dared to say no.
This Is Who I Celebrate
This Fourth of July, I’m not celebrating powdered wigs and cherry tree lies. I’m not holding my heart for men who talked about liberty while chasing enslaved women through city streets.
I’m celebrating Oney Judge.
She is the step-granddaughter they called property. The fugitive they could never catch. The woman who gave up everything for true independence.
If you think America has “lost its way” in recent months, let me remind you: for people like Oney Judge, and people like me, it was pretty much never all that great to begin with.
The only way forward is to tell the truth.
And the truth is: Oney’s independence is the one worth celebrating, and emulating.
She stood up to a depraved president of the United States, and won.
Happy Independence Day.
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Thank you Alisa for telling Oney Judge’s story. It’s fascinating, and I’d never heard of it before. Women of color, Latinas and yes white women who dare to speak out against white supremacy are all met with brutal repression. My mother took her secret to her grave but I found it out later: As the oldest daughter of my grandfather, my mother was raped constantly by her own father, as well as her younger (half) sister, my older females cousins, my older half-sister and possibly me, too, but I was a baby and only have memories in my bones, that something terrible happened when I was a baby. Rape is a powerful tool of control, and incestuous rape is the most powerful of all, no matter your skin color. Rape and the power a man exerts over a woman by raping her lasts a lifetime, and leaves scars that most women, like my white mother, take to their graves, unspoken, lest they be further destroyed by trying to seek justice in an utterly unjust world. Thanks for telling the story of Oney Judge. I will celebrate her strength and freedom today, all future 4th of Julys.
Ms. Valdes-Rodriguez, I celebrate Oney Judge today. This is the first I have heard her name. Thank you for telling her story.
Their are many myths of American white exceptionalism. Thanks for busting another one and sharing our forgotten history. We are far from the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Much work on equality remains. Not only equality in pay, equality in opportunity, and equality in history telling.