Like their free counterparts, the family worked hard to scratch out a living with Jack Staines constantly at sea and Ona Staines most likely picking up domestic work while she cared for their small children. Their family was fragile as free blacks across the new nation found themselves only a few steps removed from slavery and poverty. Illness or the death of a loved one could completely change the life circumstances of a family teetering on the brink of survival. For women, the situation became even bleaker in the wake of the loss of a husband or son. And indeed, Ona Staines confronted this reality when Jack passed away.
Seafaring men risked their lives every time they left the docks, and illness was often the cause for many deaths on the open seas. Although Ona Staines did not leave personal testimony about the death of her husband, we know he was no longer a part of the Staines family after 1803. The circumstances of Jack Staines’s death—Was it protracted illness or sudden? Was it while he was at sea or in his own home?—remains a mystery to this day, but his death notice appeared in the New-Hampshire Gazette on May 3, 1803. The specifics are lost, but the endurance of his fugitive wife was not. After only six years of marriage, Ona Staines found herself alone with young children, with no one but herself to rely upon financially. Once again, she was reliant upon her network of friends to find a way to survive.
The Staines family lived close to neighbor John Bartlett, who offered the young widow a maidservant position. This form of employment would call for Ona Staines to live with the elderly Ann and John Bartlett in order to earn wages to support her young family. It is unclear but improbable that Staines was allowed to bring her children to board with her. In most cases women were forced to leave their children in the care of family members or friends for long periods of time. For Staines, this was too much to ask and eventually she turned to her friends, the Jack family, to save her.
The Jacks (as they were called by their neighbors and friends) was a free black household that had come to the rescue of the fugitive on at least one other occasion. In 1799 when Washington’s nephew, Bassett, came to Portsmouth looking to reclaim Mrs. Staines and to take her back to Virginia, the fugitive turned to this family for help. The Jacks lived outside the city limits of Portsmouth in a small cottage in Greenland, where they harbored Mrs. Staines and her toddler, Eliza. After Jack Staines died, she found herself calling upon them again for assistance. But this time it was at a juncture when the Jack family needed help themselves.
The matriarch of the family, Phillis Jack, had managed to turn her bondage into opportunity. For unknown reasons, Jack’s master, Deacon James Brackett, decided to let go of his human property sometime during the 1760s. With no raging abolitionist movement to propel him, we can only guess his reasons for emancipating a young slave woman before the Revolution. The only thing more startling than her freedom was the gift of land that accompanied it. Brackett gave his former slave a parcel of land and a small home that was surrounded by swampy wetlands. It wasn’t uncommon for slave owners to move bondwomen, especially those with whom they had an ongoing sexual relationship, out of their homes and into private dwellings. Slave owners built small cottages buried deep in the woods where they could keep their prized possessions out of view from jealous wives, all with the hope of easing marital tensions. Just how Phillis Jack came into her freedom, we don’t know, but her status as a free landholding black woman is notable.
Phillis Jack’s land lay close to the border between Greenland and Stratham, a location at the center of a property-line battle between the neighboring towns. Existing town records do not cite Phillis Jack as the formal owner of the property, but other accounts and eyewitness reports place the former slave and her family on this parcel of land. Residents of Greenland often referred to the stream that ran through the property as “Phillis’s Brook,” while less enlightened neighbors simply called it “Nigger’s Brook.”
The patriarch of the Jack family was enslaved for a much longer stint than was his wife, but he earned his freedom by his service in the Revolutionary War. Like many enslaved people, Jack was called many names, Jack Warner (after his slave owner), John Jack, Black Jack, and Jacks. His daughters would eventually use the surname Jack on formal records and accounts.
When Ona Staines turned to the Jack family again for help, they were themselves in dire straits. Matriarch Phillis Jack died in October of 1804, only a year after the death of Jack Staines, and poverty had already fastened its grip on the family. Although the former slave had found freedom and amassed property, her family had slipped into the ranks of the desperately poor. So impoverished, her family couldn’t even pay for an honorable funeral for Phillis Jack. This was the case for many free black families across the Northeast who simply could not afford the cost of a coffin or to hire professional grave diggers. Mutual aid organizations in cities such as Philadelphia and New York provided assistance to black families for this kind of need, however in Greenland, New Hampshire, no such organization existed. Private citizens stepped in to cover the cost of Phillis Jack’s funeral and to recognize her passing with the ringing of the town’s bell.
Ona Staines and her children eventually moved into the Jack home, fusing two desperate and grieving families into one. Close to thirty years old now, Staines was definitely capable of earning a decent wage, provided she had help raising her own small children. Living at the Jack home was the patriarch and his two daughters, Nancy and Phillis Jr. Like Ona Staines, the women were in their thirties. Similar to other struggling black families, they pooled their meager resources to stay afloat.
But over the next ten years it became nearly impossible for Ona Staines to support her children. In August of 1816, things were so bad for the Staines family that the unthinkable had to be confronted; Ona Staines would place her teenaged daughters into indentured servitude. Her two Northern-born daughters were bound out for a fee. Eliza and Nancy Staines went to work for Nathan Johnson, who lived about a mile away. In return for food and shelter, the sisters worked the fields and served the six members of the Johnson family. Nathan Johnson received thirty-five dollars from the town coffers for agreeing to provide food and shelter to the impoverished teenagers. Johnson was doing the town a favor by taking the teenagers into his home. They would no longer be reliant upon Greenland’s charity or considered a financial nuisance. Ona Staines said good-bye to her daughters, now indentured servants, who would serve out an eight-month contract. It was probably at this moment that her son, William, followed in his father’s footsteps and left home to look for wages as a sailor. He was only sixteen years old, but life in Greenland had become too difficult, and Ona Staines could do nothing to help. William left Greenland for new East Coast seaports and was never again recorded as a resident in New Hampshire. His mother’s depression must have been suffocating.
In April of 1817, the Staines daughters returned home, but Eliza, the eldest, didn’t stay long. The Johnsons expected Eliza Staines to serve them for an additional nine months, and this time, she would not have the company of her sister for comfort. As Ona Staines worried about her daughter, still caught in the unpredictable web of servitude, things grew even bleaker. The fall brought the typical cold weather of New England as well as the death of the Jack patriarch. Thirteen years had passed since the death of Phillis Jack, and neighbors came to the family’s aid when the family found themselves unable to pay for a funeral. When Eliza Staines returned in January of 1818, she came home to a house full of women trapped in poverty with very little chance of escaping it.
The women in the Jack household did odd jobs, domestic work, and anything that could bring in additional income. Both Nancy and Eliza Staines were known around the town for their artistic abilities, and as they grew into adulthood, they began to sell their sketches to wealthy Portsmouth families. The Jack sisters never married and neither did the Staines girls, leaving the five women to muscle their way through the early years of antebellum America. Little changed in their material lives as their small house began to show signs of aging. T
he women of the house were simply happy to have a roof over their heads; poverty’s roots were deep.
The 1830s tested Ona Staines in ways that were unimaginable. That her Northern-born daughters would die before her was a cruel twist of fate, another unfair and seemingly insurmountable blow. On February 16, 1832, Eliza Staines died at the age of thirty-four after a “long and distressing illness.” She was followed by her sister Nancy on September 11, 1833. Never released from the grasp of poverty, Eliza and Nancy Staines experienced lives that were filled with challenges, concerns about hunger, forced servitude, and the ever-present fear of slave catchers. Ona Staines did the best she could to raise her daughters, and now in her late fifties, she was, once again, alone.
It was her faith in God that carried Ona Staines through the most difficult times in her life. In her later years, Staines reminisced about her sojourn to Christianity and literacy, two silos that she encountered once she fled north. Staines recounted that she “never received the least mental or moral instruction of any kind, while she remained in the Washington family.” For many fugitives and former slaves, access to education and the ability to practice religion in their own ways were markers of freedom. By the 1840s, literacy rates among free African Americans were climbing, and Staines linked her newly found literacy to her religious practice, telling another interviewer that the ability to read the Bible and participate in religious events made her “wise unto salvation.” She questioned George Washington’s religious practice, prompting her interviewer to write, “She never heard Washington pray, and does not believe that he was accustomed to.” While there are many accounts of the first president attending church services, Staines questioned his devotion and did not leave Martha Washington out of her commentary. She stated, “Mrs. Washington used to read prayers but I do not call that praying.” It was Staines’s own strong connection to the church that prompted her to question Martha Washington’s religious integrity.
Ona Staines probably attended Reverend Samuel Haven’s South Church, the place where she married Jack Staines. But she was moved to join the Baptist denomination after hearing the sermons of Elias Smith, an itinerant preacher who traveled around New England during the 1790s, landing permanently in Portsmouth by 1802.
Once she moved in with the Jack family, Staines probably attended the Baptist church in Stratham, only a mile’s walk from her home. Decades later, it was this connection that brought Reverend Thomas Archibald to interview the aging fugitive. Archibald published this first interview on May 22, 1845, in the Granite Freeman, an abolitionist newspaper. The article appeared on the forty-ninth anniversary of her escape—almost to the day. With her children deceased, the elderly Ona Staines no longer hid from the spotlight. Now in her early seventies, the fear of being returned to the Parke Custis heirs had finally been vanquished. Her Granite Freeman interview appeared a week before the paper’s announcement of a new publication, a narrative written by a man named Frederick Douglass. It might not have been her intention to be grouped with other famous fugitives such as Frederick Douglass, but she was.
Two years later, on New Year’s Day, Ona Staines’s story appeared in the leading abolitionist newspaper of the era, the Liberator. Her name and life’s story were finally known to thousands of readers across the nation, permanently linking her to the crusade for black freedom in the years leading up to the Civil War. Interviewer Benjamin Chase, antislavery convention attendant and ardent abolitionist, was lucky to record his interview with Staines when he did. A little over a year later, in February of 1848, Dr. George Odell paid a call to the Jack household, where Ona Staines and Nancy Jack resided. Nancy’s sister, Phillis Jack, had died, so the two elderly women were left alone. Dr. Odell’s house call was most likely to treat an ailing Ona Staines, now close to seventy-four years old. But whatever cures or treatment he may have prescribed were unsuccessful. On February 25, 1848, eleven days after the doctor’s visit, Ona Maria Staines was carried away, not by slave catchers, but by her God.
Epilogue
* * *
Ona’s Sister: Philadelphia Costin
Washington, DC, in 1800. Published in 1834.
When Ona Staines was asked to reflect upon her escape, her interviewer put forth a question that could be asked of any successful fugitive who lived a life in the shadows. The interviewer wrote, “When asked if she is not sorry she left Washington, as she has labored so much harder since, than before, her reply is ‘No, I am free, and I have, I trust, been made a child of God by the means.’ ”
Although she never regretted her escape, she could not forget her family members who still lived at Mount Vernon. Leaving them behind was the greatest of sacrifices. The slave woman surely wrestled with her soul, thinking about the consequences of her actions and how they might place her family in harm’s way. How could her family ever forgive her for abandoning them? What would become of them? Instead of visualizing their anger and feelings of betrayal, she must have hoped for her family’s blessing, imagining them secretly cheering for her as she risked everything to find freedom.
Ona Staines would have no idea that the price of her freedom carried such a steep penalty for her loved ones, most specifically for her younger sister Philadelphia. Staines’s escape from a life under the scrutiny of Eliza Custis Law had unintended consequences, and Philadelphia ended up in the very position that Staines had refused to accept. Passed down to the volatile granddaughter of the Washingtons, Philadelphia found herself living the life that was intended for her older sister. The fugitive’s younger sister did what most enslaved people were trained to do—she survived the best she could. Philadelphia probably never believed that one day she, too, would be free.
When the Washingtons returned to Mount Vernon in the early summer of 1796 without Ona Staines, there was no way to prevent the rumors and gossip that spread like contagion through the slave quarters and the Mansion House. Her disappearance served as a reminder to all who labored at Mount Vernon that when given the right opportunity, freedom could be taken. Her departure must have earned her special acknowledgment, perhaps a hero’s recognition, among the Washingtons’ slaves. But no matter how proud or elated, the slaves at Mount Vernon had to suppress any expression of joy. Driven into the unspoken alcoves of their minds, the fugitive took her place among the fabled stories of other slaves who had risked everything for freedom. The enslaved Harry, Tom, and Will Shag were among the few bondmen at Mount Vernon who had gambled on escape; sometimes they found freedom but most often they met with capture and the auction block. Ona’s name was now firmly rooted in the legend of freedom makers.
Not everyone shared the hidden enthusiasm regarding the fugitive’s escape. Martha Washington was deeply disturbed by the abandonment of her slave, for not only did her bondwoman break the law by running away, she also destroyed the first lady’s plans of assistance for her newly married and now pregnant granddaughter. Martha Washington was forced to make new arrangements regarding Eliza Custis Law, and she turned to a young Philadelphia.
Only sixteen years old, Philadelphia was saddled with the responsibility of serving the new Mrs. Law. Perhaps Philadelphia had proven herself to be trustworthy and reliable and was therefore the natural replacement for her older sister. Or maybe, in a fit of anger, Mrs. Washington purposely selected Philadelphia to serve the new Mrs. Law, a duty that would require her to leave Mount Vernon and head for a new home in the Federal City. If vindictiveness was her motive, Martha Washington was successful. Philadelphia followed in her older sister’s footsteps, leaving behind the world she knew at Mount Vernon. Both Ona Staines and Philadelphia traveled through similar rites of passage; torn from their homes, the sisters were sent to live and serve in new cities.
On January 19, 1797, Mrs. Law and her new husband, Thomas, welcomed the arrival of a baby girl, Elizabeth Parke Custis Law. Much like their fast and furious courtship and marriage, the union brought sudden and sweeping change to Mount Vernon. Upon her marriage, Eliza Law received a portion of her inherit
ance from her late grandfather Daniel Parke Custis, an inheritance that included a significant number of slaves. Eliza’s marriage and the birth of a baby expedited Philadelphia’s departure from Mount Vernon. Existing records do not mention her exact date of departure, but according to Washington’s records, Philadelphia was still spinning at Mount Vernon as late as April of 1797. Sometime after that, Philadelphia would go to live with the Laws in Georgetown.
When the Congress decided upon the Potomac River location for the nation’s new capital, there were two established towns in the area, Alexandria and Georgetown. Located at the southern tip of the District of Columbia, Alexandria was considered to be a handsome Virginia town with attractive homes and a growing population, while Georgetown was separated from the Federal City by Rock Creek and was considered a bit more remote. By 1800, Georgetown counted close to two thousand black residents, the vast majority of whom were enslaved.
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