THE WORLD OF ‘NEVER CAUGHT’
Portsmouth, N.H., once gave refuge to George Washington’s runaway slave
The Governor Langdon House on Pleasant Street in Portsmouth, N.H. Langdon’s daughter, Elizabeth, recognized Ona Judge on the street and reported this to her father (then a US Senator), who dutifully notified President Washington. The house is a National Historic Landmark.JAMES F. LEE
By JAMES F. LEE
Globe correspondent,Updated December 5, 2019, 6:00 a.m.
On the evening of May 21, 1796, Martha Washington’s enslaved servant, Ona Judge, slipped out of the presidential mansion in Philadelphia and sought sanctuary within the black and abolitionist community. With their help, she escaped aboard a ship bound for Portsmouth, N.H.
The Washingtons were furious. Two days after her escape, they put an ad in local newspapers offering a $10 reward for her return.
I first learned about Ona Judge by reading Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s biography of Judge, “Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge.” Born on the Mount Vernon plantation, Judge was the daughter of a biracial woman and a white man. Because of her skills as a seamstress and her light skin, Martha Washington chose Judge to be her personal servant. During Washington‘s term in Philadelphia, she accompanied the president’s wife to official functions, on social visits and shopping trips, assisted her in hosting social gatherings at the President’s House, and cared for two of the Washingtons’ grandchildren. She lived in a gilded cage and yearned to be free.
The African Burying Ground Memorial in Portsmouth, N.H. This sculpture by Jerome Meadows features a man on one side and a woman on the other, their hands almost touching. JAMES F. LEE
Judge risked everything in her quest for freedom, not only severe punishment if caught, but she also made the difficult choice to leave her younger sister, Delphy, behind at Mount Vernon. As Dunbar put it, “the beast that slept in every slave’s soul was awakened.”
My wife, Carol, and I journeyed to Portsmouth to see what remained of Judge’s world. At the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire offices on Court Street, we signed up for a walking tour, “Lives Bound Together: The Washingtons & Ona Marie Judge in New Hampshire,” and with several other participants met our guide JerriAnne Boggis and intern Jubilee Byfield.
Portsmouth was a seafaring town, tiny compared to cosmopolitan Philadelphia, with a small free black community and a relatively small number of enslaved people. Today, narrow streets, not much more than lanes, lined with 18th- and early-19th-century houses once occupied by captains, shipwrights, carpenters, and tradesmen, look much as Ona Judge would have seen them. She supported herself here by hauling water, ironing, and doing laundry and cooking, far different from her life as the enslaved servant of Martha Washington.
Our first stop was the waterfront where Judge landed in Portsmouth, free for the moment from the Washingtons but never safe from slave catchers. Boggis explained that many Portsmouth sea captains were slave traders, carrying human cargo wherever it sold.
“We participated in the trade in every way possible, and Portsmouth became wealthy,” she said.
Not far from the waterfront, on narrow Hunking Street, we passed a dilapidated wooden Georgian-style house with three distinctive dormers projecting from a hip roof. This was Washington’s secretary Tobias Lear’s house, built in 1740. Lear no longer lived in the house when Ona Judge arrived in Portsmouth, but his family still occupied it. The house is included in the National Register of Historic Places.
Standing on tiptoe, I peeked inside the now-empty parlor room on the lower left where a crowd once stood in 1789 trying to catch a glimpse of President Washington bouncing little Lear children on his knee.
This private home was the residence of John Bowles, captain of the sloop Nancy that brought Ona Judge to Portsmouth, N.H.JAMES F. LEE
On Marcy Street, we climbed Meeting House Hill to the South Meeting House, an impressive Italianate structure with a clock tower and steeple, built in 1866. In Ona Judge’s time, the Old South Church stood on the same foundation. Just eight months after her escape from the President’s House, Ona Judge married Jack Staines here, a free black seaman, with whom she would have three children.
Around the corner on Washington Street is a yellow clapboard house once the home of John Bowles, captain of the sloop Nancy that brought Judge on her journey from Philadelphia to Portsmouth. Bowles risked a $500 fine and prison for aiding and abetting an escaped enslaved person. Some of us wondered: How could this be in a “free” state?
“They were all slave states,” said Byfield, the intern. Indeed, in New Hampshire, slavery was still legal during Judge’s lifetime. And it was true for the country as a whole, where the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, signed by George Washington in Philadelphia, was the law of the land.
After three months in Portsmouth, Judge’s greatest fear was realized. Elizabeth Langdon, the 18-year-old daughter of US Senator John Langdon, spotted Ona Judge at Market Square in the heart of Portsmouth and still very much the center of town today. Elizabeth was a close friend of Washington’s granddaughter, Nelly, and a frequent visitor to the President’s House in Philadelphia. Her father dutifully notified the president.
This street in Portsmouth, N.H, today looks much as it was in Ona Judge’s time.JAMES F. LEE
Over the next three years, three unsuccessful attempts were made by the Washingtons to get Ona Judge back. They failed in large part because the agents that Washington sent to retrieve Ona Judge pursued their quarry half-heartedly. Even Senator Langdon was ambivalent about her return. The last attempt was shortly before Washington’s death in December 1799. Despite his passing, she and her three children legally remained the property of the heirs of Martha Washington, who died in 1802. Ona Judge would look over her shoulder for the rest of her life.
Langdon’s grand Georgian mansion, which Washington visited in 1789, still stands on Pleasant Street and is a National Historic Landmark open for tours.
Judge eventually moved to nearby Greenland, N.H., living there for the remainder of her life in grinding poverty. Before her death in 1848, after outliving her husband and their three children, she told her story to two abolitionist newspapers. She didn’t regret her decision to escape, saying, “I am free and have, I trust, been made a child of God by the means.”
Today, Ona Judge lies buried in Greenland in an unmarked grave on private property. Boggis reminds us that Judge’s story is not unusual, despite the Washington connection. “It’s the story of the human desire for freedom,” she said. “That they [enslaved people] would go through anything to be free.”
“In the end, it’s a human story.”