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. Yet freedom would not come without its costs. So, when the opportunity presented itself one clear and pleasant spring day in Philadelphia, Judge left everything she knew to escape to New England. Though Ona Judge lived a life of relative comfort, she was denied freedom. Every six months he sent the slaves back down south just as the clock was about to expire. Rather than comply, Washington decided to circumvent the law. As the President grew accustomed to Northern ways, there was one change he couldn’t abide: Pennsylvania law required enslaved people be set free after six months of residency in the state. In setting up his household he brought along nine slaves, including Ona Judge. 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. She lived most of her time as a fugitive in Greenland, New Hampshire, a tiny community just outside the city of Portsmouth.A startling and eye-opening look into America’s First Family, Never Caught is the powerful story about a daring woman of “extraordinary grit” ( The Philadelphia Inquirer). For almost fifty years, the fugitive slave woman kept to herself, building a family and a new life upon the quicksand of her legal enslavement. Afraid of being returned to her owners, Judge lived a shadowy life that was isolated and clandestine. But it was the threat of capture and re-enslavement that kept closed the mouths of those who managed to beat the odds and successfully escape.

Sometimes, the nightmare of human bondage, the murder, rape, dismemberment, and constant degradation, was simply too terrible to speak of. Enslaved men and women on the run often kept their pasts hidden, even from the people they loved the most: their spouses and children. For fugitives, like Ona Judge, secrecy was a necessity. The violence required to feed the system of human bondage often made enslaved men and women want to forget their pasts, not recollect them. “Very few eighteenth-century slaves have shared their stories about the institution and experience of slavery.

Never caught by dunbar