Summary of Never Caught by Erica Armstrong Dunbar Erica Armstrong Dunbar, a historian, narrates the tale of Ona Maria Judge Staines in her book Never Caught. Ona Maria Judge Staines was born into slavery on the Mount Vernon property owned by George and Martha Washington. In 1796, Ona ran away from Philadelphia to New Hampshire and became free.
Ona was born in 1773. Just after Martha Washington's daughter Patsy had died, Betty was one of Martha Washington's dour slaves, or property from her first marriage, and her father, Andrew Judge, was a white indentured servant from England. Ona was mostly raised by her mother after her father left Mount Vernon alone when his time as a servant ended. In 1789, when Washington becomes president, his wife, Martha, hires the 16-year-old Ona as a tailor and handmaiden. Ona's job is to dress the First Lady in fine clothes every day.
She moves with the Washingtons to New York, which is the country's temporary capital. As Ona helps Martha, who is nervous and stubborn, in New York, she meets free black men and women living together and on their own for the first time. Ona and the Washingtons start to see that the way the North feels about slavery is changing. In 1790, after a short trip back to Mount Vernon, The Washingtons leave New York and move to Philadelphia. The new country is in a state of change, and Congress has chosen to make Virginia the new capital.
While the new capital is being built, the country's new temporary capital will be in Philadelphia, which is even more progressive than New York because of its Quaker roots. At the large executive mansion on High Street in Philadelphia, Ona lives in a house filled to the brim with members of the family and the government, white bonded workers. and enslaved black people.
Ona starts taking care of Wash and Nellie, the Washington's grandkids. After being close to the Washington's white workers and the growing number of free black people in Philadelphia, Ona starts to think about what it would be like to be free. After living in Philadelphia for a few months, a member of Washington's staff tells George and Martha that a law in Pennsylvania could take away their control over the few slaves they brought with them. Adult slaves who have lived in Pennsylvania for more than six months have the right to claim their freedom, according to the law.
To get around this law, George and Martha start shuffling their slaves by sending them back and forth from Mount Vernon every six months. They do this even though they know it won't be long before Ona and the other bondwomen and bondmen find out the truth about what they're being told. Tobias Lear, Washington's chief of staff, helps set up the slave shuffle that the Washingtons do for almost six years.
During that time, Ona struggles with her desire for freedom and her fear of being found or recaptured, as Dunbar writes. Ona knows that even if she manages to get away from the Washingtons, she will never feel safe. She will probably be made to do hard housework that is much harder than what she did at the executive mansion.
After seeing Giles in Paris, two of Washington's slave black drivers Lose favor, Ona has to deal with the death of her brother, Austin. Soon after, she and the Washingtons have to run away from a terrible spread of yellow fever. Then, when Martha Washington's niece Eliza Park Custis announced that she was getting married to a much older man, Thomas Law, Martha said that she planned to give Ona to the young Eliza as a wedding gift.
Ona can't take the shame of understanding that she is disposable and can be replaced. Ona is a woman. is finally ready to start making plans to leave because of the bad things that have happened to her lately dunbar says that a group of free black people in philadelphia helped ona get away at the end of may 1796 while george and martha washington were eating dinner at the executive mansion the washingtons put an ad in the local paper almost right away offering a prize for ona's safe return but ona is already on a ship headed for portsmouth new hampshire when the ad comes out In Portsmouth, Ona stays out of sight while she gets a place to live and a job as a housekeeper through a small but close-knit group of free black men and women who live there.
Even though slavery won't be against the law in New Hampshire until 1857, by the time Ona gets there, not many white men or women own slaves. Ona is still careful about what she wears, who she tells her story to, and how she moves. But one day in the summer of 1796, Elizabeth Langdon sees Ona and recognizes her. Elizabeth is the daughter of John Langdon, a New Hampshire senator whose family often visited the executive mansion while Ona worked there. Langdon tells the Washingtons what his daughter has seen in a letter to them.
In September, Washington asks for help from federal officials who catch runaway slaves to try to bring Ona back to Virginia. He thinks a Frenchman led her away. and he won't even consider the idea that she ran away on her own. Joseph Whipple, who works as a customs officer in Portsmouth, is one of the people Washington asks for help.
Whipple puts out a fake ad for a housekeeper, and Ona takes the call because she needs a job. But when Whipple talks to Ona, she sees that she has been tricked. She makes Whipple happy by telling him she'll get on a boat to Virginia. But while Whipple waits for her on the docks, she goes into hiding in a nearby town.
Whipple tells Washington about his failure, and Washington starts to understand that if he really wants Ona back, he will have to show how desperate he is in a political situation that is becoming more and more anti-slavery. Ona is safe for now, and when she marries Jack Staines, a free black sailor whose job takes him away from Portsmouth for months at a time, she finds warmth and company. Ona has a daughter named Eliza, but she doesn't know that Washington has chosen to try harder to get her back.
In the summer of 1799, Washington asks Martha's nephew Burwell Bassett Jr., who is a senator in Virginia, to go to New Hampshire and bring Ona back by any means possible. Bassett goes to Ona's house and finds her alone with her daughter. She tells him so strongly that she wants to stay free that he leaves without making a scene.
When Bassett goes back to Ona's house the next day to take her by force, he finds it empty. Ona has run away to the nearby Greenland to stay with a family called the Jacks. Washington gets sick in December.
He has a sore throat. The doctor's efforts to make him feel better don't work. On his deathbed, Washington changes his will and adds a clause that will free 123 of the slaves at Mount Vernon when his wife dies.
Martha doesn't like the phrase because she thinks she will be killed to speed up the freedom of her husband's slaves. She frees them herself on January 1, 1801. When she dies in 1802, her slaves are given to her grandkids. Ona's other two kids with Jack Staines are a girl named Nancy and a son whose name isn't known for sure.
but is probably named William. In 1803, Jack Staines dies, which makes things hard for Ona and her children. Ona asks the Jacks for help again, but she still has to give her girls to a nearby white family to work for them so that she can make ends meet. The girls'work is hard and makes them sick and Eliza and Nancy both pass away in 1832 and 1833. Ona still does hard, low-paying housework even though her kids are dead.
She finds comfort in Christianity and teaches herself how to read and write by reading the Bible. In 1845, when she was 70 years old and nearing the end of her life, she gave two interviews to abolitionist newspapers in her area. She then got sick and died in 1848. In a short ending, Dunbar tells the story of Philadelphia, Ona's sister. At Mount Vernon, Philadelphia was born into slavery like Ona.
When Ona ran away in 1796, Eliza Park Custis Law took over Philadelphia. While she was still a slave, Philadelphia married a free black man named William Costin. Scholars think that Costin was related to Martha Washington, and he was an important and relatively wealthy part of the growing free black community in the fast-growing District of Columbia. Costin spent his whole life buying slaves from the Washington's Mount Vernon Farm and other nearby fields, and setting them free right away.
In 1807, Thomas Law freed Philadelphia from being a slave city. At the age of 28, Philadelphia was already the mother of two young girls. She joined her husband in having more children, buying property, and helping enslaved and newly freed black people in the District of Columbia find their way in the world. Dunbar says that Ona probably didn't know what happened to her sister, a sad but important loss.
because Ona wanted freedom more than anything else. About the author. Erica Armstrong Dunbar was born and raised in Pennsylvania. For her first few years of school, she went to a Quaker school in Philadelphia and spent hours and hours reading. She liked real-life stories, and when she went to college at the University of Pennsylvania, she chose to study what she loved as a child.
After getting her BA in History and Afro-American Studies from UPenn, She went on to Columbia University to get her M.A. and Ph.D. Dunbar says that most of her study and writing has been about the lives of women of African descent who lived in the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries. Dunbar has been the Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers University in New Jersey since 2017. She is especially interested in urban history, the history of Philadelphia, and the study of freedom. Dunbar is also the national director of the Association of Black Women Historians.
Before that, she was the first director of the Library Company of Philadelphia's program in African-American history. Dunbar wrote She Came to Slay, The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman, Never Caught, The Washington's Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Own a Judge, which was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and A Fragile Freedom, African-American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City. Dunbar has also written for newspapers and magazines like The Nation, Time, The New York Times, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Hope we summarized it fully and you liked it.
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