Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave by Erica Dunbar

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.

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. In setting up his household he took Tobias Lear, his celebrated secretary, and nine slaves, including Ona Judge, about which little has been written. 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. Rather than comply, Washington decided to circumvent the law. Every six months he sent the slaves back down south just as the clock was about to expire.

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. So, when the opportunity presented itself one clear and pleasant spring day in Philadelphia, Judge left everything she knew to escape to New England. Yet freedom would not come without its costs.

At 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.

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.

I suppose given what I’m feeling about our government right now, it probably wasn’t the best time to read a book that casts our first president in such a bad light. But I was intrigued by what I had heard about it, enough to go out of my way to read about On a Judge, and her life, before and after slavery. I’m very glad that I did.

I realize that much of Ona Judge’s story has to be supposition, but I thought the author did an excellent job of relaying the facts and making the book an interesting read, too. It never gets bogged down in the details, even though there are a lot of them. There could hardly not be. The backgrounds of all the leading actors, the intricacies of the laws dealing with slavery, the societies that the free Blacks created, all are thoroughly covered. But overlaying all of it, is one female slave, wanting to be free.

It took a great deal of courage to do what Ona Judge did. Even if her life as a slave wasn’t as bad as those in the fields, she was still a slave. Even knowing that she could be facing a life a poverty, she chose freedom. Her life would be a hard one, but, through it all, she never regretted her choice.


This book was published this year, and so is not part of my Mount TBR Challenge.