2020-2021 Historic Marker Project

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I nominate Ona Judge Staines for a PHMC historic marker because of the significance of her story, revealing the nature of race, enslavement, the beginnings of America’s federal government, and the limited power of the chief executive under that government, all of which played out while Pennsylvania hosted the nation’s capital. While a resident of the commonwealth for only a few years, her escape from enslavement has profound meaning for visitors – real and virtual – to America’s most historic square mile. Judge’s enslavement and escape reveal core historical truths about 1790s Pennsylvania and some of the most significant legal issues of that time and place.

Background of Project

I began the #RememberTheWomen project in the fall of 2016, just after the majority of Americans voted for a woman to be the next president of the United States, but during a period in which some Americans still asked “Is America ready for a woman to lead them?” Women have played vital roles in American society and culture since our colonial beginnings. I thought – as a white man – that I could and should help raise historical understanding as well as a reimagining of the historical landscape, to tell the story of women, their accomplishments, their ideas, and their lives.

I began this project by asking the PHMC review panel a question that continues to nag me: “What if Shakespeare had had a sister?” the query Virginia Wolf raised a century ago. I wrote: “That quotation, along with her equally wise ‘For centuries, anonymous was a woman,’ allows us to focus on a core fact of literary history: women’s writings were private, often ignored, discarded, deemed insignificance. Scholarship in the last fifty years has sought to correct this gross omission. Within this transformation, women’s writings, many of which survive only in unpublished manuscripts or anonymous brief published passages, have emerged as cornerstones of the world of letters. Within historical studies, many of these women’s writings are now seen as the essential sources to comprehend historical moments, idea, and developments.” Commissioner Nancy Moses summed up the need for expanded interpretation of women’s history at our dedication ceremony, when she related that only 6% of current PHMC Markers celebrate women.

Not every reviewer was immediately enthusiastic about my nomination of Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker, Quaker diarist, for the first of these PHMC markers; in the months that followed the levels of support widened and grew. We received letters of support from some of the outstanding historians of American women’s history, as well as members of the general public and the Pennsylvania public history community. When approval came, I decided to tackle one more challenge: rather than seek corporate or organizational major support, we began a crowdsourcing campaign, using social media to raise funds to pay for the PHMC marker, reaching heretofore untapped audiences that included Drinker descendants, lovers of women’s history, supporters of historic preservation, and the husband of a current presidential candidate. The funds allowed for the quick ordering of the Drinker Marker, as well as a day of scholarship and celebration when it was installed in November 2019.

One issue did arise in these days and led me to make a pledge that I fulfill in nominating this marker for 2020: “Why did you choose a white, wealthy woman for the first of the #RememberTheWomen nominations?” I vowed that next, I would nominate Ona Judge, who was from a vastly different social status in the same world and time of Elizabeth Drinker.

Why Commemorate Ona Judge, and Her Escape?

None of us who have reached a certain age learned the name of Ona Judge in school; no courses covered her life and work prior to the historiography of the last few decades. But as we have come to think more expansively as well as accurately about the nature of society during America’s founding and the complex, changing role of enslaved labor in that time. Pennsylvania’s pioneering legislation in abolishing slavery has been celebrated for years, but the full nuances of that story have not fully explored until very recently.

Remembering Ona Judge Staines with a PHMC marker fulfills a critical role in expanding the narrative of the interpreted spaces of Pennsylvania, telling the representative story of Judge’s struggle for liberty in a city where thousands remained enslaved. She was not alone in her desire for freedom or in her attempt to escape, but her enslavement by America’s first first couple allows us as historians to know more about her life, her words, and her actions. 

Where millions of voices were silenced by enslavement, Ona’s words survive, including an 1845 interview in which she related “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. I had friends among the colored people of Philadelphia, had my things carried there beforehand, and left Washington's house while they were eating dinner.” (“Washington's Runaway Slave”, The Granite Freeman, Concord, New Hampshire, May 22, 1845; carried at President's House in Philadelphia, Independence Hall Association.).

Judge’s personal decision to escape slavery set off what could have become a constitutional crisis that rivaled Marbury v Madison.  A family friend spotted her in New Hampshire, reported her whereabouts to the Washingtons, and they attempted to secure her recapture and return. Such actions were not at all unusual for the Squire of Mount Vernon and his Lady; indeed, enslaved people were property in their eyes, and George Washington had used his status and power before to re-enslave freed laborers, as related by Judith Van Burkirk in her seminal study of Revolutionary New York. But in the case of Ona’s recapture, federal officials refused to accede

to the president’s request. Washington told Treasury Secretary Oliver Wolcott to arrange the capture and return. Wolcott passed along the order to Joseph Whipple, keeper of customs at the Port of Portsmouth. Instead of immediately following presidential directives, Whipple interviewed Ona Judge, and informed his superiors that the recapture could incite public outrage or riots. 

Washington responded with a level of anger that he often held in cases where he saw his right to enslave people: “I regret that the attempt you made to restore the Girl (Oney Judge as she called herself while with us, and who, without the least provocation absconded from her Mistress) should have been attended with so little Success. To enter into such a compromise with her, as she suggested to you, is totally inadmissible, for reasons that must strike at first view: for however well disposed I might be to a gradual abolition, or even to an entire emancipation of that description of People (if the latter was in itself practicable at this moment) it would neither be politic or just to reward unfaithfulness with a premature preference [of freedom]; and thereby discontent beforehand the minds of all her fellow-servants who by their steady attachments are far more deserving than herself of favor.” (Washington Papers, November 28, 1796). 

Weeks away from the end of his presidency and return to Mount Vernon, Washington did not opt to use the courts to recapture Ona Judge under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. 

Why a PHMC Marker

The placement of the Ona Judge Marker will allow historians and the public to continue and expand on recent decades’ expansion of the history of American freedom and enslavement, and to place this woman more fully within the public historical imagination, both through the text of the marker and a proposed Behind-The-Marker website, such as we are currently creating for the Elizabeth Drinker Marker erected in 2019.

George W. Boudreau, Ph.D.

RTW Project Director

2019

 Ona Judge(c. 1773-1848)Born at Mount Vernon in Virginia, she was brought to Philadelphia as the enslaved laborer to First Lady Martha Washington in 1790. In learning she was to be given away as a wedding present, Ona fled the President’s House, just east of this spot, on May 21, 1796 and with the assistance of the city’s African American community she escaped to New Hampshire. Federal officials’ refusal to help George Washington re-capture her was one of the first tests of presidential power under the U.S. Constitution. She lived the remainder of her life a free woman