The President’s Slave Escaped To NH – Senator Langdon Helped Her Stay

by Robert Hanaford Smith, Sr.
Weirs Times Contributing Writer

It was during the year 1799 when President George Washington learned that his wife’s nephew, Burwell Bassett, Jr., was planning a trip to Portsmouth, New Hampshire as the guest of Senator John Langdon. Washington had a friend in the Senator and special interest in the city of Portsmouth at that time.
One of his slaves, or, more accurately, one of Martha Washington’s slaves, had left their home and fled to Portsmouth. Moreover, it wasn’t just any slave, but a girl who had lived and slept in their house as Martha’s personal attendant since she was about ten years old and was given privileges that most slaves didn’t enjoy.
She was one of seven slaves that the Washingtons had taken with them to New York and later to Philadelphia when he became the first President of the United States of America. While living in the President’s house in Philadelphia, the female slave, Ona Judge, made friends with some free African Americans living in the city.

It was while they were at Philadelphia that Martha Washington’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Custis, was married to Thomas Law, and Ona heard that she was to be given to Elizabeth as a wedding present. Ona, or Oney, as she was usually called, was said to have detested Elizabeth Custis. That was a factor in her decision to run away from the President’s household. She later would say that while the Washingtons were packing for a trip to Virginia “I was packing to go.”
On May 21,1796 Oney slipped out of the house while her owners were eating their dinner and, with the help of some friends, escaped. After an unknown amount of time she made her way to the waterfront docks where Captain John Bowles, who was sympathetic to the abolitionist cause, and runaway slaves, welcomed her as a passenger on his ship, and they sailed to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. There Ona Judge found a home among a community of free African Americans.

George and Martha Washington posted a notice in several newspapers, asking for the return of Oney Judge. They couldn’t believe that the household slave that they considered themselves to have treated like a daughter could have left them by her own choice. Somehow they believed that a Frenchman had seduced her, and that she was in danger. Someone reported seeing Ona in New York, and then see was seen in Portsmouth by a friend of the family, Elizabeth Langdon, the daughter of the Senator, who informed the Washingtons that their runaway slave was there.
Word was sent to William Whipple, the customs officer in Portsmouth, asking him to capture Oney and return her to her home. When Whipple was able to talk with Oney and learned that she had not been seduced, but had left and sailed to Portsmouth by her own choice, and did not want to go back, he would not take her by force. Instead he persuaded her to agree to go back if the President and his wife would promise that she would become a free woman after they died. Washington wouldn’t agree to those terms and Oney wouldn’t go back.
So we return to Burwell Bassett, Jr.’s effort to return Oney to Mount Vernon.
By this time Oney had married a free sailor by the name of John Staines and already had the first of the three children of which they would become parents. Her husband was then away somewhere on the sea. Bassett was able to talk to Oney and try to persuade her to return with him voluntarily. She refused, saying, “I am free and choose to remain so.”
In keeping with his instructions Bassett informed his host, Senator Langdon, as they dined together, that he would use force to take Oney back to her owners. It is said that Senator Langdon then left and warned Oney of his guest’s intentions, and told her she needed to leave Portsmouth that night.
Years later Oney would tell the story of what happened that night.
She went to a stable where she hired a boy with a horse and carriage to take her to Greenland, New Hampshire to the home of a free black man named John Jack. She stayed there until her husband returned from his time at sea. They apparently made their home at Greenland for the rest of their lives and apparently neither the Washington or Custis families bothered them again.
Ona Judge had been born at Mount Vernon to an African-American slave named Betty and an English tailor by the name of Andrew Judge. Judge was an indentured servant of the Washingtons, meaning that they paid for his passage to the American colonies and provided his board and room in exchange for his work in making uniforms and other clothing for a period of four years. Oney, however, was then legally considered property of the Washingtons because her mother was a slave. At the age of ten she was moved into the Washington’s household as a maid for Martha, and perhaps as a playmate for her granddaughter. She was somewhere between fifteen and twenty years of age when she decided she would seek her freedom.
For forty years Oney Judge Staines apparently lived a quiet life in Greenland. After her husband and three children had died and she felt that she had no longer to fear being claimed as someone’s property, Oney told her story.
She was never taught to read or write at Mount Vernon, but taught her self to do so after arriving in New Hampshire. In an interview she said that when she heard Elias Smith preach in Portsmouth she was converted to Christianity. The interviewer observed, “She and the woman with whom she now lives (Nancy Jack) appear to be, and have the reputation of being imbued with the real spirit of Christianity.”
The Rev. Benjamin Chase, who visited the women wrote: “These women live in a rather obscure place, and in a poor, cold house, and speak well of their neighbors, and are probably treated with as much kindness and sympathy as people are generally in their circumstances; but not with half as much as it is the duty and interest of people, in better outward circumstances, to treat them.”
Living as a poor elderly woman in Greenland, NH, Oney Judge Staines was asked if she was sorry she had left the Washingtons and she said “No, I am free, and have, I trust been made a child of God by the means.”
She died at perhaps age 75 on Feb. 25, 1848.
The Rev. Chase made this comment on John Langdon’s intervention on Oney’s behalf: “Langdon was guilty of a moral violation of the Constitution, in giving this woman notice of the agent being after her. It was frustrating the design, the intent of the Constitution, and he was equally guilty, morally, as those who would overthrow it.”
Yet he also had high praise for the slave woman who benefited from Langdon’s actions.