Undoing History | The Huntington

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Undoing History

Image of a museum sign with an artist's rendition of Ona Judge, an enslaved woman who escaped from the home of her enslavers, George and Martha Washington, in 1796. The words "I am free now" are visible beneath the image of a ship in Philadelphia's harbor. The sign is mounted on a red brick wall. — “I am Free Now,” President’s House, Independence National Historical Park, courtesy of Save Our Signs, public domain.

Posted on Mon., March 30, 2026 by Brett Rushforth

The federal government dismantled an exhibit about the Black freedom struggle in Philadelphia. The city fought back with an unlikely weapon: specialized academic research.

In The Huntington’s vast collection is a letter written by George Washington during the final months of his presidency. Addressed to an obscure port inspector named Joseph Whipple, the letter details Washington’s efforts to re-enslave a young woman named Ona (sometimes Oney) Judge. Earlier that year, she had liberated herself by sneaking out of the president’s Philadelphia residence and boarding a ship bound for New Hampshire, where she joined a growing free Black community. Washington needed Whipple’s help “to restore the girl,” as he put it, to her former confinement as the personal slave of Martha Custis Washington. The president instructed Whipple to operate discreetly and lure Judge onto a ship under false pretenses. If she suspected their designs to return her to slavery, Washington wrote, “she would contrive to elude it.” Whipple responded four weeks later that Ona had, in fact, eluded his efforts. Despite the Washingtons’ continued attempts to return Ona to slavery, she remained free until her death in 1848.

Image of an 18th-century handwritten letter from Philadelphia dated Nov. 28, 1796.

Image of an 18th-century handwritten letter from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, dated Dec. 22, 1796.

George Washington to Joseph Whipple, Nov. 28, 1796, box 20, folder 23, George Washington Collection, 1749–1806, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA.

Joseph Whipple to George Washington, Dec. 22, 1796, box 20, folder 25, George Washington Collection, 1749–1806, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA.

In 2010, Ona Judge’s story became part of a new historical exhibit at the President’s House, the official residence of the U.S. president from 1790 to 1800. When it opened to the public, the site featured thirty-four signs and a multimedia display about the people who had lived and worked there: George and Martha Washington, John and Abigail Adams, and nine individuals enslaved by the Washingtons. Guided by a congressional resolution, the central theme was “Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation.”

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To understand Washington’s letters about Ona Judge, for example, historians have culled through thousands of other letters, newspapers, account books, court filings, diaries, probate inventories, and much more. Experts then assessed this research in peer review, identifying new contributions, recognizing errors, and detecting distortions. The result is a rich library of resources—including recent books on Ona Judge, the Washingtons’ views on slavery, and the contested memory of those views—available to NPS committees and other stakeholders. Federal agencies also draw on similar research conducted by private foundations, including Mount Vernon, the Museum of the American Revolution, and many others.

Too often, we affirm the value of public humanities by contrasting it with academic scholarship. Public-facing work is virtuous, democratic, and accessible, whereas academic writing is indulgent, elitist, and obscure. This is a false dichotomy. Not only is there room for both, but meaningful public humanities work always rests on a foundation of sound scholarship.

The story of Ona Judge and the ongoing battle over interpreting history at the Declaration’s quarter-century mark highlight the often-invisible links between public humanities and the peer-reviewed academic scholarship supported by The Huntington’s Research Division and published in the Huntington Library Quarterly.

To make these connections more visible, we’ve added a new article category to the HLQ called “Early/Modern Connections.” These articles present original early modern research that has enabled, supported, or shaped a specific public humanities or public interest project. These essays do more than compare and connect the past and present. They must include an element of active public engagement.

The first of these articles is “Black Aquatics: Early Modern Past, Present, and Future,” by Amanda Herbert and Kevin Dawson. Their research on Black aquatic culture is brought to life by the visionary art of Ebony Iman Dallas, who provided illustrated wooden puzzles for a community education program to address modern racial inequities in aquatic sports. By showing young people the importance of aquatic cultures in the African diaspora, they decenter the slave trade and offer youth other ways to imagine their connection to the water.