Celebrate Black History Month By Learning About George Washington’s Horrible Attempts to Recapture A Runaway Slave

Another Example of White History Trumping Black History

George Washington has been elevated to god like status in American History.  But there is nothing god like and a lot Satan like in his treatment of Ona Judge, a 20 year old woman who was enslaved on his estate and who escaped putting her freedom above all else. From the NYT.

It’s always 1799 at Mount Vernon, where more than a million visitors annually see the property as it was just before Washington’s death, when his will famously freed all 123 of his slaves. That liberation did not apply to Ona Judge, one of 153 slaves held by Martha Washington.

But Judge, it turned out, evaded the Washingtons’ dogged (and sometimes illegal) efforts to recapture her, and would live quietly in New Hampshire for another 50 years. 

Yes, Washington is always lauded for freeing his slave, but not of course until he was dead and did not need them.  But there would be no freedom for Ona Judge. In a forthcoming book

Ms. Dunbar describes how the Washingtons quietly maneuvered around Pennsylvania’s 1780 gradual abolition law, rotating their slaves in and out of the state every six months. And she recounts their shock at the “ingratitude” of Judge, who fled “without any provocation,” the president wrote.

After hearing that Judge was in Portsmouth, Washington, offering a story that she had been “enticed away by a Frenchman,” discreetly sent a federal customs officer to bring her back, circumventing procedures laid out in the 1793 fugitive slave law he himself had signed.

Here is some visual, some ugly visual documentation.