A review of Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar

Ona Judge was Martha Washington’s “body servant,” an enslaved woman who served as a kind of personal attendant. Born at Mount Vernon, and spending her life in bondage, she was one of the enslaved people brought to Philadelphia as George Washington became the first President of the United States. For years she lived in the President’s home in Philly. Until one night, when she escaped.

Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge, by Erica Armstrong Dunbar, provides Judge with the full biography she deserves. That Dunbar has excavated the details of Ona Judge’s life story is an important contribution to our understanding of early America. That she has crafted this story into a full, compelling, and at times gripping narrative is a stunning accomplishment. I hope that it becomes part of the canon of American history.

Ona Judge’s mother was a “dower slave” named Betty who was inherited by the Washingtons from Martha’s family’s estate. Her father was an indentured white servant named Andrew Judge who had worked at Mount Vernon for a short time. (We don’t know the nature of their relationship.) As Martha Washington’s personal attendant, Ona Judge was one of the seven slaves brought to New York City for the beginning of George Washington’s first term as President. When it was agreed that Philadelphia would become the interim capitol for a decade before the eventual move to DC (all part of Hamilton and Jefferson’s “Room Where It Happens” compromise), Ona Judge moved to Pennsylvania for the remainder of Washington’s Presidency.

At this point, shortly before the final move back to Virginia at the end of the President’s second term, Judge learns that she will become a gift to Martha Washington’s niece, a notoriously temperamental woman. With the Washington family sitting down for dinner, their bags packed for a final return to Mount Vernon, Ona Judge makes her break.

Judge settled in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, married a free black seaman named Jack Stains, and gave birth to three children. She learned to read. She found religion. Throughout her life she remained a fugitive, continuously evading capture. Dunbar makes her close encounters with Washington’s slavecatchers genuinely suspenseful reading.

Ona Judge’s life also included monstrous hardship. She outlived her two daughters. We don’t know what happened to her son. Her husband was lost at sea. And yet, when an interviewer later asked her if, considering her life of adversity, she regrets having escaped the Washingtons, Ona Judge famously replied: “No, I am free, and have, I trust, been made a child of God by the means.” 

One of the most impressive accomplishments of Never Caught is the way Dunbar is able to construct a seamless and compelling narrative from limited historical data. Of course this is always an issue in the writing of history. For example, biographies of John Adams reliably sag in those periods in which he has returned home to Abigail Adams, since biographers are left without the invaluable resource of the sparkling correspondence between two geniuses. Jill Lepore addresses this issue head-on in Book of Ages, her great biography of Jane Franklin, the beloved sister of Benjamin Franklin. Lepore’s strategy is to put the act of writing history itself front and center throughout, making that book in part a meditation on process. One of the brilliant aspects of Lin Manuel Miranda’s musical, Hamilton, is the way he transforms instances of our lack historical knowledge themselves into the content of songs.

But in writing about the life Ona Judge, Dunbar is multiply disadvantaged. The historical record is comparatively overstuffed with information on the rich and influential white men of early America. Prejudice throughout history has led to the discard of records of common folk, the poor, black people, women, and slaves. On top of all that, as a fugitive, Judge had to keep a low profile.

In addition to her historical research, Dunbar has two main resources that make this book possible. First, amazingly, Ona Judge gave two interviews late in her life for abolitionist publications. (I was surprised not to see them reproduced in this book. But it turns out they are rather scant, and aside from a few important quotes, they are largely in the voice of the interviewer. You can find them here.) Both interviews reveal that Judge was distinctly unimpressed with the Washingtons’ status as Christians. Her interviewer reports that the Washingtons did not teach religion to their slaves, and that Judge claims never to have heard George Washington pray. She notes, “Mrs. Washington used to read prayers but I don’t call that praying.”

Second, we know intimately much of what was happening throughout the Washingtons’ lives, their moments of pride and fear, their fortunes and hardships. We know quite a bit about what they were doing, and where, and when, all through accumulated letters and documents and historical study. Since Ona Judge was in close quarters with the Washingtons for so much of their lives—at Mount Vernon, in New York City, and in Philadelphia—Dunbar can infer what life must have been like for her. We can surmise how specific moments in the lives of the Washingtons—the sorrowful loss of loved ones, the stressful packing for the next move, the fretting about finances—played out for those enslaved people forced to live and work around them. As Dunbar writes, “The major life events of white slave owners always directly impacted their slaves.” Much of Never Caught includes what Judge “would have” been doing, or how she “must have” felt. This writing strategy, handled artfully by Dunbar, is one of things that makes a full biography of Ona Judge possible.

The Washingtons themselves are also central players in this story. It’s not a great look for them.

Like the cherry tree or the wooden teeth, one of the things attached to the mythos of George Washington is that his will instructed that his slaves be freed upon his wife’s passing. My impression is that many people consider this is an important pillar of Washington’s reputation. The issue of slavery did appear to genuinely wear on Washington. So it might be easy to think that Washington, after a lifetime of slave ownership, ultimately lands on the right of history. Never Caught makes such a view seem naïve.

For example, Dunbar reminds us that while in office Washington signed the Fugitive Slave Act, which enabled slavecatchers to pursue escapees across state lines, and made it a crime to interfere with recapture. Washington’s deep commitment to tracking down escaped slaves is evidenced by his intense frustration with Ona Judge’s continued evasion. As Judge herself reported, efforts to capture her finally ceased only upon his death. And it was not merely the case that Washington was simply a man of his time, as if to imply that anyone in his place in society held either the same or perhaps less evolved views; the Washingtons’ slaveholding practices stood out conspicuously within the then-capitol city of Philadelphia. Slaves made up only around 1 to 2 tenths of 1% of the black people living in Philly at the time that Ona Judge and eight other enslaved people worked in the President’s residence. This is part of the reason that Judge could find a network of free black Philadelphians to help her escape.

In addition, the Keystone State at that time required by law that any enslaved adults brought into its borders were to be liberated after six months. Dunbar writes, “So the Washingtons devised a plan: the couple would shuffle their slaves to and from Mount Vernon every six months, avoiding the stopwatch of Pennsylvania black freedom.” Ona Judge and the others were briefly moved out of the state every once in a while to skirt the law that would make them free. And the Washingtons were careful to perform this maneuver in a way that would keep it a secret both to the public and to the slaves themselves. The President of the United States would not be deprived of his human possessions that easily.

It is true that George Washington’s will ultimately resulted in freedom for more than one hundred enslaved people. But Ona Judge was not one of them. Hundreds more enslaved people worked at Mount Vernon, and, like Judge, they were descendants of the slaves of Martha Washington’s family. So, despite her escape, and despite Washington’s will, Judge remained the legal property of someone else for the rest of her life. And since her children were born to a fugitive, they were by legal definition also fugitives—escaped human property—for the entirety of their lives.

Dunbar explains that she has been careful with the wording of her title. Ona Judge never attained status as a free American. After her escape, she remained for her whole life a fugitive. But she was never caught.