She supports her work-life balance with long walks and her love of photography, which you can find here. She seeks the extraordinary in the ordinary, and reinterprets the historical narrative in both traditional and creative forms. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. With impeccable research, 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.ĭr. Yet freedom would not come without its costs.Īt 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. So, when the opportunity presented itself, Judge left everything she knew to escape to New England.

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. Titles She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman Erica Armstrong Dunbar 25.99 24. She is also the author of Never Caught, which received a National Book Award Nomination, and She Came to Slay. Every six months he sent the slaves back down south just as the clock was about to expire. She has written articles for the New York Times, The Nation, USA Today, and Boston Globe. Rather than comply, Washington decided to circumvent the law. 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. In setting up his household he took Tobias Lear, his celebrated secretary and eight slaves, including Ona Judge, about whom little has been written. When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left his beloved Mount Vernon to serve in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the nation’s capital.

A startling and eye-opening look into America’s First Family, Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge(Simon and Schuster, 2017) is the powerful narrative of Ona Judge, George and Martha Washington’s runaway slave who risked everything to escape the nation’s capital and reach freedom.

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