She would grieve the deaths of two daughters, and sorrow over the enslaved family members she had left behind. A final attempt to recapture her by force failed when the Staineses slipped away, forewarned.Īnd so Ona Judge Staines lived free, though in the sort of poverty that most ex-slaves could rarely overcome.
#ONA LIFE REVIEW FREE#
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.īut 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. 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.īelieving 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. Indeed, Ona Judge suffered as much in freedom as in slavery, it seems, preferring a shadowed, secret life to the relative privilege of her slave stature. Even for those who know the basics, Never Caught is a crisp and compulsively readable feat of research and storytelling.
The Ona Judge saga is a well-known matter of human bondage and presidential history, but Dunbar’s book is touted as the first full-length account of Judge’s life. 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 famously stole away from the Washingtons, dying free at last in New Hampshire, outliving her owners by nearly a half century. 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. As Dunbar, a professor of Black American history at the University of Delaware, recounts, Washington brazenly cycled his slaves in and out of his Virginia home, Mount Vernon, to avoid Philadelphia’s time limit on slaveholding.īut this legal issue is hardly the book’s subject. In this case, we learn how our first president, George Washington, skirted Philadelphia’s anti-slavery laws during the five years he and his wife, Martha, resided there, while the nation’s eventual capitol was being built - by slave labor, largely - along the Potomac River. Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (37Ink/Atria, 253 pp., **** out of four stars) is a chronicle that throws considerable shade on America’s Founding Fathers for their slaveholding hypocrisy. 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 STORY OF ONA JUDGE: GEORGE AND MARTHA WASHINGTON'S COURAGEOUS SLAVE WHO RAN AWAY YOUNG READERS EDITION is middle-grade novelist Kathleen Van Cleeve's tween-friendly adaptation of the 2017 nonfiction National Book Award finalist Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge, written by hist.
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