USA TODAY International Edition
A slave’s flight from our first president
‘ Never Caught’ tells story of Ona Judge, who fled Washington
If there’s an irony to the fact that February, Black History Month, also contains Presidents Day, Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s new book brings that irony into sharp relief. Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge ( 37Ink/ Atria, 253 pp., ★★★★ out of four) is a chronicle that throws considerable shade on America’s founding fathers for their slaveholding hypocrisy.
In this case, we learn how our first president, George Washington, skirted Philadelphia’s antislavery laws during the five years he and his wife, Martha, resided there, while the nation’s eventual capitol was being built along the Potomac River. As Dunbar, a professor of black American history at the University of Delaware, recounts, Washington brazenly cy- cled his slaves in and out of his Virginia home, Mount Vernon, to avoid Philadelphia’s time limit on slaveholding.
But this legal issue is hardly the book’s subject. Instead, the human drama of one particular slave, Ona Judge, a Mount Vernon- born mulatto woman who became Martha Washington’s prized servant, takes center stage. For in her life away from the Southern locus of slavery, Ona Judge breathed the freer air of the Northern states, and in 1796 she stole away from the Washingtons, dying free in New Hampshire, outliving her owners by nearly a half century. The Judge saga is a well- known matter of human bondage and presidential history, but Dunbar’s book is touted as the first fulllength account of Judge’s life. Even for those who know the basics, Never Caught is a crisp and compulsively readable feat of research and storytelling.
Indeed, Judge suffered as much in freedom as in slavery, it seems, preferring a shadowed, secret life to the relative privilege
of her slave stature. For her pains, George Washington never ceased in his efforts to recapture her, through hired minions and with an obsessiveness that reminds one of Javert, the iconic pursuer of Les Miserables.
Believing at one point that Judge, who would become Ona Staines through marriage, was pregnant, Washington could only have thought that his legal property had increased by the sum and value of an unborn slave. Strategic as ever, he encouraged a customs collector named Whipple to spirit her quietly to Virginia rather than to Philadelphia, lest the last few months of Washington’s presidency endure bad publicity in the North.
But Whipple, and others, failed in their efforts to persuade their fugitive quarry to leave New Hampshire, where a free black community and the strong stirrings of abolition protected her to a fair degree. A final attempt to recapture her by force failed when the Staineses slipped away.
And so Ona Judge Staines lived free, though in the sort of poverty that most ex- slaves could rarely overcome. She would grieve the deaths of two daughters, and sorrow over the enslaved family members she had left behind.