![]() But she persevered, marrying and raising children in freedom if not luxury. She would spend the rest of her life in danger of being kidnapped and returned to her owners. So, on Saturday, May 21, 1796, at the age of 22, Ona slipped away from the Washingtons’ Philadelphia mansion, never intending to return. Never caught, the story of Ona Judge : George and Martha Washingtons courageous slave who dared to run away / by Erica Armstrong Dunbar and Kathleen Van Cleve. Having spent six years with the first president’s household in the nation’s capital (then Philadelphia), she had enjoyed certain freedoms among the free black people of Pennsylvania and did not wish to be uprooted, removed back to Virginia, and have her ownership transferred to Washington’s fiery-tempered step-granddaughter, which is what the Washingtons wanted. ![]() Both parents worked for the Washingtons, and, by the laws of the day, Ona Judge was enslaved like her mother. Ona Judge was the daughter of an English indentured servant and an enslaved woman of African ancestry. In Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave Ona Judge, that is exactly what we have. There is nothing like a personal story-an enslaved person's personal and true story-to get a deeper perspective. In traditional biographies of the Washingtons, the subject of slavery rarely comes up, or, if it does, it is given a paragraph or perhaps a chapter to explain the “peculiar institution” as it related to the first First Family.
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