It seemed a little odd to me,” Dunbar said in a telephone interview with Paste. “Her name and the situation behind the advertisement were more than intriguing. While scanning the pages of a Philadelphia periodical, Dunbar discovered an advertisement announcing that a “light Mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes, and bushy black hair” had run away from the president’s home. Judge was Martha Washington’s* legal property, and Martha’s wealth-heavily concentrated in the humans she claimed-far exceeded her husband’s.ĭunbar first came across Judge’s name while conducting archival research for her debut book, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City, an academic study of free black women in the 19th century. Historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar has written a book that, in detailing Ona Judge’s extraordinary life, illuminates how George Washington* remained committed to the institution of slavery-so much so that he spent years trying to capture Judge and return her to Mount Vernon, where she had been born and raised. Their names were George and Martha Washington. After all, the couple who claimed her as their property was the most powerful duo in the young nation. Whether or not she knew the law’s specifics, Judge understood the manifold challenges she was facing by leaving Philadelphia behind. The law established guidelines by which slave owners could pursue their slaves into northern states that were moving away from slavery and into a wage labor system.

Runaways had become so common for America’s slave-owning gentry that three years before Judge’s escape, they pressured one of their own-the nation’s first president-into signing the Fugitive Slave Act. On May 21, 1796, an enslaved 22-year-old woman named Ona Judge slipped out of her owners’ home in Philadelphia and into an illicit freedom.

Never Caught by Erica Armstrong Dunbar