Washington [523]
The protracted hunt for Ona Judge began when a young woman, Elizabeth Langdon, who had befriended Nelly Custis, spotted her in Portsmouth. When Langdon realized that Martha Washington was nowhere to be seen and that Judge had escaped, she asked Judge, “But why did you come away? How can Mrs. Washington do without you?” “Run away, misses,” Judge replied. “Run away!” said Langdon. “And from such an excellent place! Why, what could induce you? You had a room to yourself and only light nice work to do and every indulgence.”“Yes, I know, but I want to be free, misses; wanted to learn to read and write.”48 Ona Judge, who had stored up grievances that Martha Washington could little comprehend, afterward complained that she had “never received the least mental or moral instruction of any kind, while she remained in Washington’s family.”49
After Judge was spotted, Martha pressured her husband into wielding the powers of the federal government to recapture her. She felt miffed by Judge’s flight and could never understand why blacks felt no gratitude toward lenient masters. As she once wrote to Fanny, “The blacks are so bad in their nature that they have not the least gratitude for the kindness that may be showed to them.”50 Since the Treasury Department ran the customs service and had officers in every major port, Washington wrote confidentially to Secretary Wolcott, asking for aid. He explained that Judge’s escape had “been planned by someone who knew what he was about and had the means to defray the expense of it and to entice her off, for not the least suspicion was entertained of her going or having formed a connection with anyone who could induce her to such an act.”51 Abusing his presidential powers, Washington instructed Wolcott to have the Portsmouth customs collector kidnap Judge and send her back to Virginia: “To seize and put her onboard a vessel bound immediately to this place [Philadelphia] or to Alexandria, which I should like better, seems at first view to be the safest and least expensive [measure].”52 Perhaps contributing to Washington’s vigilance in hunting down Judge was that she was a dower slave, which meant that he would have to reimburse the Custis estate for her loss.
As with runaway slave ads, Washington struggled to confine knowledge of the situation to Virginia and keep it from carping northern abolitionists—hence his preference for whisking Judge off to Alexandria. Dreading publicity, he also convinced Martha that it would be unwise to post a fugitive slave notice. He apologized to Wolcott for the trouble he was giving him “on such a trifling occasion, but the ingratitude of the girl, who was brought up and treated more like a child than a servant (and Mrs. Washington’s desire to recover her) ought not to escape with impunity if it can be avoided.”53 That the Washingtons faulted Judge for “ingratitude” and pretended that she was like a daughter again shows the moral blindness of even comparatively enlightened slave owners. Judge’s flight belied whatever sedative fantasies the Washingtons might have had that slaves developed familial relations with their masters, transcending the indignity of bondage.
The Portsmouth customs collector, Joseph Whipple, tracked down Judge and, to lure her aboard a ship bound for Virginia, cooked up a bogus story about employing her to work for his family. Then something unaccountable happened: Whipple engaged in conversation with Judge and discovered that “she had not been decoyed away, as had been apprehended, but that a thirst for complete freedom . . . had been her only motive for absconding.”54 Remarkably, Judge said that she was prepared to return to servitude, but only if her emancipation were guaranteed at a later date. In Whipple’s words, “she expressed great affection and reverence for her master and mistress and, without