Author’s Note: Courage rarely announces itself. It forms through risk, resistance, and consequence long before history chooses names to remember. The Courage They Didn’t Teach moves decade by decade from the mid 1700s onward, setting aside hero worship to focus on moments when retreat looked safer but resolve demanded sacrifice. Please note that, since these people weren’t readily celebrated, historical information may be light at times.
Each entry follows one life that faced danger, opposition, or erasure and stood firm without promise of reward. Some endured violence in the open. Others absorbed pressure in silence. Together, these stories show courage as a skill shaped under strain and refined long before applause, if applause comes at all.
Ona Judge Staines: 1774 – 1848
Most plants start out life lucky; they begin their life in rich soil, trimmed and tended, yet some push out under the fence, taking root where nobody planned. They grow without permission and hold fast when hands try to pull them back.
Early years at Mount Vernon
Ona Judge entered the world at Mount Vernon around 1774. Her mother, Betty, worked as a skilled seamstress within the Washington household. Her father, Andrew, served as an indentured laborer who left after completing his term. Ona grew up close to the main house, moving between small tasks and long days shaped by other people’s needs.
Ona was later described as “a light mulatto girl, much freckled” and “almost white.” Like many other slaves of mixed-race descent, she received a post in the household: at age ten, she became Martha Washington’s personal maid. Like her mother, Ona was skilled at sewing, “the perfect mistress of her needle.” Also, like her mother, Ona and her younger sister Delphy belonged to the Custis estate, and so would pass to Martha Washington’s heirs upon the latter’s death.
When Ona was about ten years old, Martha Washington selected Ona to serve inside the mansion. Training quickly followed: she learned sewing, hair care, and the constant attention of a personal attendant, a role that brought proximity to power but never protection from the system that defined her life.
Service in the capital
When George Washington took office as president, the household moved first to New York and then to Philadelphia. Ona traveled with them as one of a small group of slaves chosen for the presidential residence. Work expanded in scale but not in freedom: laundry, mending, dressing, and waiting filled each day.
Philadelphia offered something Mount Vernon never could: free black communities lived and worked in plain sight. Streets carried a different rhythm, one that didn’t require permission at every step.
Judge received nominal cash from Washington on several occasions to go see a play, the circus, and the “tumbling feats.” Her visible position in the household meant that she received a regular supply of high-quality clothing. Washington’s account book notes purchases for her gowns, shoes, stockings, and bonnets. The city’s large free black and Quaker abolitionist communities also offered the young woman new ideas, new connections, and new opportunities to escape.
Ona watched and learned; a different life stood close enough to touch, yet remained unreachable, so long as she stayed where she was placed.
A bold step to freedom
Plans were formed in 1796 for a return to Virginia, a move that would’ve sealed her future. Instead, Ona made her own plans: on May 21, while the household gathered for dinner, she left without announcement or second thoughts.
On May 21, 1796, enslaved maid Ona Judge seized her freedom from the President’s House in Philadelphia while George and Martha Washington ate dinner. Judge had just learned that Mrs. Washington planned to bequeath her to Eliza Custis Law, Mrs. Washington’s granddaughter.
In an 1845 interview published in the abolitionist newspaper The Granite Freeman (May 22, 1845), Judge says, “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.”
Members of Philadelphia’s free black community helped her reach the docks, where she boarded a ship bound for Portsmouth, N.H. Five days later, she stepped onto northern ground where slavery held no legal claim.
Ona had no money, no safety net, and no guarantee beyond her own decision.
Building a free family
As time passed, Ona found work as a seamstress and built a quiet life. In 1797, she married Jack Staines, a free black sailor, and together they raised three children.
Life is never easy; loss came early and often. Jack died in 1803, two of her children died young, and then poverty pressed hard.
Ona adapted, took in work, shared space with others, and learned to read. Faith and community filled gaps left by hardship. Each day carried its own weight, but those days were hers in ways her earlier life never allowed.
Facing pursuit from the past
Unfortunately for Ona, George Washington didn’t let the matter rest. He sent agents north and authorized notices offering rewards for her return. Pressure mounted through letters and intermediaries, and efforts to reclaim her continued after she settled into her new life.
Her friends in the free black community had already carried her belongings to the port and they were waiting for her when she arrived at the docks.
Two days later, Frederick Kitt, Washington’s steward, placed an advertisement in the Philadelphia Gazette chronicling the details of Ona’s escape:
Absconded from the household of the President of the United States. Oney Judge, a light mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes and bushy black hair, she is of middle stature, slender, and delicately, about 20 years of age. She has many changes of good clothes, of all sorts, but they are not sufficiently recollected to be described. 11
The advertisement also listed a $10 reward for her capture and return, and conveyed the Washingtons’ shock and outrage that Ona would escape: “As there was no suspicion of her going off nor no provocation to do so, it is not easy to conjecture whither she has gone, or fully, what her design is.”
Local officials in Portsmouth declined to force her return. Ona refused offers that required her to return without any guarantee of her full freedom. Another attempt came in 1799 through a relative of Martha Washington, yet local resistance blocked any seizure.
She remained in New Hampshire, outlasting all attempts to drag her back to Virginia.
Years of quiet strength
Ona lived the rest of her life in relative obscurity: working, raising children, and speaking plainly when asked about her choice. Comfort never tempted her decision. Freedom, even with hardship, stood above any promise offered from the life she left.
Ona Judge didn’t command armies or write laws; she made a single decision and carried it through every year that followed.
Upon the death of George and Martha Washington, her ownership, along with that of her children, transferred to the Custis estate forcing Judge to live the lived the rest of her life as a fugitive slave. During an interview with the Granite Freeman, an abolitionist newspaper, when asked if she regretted leaving the comfort of the Washington estate for her near-poverty conditions, she responded with, “No, I am free, and have, I trust, been made a child of God by the means”.
Oney Judge married John Staines on January 8, 1797. Together they had three children: Nancy, Eliza, and Will. She passed away at the age of 75, on February 25, 1848, in Greenland, New Hampshire.
One Judge died a free black woman in 1848.
The roots of that misplaced plant held. The ground changed, the seasons turned, and the hands that tried pulling her back never reached again.
Facing a hard truth: George Washington
If we replaced Washington’s name with anybody else, this would simply be a common story back around 1800. But clear history demands we keep George and Martha Washington’s names in the story of Ona Judge.
There are two sides to every story, and to stay true to the heart of this series, I wrote Ona’s side. The reason behind the Washingtons’ efforts to reclaim Ona is another story, to be shared at a different time.
But the focus behind this particular story remains on a single, black woman’s courage during a time when similar blacks were dragged back to slavery or worse.
Ona Judge chose a difficult life of freedom over a comparatively easier one. Her courage wasn’t the only thing that defined her. Her strength, and that of everybody who survived the early years of our republic, became the marrow in the spine that makes America strong.
Next up in the series: Richard Allen
Richard Allen began life in bondage and earned freedom through labor, discipline, and faith. He did not stop there. He built institutions that allowed black Americans to gather, worship, and lead without interference. His work shaped one of the first independent black denominations in the United States, laying a foundation that reached far beyond his own lifetime.
His path did not rely solely on escape. He stayed, organized, and built something lasting in a world that resisted both his voice and his vision.
Other columns in this series
