Ona Judge's Escape

Ona Judge, an enslaved seamstress and Martha Washington's personal maid, slipped out of the President's House at Sixth and Market Streets on 21 May 1796 while the Washingtons were at dinner, and never returned. She was one of nine people George Washington held in slavery in the house while Philadelphia was the capital: Austin, Paris, Hercules, Christopher Sheels, Richmond, Giles, Ona Judge, Moll and Joe. She later said she fled after learning that Martha Washington meant to give her to a granddaughter, Eliza Custis Law, because if she went back to Virginia she would never get her liberty. She had sent her belongings ahead to friends among Philadelphia's free Black residents, and reached Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Pennsylvania's Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 let an enslaved person brought into the state claim freedom after six months. In April 1791 Washington told his secretary Tobias Lear to send home any of his slaves who might qualify, under a pretext that might deceive both them and the public, and he kept rotating them out of the state to restart the count, though a 1788 amendment to the act had outlawed the practice.

Recognised in Portsmouth, Judge told the customs collector Joseph Whipple she would return only if promised freedom at the Washingtons' deaths, terms Washington called inadmissible. In 1799 his nephew Burwell Bassett Jr. came to seize her and her child, and a warning let her flee again. She married a sailor, Jack Staines, outlived her husband and her two daughters, and died a legal fugitive in Greenland, New Hampshire, on 25 February 1848.

Excavation in 2007 uncovered the house's foundations and Washington's bow window. The original open-air exhibit on the footprint opened in December 2010.