Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (4 page)

“Since the publication of the Roberts Commission Report,” California governor Culbert Olson declared on January 27, “[the people of my state] feel that they are living in the midst of a lot of enemies. They don’t trust the Japanese, none of them.” Buried in the report, and unmentioned by Olson and like-minded politicians, was the fact that the U.S. soldier who led the raid on Niihau to hunt down Nishikaichi was a Japanese American lieutenant named Jack Mizuha. Mizuha went on to serve heroically in the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team, one of the most highly decorated units in American military history.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the internment of 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent, many of them American-born citizens. The Niihau incident was not solely responsible for the order, but it galvanized the public and fortified Roosevelt’s decision to uproot thousands of families from their homes for the duration of the war.

Exactly thirty-four years after Executive Order 9066 was issued, the federal government began making amends to those who were forced into the camps. “We now know what we should have known then—not only was that evacuation wrong, but Japanese-Americans were and are loyal Americans,” President Gerald Ford stated in Proclamation 4417. On August 10, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act into law, officially expressing regret for the government’s
actions and appropriating $1.2 billion in monetary reparations ($20,000 each for all surviving detainees) to be disbursed over ten years. Presidents Bush and Clinton included a signed letter of apology with the payments sent during their respective administrations.

While Niihau’s far-flung location is one of the primary reasons the Niihau incident hasn’t garnered more attention, its association with a dark moment in American history is responsible as well. And this notion—of shameful events intentionally being relegated to the most distant regions of the nation’s collective memory—would take me back to the East Coast, 5,500 miles away.

UNLIKE THE THOUSANDS
of slaves who would escape from plantations and manor houses in the years and decades after her, Ona “Oney” Judge did not flee across moonlit fields chased by dogs or wade through dark, waist-high swamps teeming with water moccasins and
alligators. No, Judge simply walked out of her master’s Philadelphia mansion on High Street as he and his family ate supper. She had even packed a suitcase. But by stepping through the white-columned doorway and into the bustling city, America’s capital at the time, Judge became one of the earliest and boldest pioneers of the Underground Railroad.

In the May 24, 1796,
Pennsylvania Gazette
, a notice announced Judge’s disappearance. “Absconded,” it declared,

The exact day that Judge left Philadelphia aboard a northern-bound sloop named
Nancy
and landed in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, isn’t known. She had no family or friends there but assimilated quickly into the town’s free black community. Judge herself, however, was in no way free; because of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, she lived in constant fear that at any moment she could be snatched up by slave hunters. Within two months of her escape, that threat became all the more imminent.

“Oney!” a voice called out as Judge was walking in Portsmouth’s Market Square. She turned and there was Bets Langdon, the teenage daughter of Senator John Langdon, an old family friend of Judge’s master. Her identity was revealed.

“Why, Oney,” Bets asked, knowing that slaves rarely traveled alone, “where in the world did you come from?”

“Run away, missis.” Judge saw no point in lying.

“Run away! 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 wanted to be free, missis.”

Judge knew that word of her whereabouts would quickly get back to Philadelphia, and she could only brace herself for the consequences.

“Are you allergic to poison ivy?” Vicky Avery asks me as we tramp through a wooded area between the intersection of Dearborn Road and Martin Brook in Greenland, a small town that borders Portsmouth. I look down and notice clusters of a three-leafed plant brushing against my bare ankles.

“I had a pretty bad case as a kid,” I reply with some concern. “Doesn’t everyone get a rash if they touch it?”

“Only certain people. Well, I guess you’ll know later,” Vicky says, moving briskly ahead of me.

A local historian who’s lectured and written extensively about Judge and other slaves in the region, Vicky is also a busy mom raising three young girls (she drives her fourteen-year-old daughter four hours, every weekday, to dance with a ballet company in Maine). And yet she’s gone out of her way to educate me about Ona Judge and is interrupting a packed schedule to show me spots relevant to Judge’s life in Portsmouth and Greenland.

As we’re walking, I explain to Vicky that, in all of my preparations for this cross-country trip, few stories have intrigued me more than fugitive-slave accounts. To set out alone, as thousands did, often carrying with them nothing at all, knowing they would be hunted, entrusting their lives to strangers along the way, and recognizing that if caught they risked a savage beating, if not death, represents a courage beyond all measure.

Those who fled did not just fly impulsively into the night. They
plotted and planned, some devising clever schemes to evade their pursuers. In 1848 an elderly gentleman named William Johnson, his head wrapped in a bandage and his right arm in a sling, boarded a train in Georgia with a male slave to seek medical treatment in the North. In fact, they were both slaves; William Johnson was a frail, light-skinned woman named Ellen Craft, and her manservant was her real-life husband. They made their way to Pennsylvania and then Great Britain, which had abolished slavery in 1833. After the Civil War they returned to the States and founded a school for young African American children in Georgia, not far from their master’s old plantation.

On March 29, 1849, Henry “Box” Brown famously shipped himself in a wooden crate from Richmond to Philadelphia, barely surviving the twenty-two-hour ordeal.

John Fairfield, a white man born into a slaveholding family, became a staunch abolitionist renowned for his creative tactics. He once dressed as an undertaker and conspired with more than two dozen slaves, all posing as mourners carrying a corpse (who was very much alive), to embark on a “funeral march” to freedom.

And in the early-morning hours of May 13, 1862, a twenty-three-year-old South Carolina slave named Robert Smalls boarded a Confederate gunship,
Planter
, docked outside the Charleston quarters of General Roswell Ripley while the general and his crew slept onshore. Smalls had served as the ship’s deckhand and was able to fool the Confederate sentinels along the coast by blowing the correct whistle signals at every station. After sighting the USS
Speed
, which almost fired on him, Smalls raised a white flag and proudly “surrendered” the
Planter
to the Union vessel. Smalls was hailed as a national hero, earned the rank of captain in the U.S. Navy, and was elected to Congress after the war.

Although Judge’s flight from Philadelphia wasn’t as harrowing or elaborate as other escapes, by remaining in New Hampshire she was publicly defying the most powerful and admired man in the country. Her master had won the War of Independence, helped craft the Constitution, and, among many other legislative acts, signed the fugitive
slave law into effect inside the very house from which she had run away.

Ona Judge’s master was the president of the United States, George Washington.

As a dower slave, Judge legally belonged to Washington’s wife, Martha, but the president was for all intents and purposes her owner as well, and he was adamant that she be returned to him. The situation, though, had to be handled delicately.

“Enclosed is the name, and description of the Girl I mentioned to you last night,” President Washington wrote to Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott on September 1, 1796. “She has been the particular attendant on Mrs. Washington since she was ten years old; and was handy and useful to her being perfect Mistress of her needle.”

Having heard through the political grapevine that Ona was in Portsmouth, Washington asked Wolcott to enlist the aid of New Hampshire’s collector of customs, Joseph Whipple, whose brother William had signed the Declaration of Independence.

“What will be the best method to [retrieve her], is difficult for me to say,” Washington continued in his confidential letter to Wolcott:

Joseph Whipple was eager to please the president and, under the pretext of offering Judge employment, convinced her to meet with him. After talking with the young woman at length, however, he became
genuinely moved by her desire to be free. She remarked that she’d never been mistreated by the Washingtons but was opposed, not unreasonably, to being enslaved for the rest of her life. In fact, Judge surprised Whipple by offering to return to President Washington if he would promise to manumit her upon his death. Whipple was relieved to have struck a compromise and communicated Judge’s proposal to the president.

The commander-in-chief was not in the habit of negotiating with slaves and upbraided Whipple for even considering her offer. “I regret that the attempt you made to restore the Girl should have been attended with so little Success,” Washington replied frostily. “To enter into such a compromise with
her
, as she suggested to
you
, is totally inadmissible.”

Making matters worse for Washington was that by December 1796, Judge was engaged to Jack Staines, a sailor of mixed race who had fought in the Revolution. Any hope of delivering Judge back to Virginia against her will and without “exciting a mob or a riot—or creating uneasy sensations in the minds of well disposed Citizens,” as Whipple humbly (very,
very
humbly) wrote to Washington on December 22, was complicated by this new state of affairs. To prove his fealty to the president, Whipple persuaded the Portsmouth town clerk to deny Judge and Staines their marriage license.

The couple simply applied for one in a nearby town, Greenland, where it was granted, and they wed in January 1797. Judge gave birth to their first child, a baby girl, that summer.

By then Washington was a former president, having retired to his beloved Mount Vernon, and Judge believed that at long last she could achieve some peace of mind.

She could not. In the fall of 1799, almost three and a half years after abandoning Philadelphia, Judge received a visitor traveling through Portsmouth on business. He was Martha Washington’s nephew, Burwell Bassett. Judge’s husband was out to sea, leaving her unprotected and alone with their daughter. (Because Judge was a fugitive slave, the child was born a slave, too.) At first Bassett tried flattery and persuasion,
entreating Judge to move to Mount Vernon with the Washingtons. She held firm: No.

Bassett left but disclosed to his Portsmouth host later that night his intention to abduct “[Judge] and her infant child by force” if necessary. Aghast, Bassett’s host secretly relayed a message to Judge that she was in grave danger. Judge went into hiding, and Martha’s nephew returned to Virginia empty-handed. Judge’s guardian angel was Senator John Langdon, whose teenage daughter had bumped into Judge three years earlier and inadvertently blown her cover.

George Washington passed away just months after Bassett’s visit, and with his death all attempts to cajole or capture Ona Judge finally ended.

Judge died a widow in 1848, alone and impoverished. Before passing away, she was asked by an abolitionist newspaper reporter if she ever regretted relinquishing the relative comfort of the Washingtons’ presidential mansion for the hardships she’d later face. “No,” Judge said. “I am free and have, I trust, been made a child of God by the means.”

Vicky and I step over a trickling creek and approach two squat rock walls shaped like an
L
, the last remnants of the property boundary in Greenland where Judge and Jack Staines made their home. About a hundred feet away is her grave marker, now just a nub of gray stone poking through a thin carpet of red pine needles on the forest floor. There’s a sense of privacy and serenity to this spot that befits a woman who wasn’t seeking acclaim or recognition but only to live her life, marry, and worship as she chose.