Books Reviewed:
Title: Escape from the Presidential Palace: The Washington Couple's Hunt for Slave Girl Ona
Author: Erica Amsterdam Dunbar
Translator: Li Dan
Publisher: Peking University Publishing Co., Ltd.
Publication date: January 2022
On May 21, 1796, the first president of the United States, George Washington, was having dinner at his home. The family's black slave girl, Orna Judge, escaped from the U.S. presidential palace in Philadelphia at the time.
On the third day, officials at the U.S. presidential office ran an advertisement in a local Philadelphia newspaper describing Ona Judge's appearance, offering a $10 reward for seeking slave catchers to bring her back.
George Washington was a founding father who was highly deified and sanctified in American history, and his political status was far from being comparable to that of his colleague Jefferson and others. At first, Washington and others led the colonies to oppose the British monarchy, using the grounds of refusing to be enslaved and seeking freedom, but European historians later found that the British North American colonies rebelled, and the more important reason was that the British king and the British government began to hinder the white colonies from expanding their territory by conquering the Native American tribes, and strictly controlled trade imports and exports to combat smuggling, which made the colonial elite more or less involved in smuggling and piracy feel strongly dissatisfied.
In terms of private morality, Washington has long been portrayed by american history and political science circles as a quasi-saint with an indifferent desire for power, an open-mindedness, and a high degree of self-discipline and law-abiding. Is this really the case?
George Washington himself was a Virginia serf owner, keeping several black slaves. According to the laws of slave states at that time, black slaves not only could not unilaterally release their slave status, but also the children they gave birth to would automatically become slaves. Moreover, not only could black slaves not resist the sexual assault of their masters, but even ordinary whites who worked for their masters could take advantage of it. Ona Judge herself was the half-blood daughter of Andrew Judge, a white Englishman, and Betty, a black slave.
After the Washington family moved to Philadelphia, they began to face a very difficult problem, that is, in 1780, pennsylvania, where Philadelphia is located, had abolished slavery, and even black slaves legally owned by people in other states could apply for freedman status after living in Pennsylvania for more than half a year.
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, an American historian and professor of history at Rutgers University, said in his book Escape from the Presidential Palace: The Washington Couple's Hunt for The Slave Girl Orna, that Washington adopted a way to circumvent Pennsylvania law, that is, to let those black slaves who followed them into Philadelphia and lived in the presidential palace return to Virginia's manor every time they were about to complete six months of residence, so that they could not meet the threshold of the free man's time limit for half a year.
When Leung Kam-song was appointed Treasurer of The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China, he had bought a private car before the tax reform was introduced — even if Leung did have the idea of tax avoidance (although not in terms of his assets and income status), it was no different from Washington's circumvention of Pennsylvania law. After the incident was exposed, Leung Jinsong apologized to the public and donated an additional part of the price difference alleged to avoid taxes, but eventually left his job.
In other words, Washington's above-mentioned approach, even if it does not involve procedural violations, crosses the bottom line that as a U.S. federal leader, it should abide by federal and state-level laws. Considering that the center of the American system of government lies in the union of states and states, this transgression is no less than the destruction of the U.S. Federal Constitution.
It is also interesting that Washington himself, although a serf owner, in the American political circles at that time, endorsed the idea of progressive abolition, that is, the idea of abolitionism, but did not advocate immediate implementation. Such political gestures stand in stark contrast to their own actual practices. It is likely that the U.S. government was based in Philadelphia (and previously in New York), and the political atmosphere in New York and Pennsylvania was one of immediate abolition and political equality, so Washington, as president, probably just adopted the idea of gradual abolition to package itself.
After Ona Judge escaped, the Washingtons tried to retrieve him by various means. In The Escape from the Presidential Palace: Washington's Pursuit of Her Slave Daughter Ona, it is explained that Orna Judge chose to flee because Washington's granddaughter was about to marry and have a child, and Mrs. Washington intended to transfer Orna to her granddaughter, who was known for her misconduct. Moreover, Ona worries that, given washington's debauched name, she could well repeat her mother's mistake of being abused by whites and giving birth to children who repeat their slave fate.
It should be noted that Ona Judge was quite intelligent, brave, and meticulous, and she planned her escape carefully, and before she fled, she approached the "Free Blacks" group in Philadelphia, and fled by boat to New Hampshire, a place more than 300 miles away from Philadelphia, to find a job as a free black maid— a profession that was much harder than babysitting for the president and his wife, but which could give Ona Jatch the freedom.
The Washington couple never imagined that Ona Judge would be able to escape so far—whether it was Washington or Jefferson, the founding leaders of the United States collectively had different degrees of discrimination against black people, and did not believe that black people could have the courage and wisdom to deal with such a complex challenge. So, the Washington couple initially thought that Ona Judge had been abducted by someone else (so he characterized the incident as having his own property stolen).
Crises remain inevitable. Ona Judge meets a guest in New Hampshire who once hosted a guest at the Presidential Palace: the daughter of a family from Washington. So, in September 1796, Washington learned of the location of the escaped slave girl and decided to bringona Judge back in various ways through local customs officials—but out of discrimination against Ona Judge's intelligence, Washington, in entrusting the matter, still claimed that she must have been abducted. So, when customs officials meet with Ona Jaci, who tells the truth about his flight for freedom, the former essentially abandons his efforts. After all, their country was said to have sacrificed to get rid of British slavery and freedom, so how could the president be so brazen and stubborn in advocating his right to enslave others!?
Orna Judge later married another free black man and gave birth to her own child. But Washington, who has stepped down and is at the end of his life, is still obsessed with recourse to fugitive slaves. In 1799, he used his wife's nephew to come forward and found Ona Jaci, who was alone in the care of the children. But Orna Judge still refused the former president's call and fled to surrounding towns before Washington's wife and nephew could use force. In December of that year, Washington died.
Ona Jachi lived much longer than both the former president and his wife. In the book Escape from the Presidential Palace: The Washington Couple's Hunt for Slave Girl Ona, it is said that in 1845, the elderly Orna Jachi was interviewed by an abolitionist newspaper in the name of Mrs. Stans, and after she was freed, she lived a life of poverty, but she had no regrets. Her story of battle had a huge impact, at least at the time—the blacks were told that even the most eminent and great people in Washington could not enslave blacks. Although, Ona Judge's story was quietly ignored by generations of American historians after the Civil War.