![]() I can say that reading it once would've been sufficient.Īnd then there's the attribution of emotions and motives to the various people populating Ona's story. I can't tell you how many times I had to read that domestic servants' lives in the late eighteenth century were backbreaking and onerous. In addition to delving into what feels like irrelevant historical details, Dunbar tends to repeat herself. Why on earth should I care what the Washingtons' house in Philadelphia looked like? I'm here for Ona Judge! Part of the reason for that is that, while the title, subtitle, and summary promise an exciting pursuit of a daring runaway slave, half the book is actually just historical description of the Washingtons' movements around the country, accompanied by X slaves and living in Y houses and hosting thus and such parties and struggling with this and that health issues. She's clearly a woman of grit, determination, resourcefulness, and strength of belief, and there are far too few women from her time period and experiences known to history.But I did not really enjoy this portrayal of her story. I'm so glad Ona Judge's story is abroad in the world. Impeccably researched, historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar weaves a powerful tale and offers fascinating new scholarship on how one young woman risked it all to gain freedom from the famous founding father. Yet freedom would not come without its costs.Īt just twenty-two-years-old, Ona became the subject of an intense manhunt led by George Washington, who used his political and personal contacts to recapture his property. So, when the opportunity presented itself one clear and pleasant spring day in Philadelphia, Judge left everything she knew to escape to New England. Though Ona Judge lived a life of relative comfort, the few pleasantries she was afforded were nothing compared to freedom, a glimpse of which she encountered first-hand in Philadelphia. Every six months he sent the slaves back down south just as the clock was about to expire. ![]() Rather than comply, Washington decided to circumvent the law. As he grew accustomed to Northern ways, there was one change he couldn’t get his arms around: Pennsylvania law required enslaved people be set free after six months of residency in the state. In setting up his household he took Tobias Lear, his celebrated secretary, and nine slaves, including Ona Judge, about which little has been written. When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left behind his beloved Mount Vernon to serve in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the nation’s capital, after a brief stay in New York. She thereby offers readers an unprecedented glimpse into a complex, fraught, and pivotal moment in American history.A startling and eye-opening look into America’s First Family, Never Caught is the powerful narrative of Ona Judge, George and Martha Washington’s runaway slave who risked it all to escape the nation’s capital and reach freedom. Dunbar provides careful, empathetic imaginings of what not only Ona but also her enslavers, the Washingtons, might have felt as their lives shifted rapidly in time with the changing and developing United States. Dunbar’s reverence for Ona’s bravery is evident in the pages of Never Caught as she charts Ona’s enduring dedication to making her own way in the world and maintaining her hard-won freedom at all costs. ![]() Dunbar uses her deep, expansive knowledge of Pennsylvania history and emancipation studies to reconstruct what life must have been like for Ona Judge as she traveled from Mount Vernon to Philadelphia, encountering for the first time thriving communities of free Black men and women and considering what price she might be willing to pay for freedom. Ona Judge’s story is one that is rarely told-and in bringing it to light, Dunbar seeks to interrogate the enduring effects of slavery, paternalism, and racism on American society. The result is a book which seeks to examine themes of slavery and paternalism, freedom and agency, the failed promises of America, and whose stories get preserved in the historical record. Dunbar’s historical narrative fuses information gleaned from letters and diary entries with fictionalized speculation rooted in sociopolitical mores of the late 1700s. ![]() Erica Armstrong Dunbar is a historian, scholar, and Pennsylvania native whose scholarship and academic career, in her own words, have focused on “the lives of women of Africa descent who called America their home during the 18th and 19th centuries.” In Never Caught, Dunbar seeks to probe a little-known facet of George Washington’s legacy: the escape of Washington’s wife Martha’s “dower slave” Ona Maria Judge and Washington’s fervent but ultimately failed attempts to recapture Ona from New Hampshire, strip her of her freedom, and return her to slavery at Mount Vernon.
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