NEVER CAUGHT: THE WASHINGTONS’
RELENTLESS PURSUIT OF THEIR RUNAWAY SLAVE, ONA JUDGE
By Erica Armstrong Dunbar
37 Ink/Atria/Simon & Schuster
One of the more noted stories about George Washington’s last years was how he reportedly wrestled with his conscience about slavery — and how, not long before he died in 1799, he freed his 123 slaves in his will.
But about three years before that, Washington, in his last year as the first U.S. president, and his wife, Martha, made strenuous efforts to get back a runaway slave, Ona Judge, who escaped from the Washingtons’ presidential household in Philadelphia in a bid to win her freedom in the northern United States.
That’s the subject of “Never Caught,” a book by historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar that was a finalist for last year’s National Book Award for nonfiction. “Never Caught” is also the centerpiece of a community reading project, “All Hamptons Read,” in Easthampton, Northampton, Southampton and Westhampton that includes multiple events this month and next examining slavery.
“Never Caught” brings to life the relatively little-known figure of Ona Judge, who as a teen and a young woman was a personal attendant to Martha Washington. The daughter of an enslaved black mother and a white indentured servant on the Washingtons’ estate of Mount Vernon in Virginia, Judge came north with selected other slaves when the Washingtons moved first to New York, then to Philadelphia after George Washington became president in 1789.
In both cities, where slavery was gradually being phased out, Judge came in contact with free blacks and, Dunbar writes, likely first began to contemplate being free herself. When she later learned she was to be given to Martha’s granddaughter, Eliza, in Virginia, she escaped in 1796, catching a sailing ship to Portsmouth, N.H.; she would live quietly there for years even as George Washington repeatedly (and sometimes illegally) tried to reclaim his family’s lost “property.”
Among a number of favorable reviews for “Never Caught,” Kirkus Reviews called Dunbar’s book a “startling, well-researched slave narrative that seriously questions the intentions of our first president.”
Community discussions for “Never Caught” take place Oct. 19 in Forbes Library in Northampton; Oct. 22 at Emily Williston Library in Easthampton; Oct. 30 at Lilly Library in Florence and Edwards Library in Southampton; and Nov. 15 at Westhampton Public Library. Copies of the book are available at all those libraries, as is a list of related events and art exhibits. More information is available at forbeslibrary.org/allhamptonsread.