Andrew Judge

Andrew Judge was an indentured tailor at Mount Vernon, and his daughter escaped from George Washington. He was an English tailor who came to Virginia under indenture - a contract binding him to work for a term of years in exchange for the passage - and served it out on the Custis estate before working at Mount Vernon. Indenture was brutal and it was finite. A servant could be worked hard, sold on, whipped and had years added for running away, but the term ended, the contract was enforceable in a court he could reach, and his children were born free. That last clause is the entire difference. Indenture and slavery were not the same thing and the difference is the whole of what happened next. His term ended and he was free; the woman he had a child with, an enslaved seamstress named Betty, was not, and under Virginia law a child took the mother's condition. So Ona Judge was born enslaved to a free father, and belonged not to Washington but to the Custis dower estate that Martha had brought into the marriage - property her heirs had a claim on, which is why Washington could not have freed her even had he wished to. There is very little else about him in the record. He appears in estate papers, he seems to have remained in the neighbourhood, and he had no legal standing to intervene on his daughter's behalf at any point. She escaped from the president's household in Philadelphia in 1796, was pursued personally by Washington for three years through intermediaries and advertisements, was never recaptured, and died free in New Hampshire in 1848. He is in this corpus because the arithmetic of who was free and who was not ran through a single household and produced two different lives from one family.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history