Never Caught Study Guide

Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Erica Armstrong Dunbar spent the early years of her education at a Philadelphia Quaker school reading deeply for hours on end. She was drawn to true stories, and when she enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania, decided to turn her childhood passion into a course of study. After earning a BA from UPenn in history and Afro-American Studies, she went on to receive her MA and PhD from Columbia University. Dunbar’s research and scholarship has, in her own words, focused primarily on “the lives of women of African descent who called America their home during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” With special interests in urban history, Philadelphia history, and emancipation studies, Dunbar is the current Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers University in New Jersey, a post she has held since 2017. Dunbar is also the National Director of the Association of Black Women Historians and previously served as the Inaugural Director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Dunbar is the author of She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman; Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona 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 been a contributor to The Nation, Time, The New York Times, and The Philadelphia Enquirer.

Never Caught is a historical text which centers the story of Ona Judge Staines. Born into slavery at George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation—but technically owned by Washington’s wife, Martha Custis Washington—Ona was pledged to the first lady and eventually came to serve as a handmaiden of sorts to Martha. Because Ona, as a slave, was never taught to read or write, no record of her feelings or experiences exist in her own words apart from a pair of interviews she gave to two American newspapers toward the end of her life. In the absence of historical documentation of Ona’s most intimate experiences, Dunbar carefully reconstructs the things Ona might have been thinking, feeling, and enduring by using what records do exist from the time period. Dunbar carefully charts what was happening in the Washingtons’ lives during the tumultuous early days of America in order to examine how the Washingtons’ experiences would have affected the slaves they owned. Changing moral attitudes around the institution of slavery throughout the late 1700s did little to shift Washington’s personal outlook on slaveholding—and even when he famously emancipated his slaves on his deathbed, he did not liberate the slaves his wife held as part of her own estate. By interrogating Washington as a historical figure—and by recognizing that much of what has been written about the man is hagiography—Dunbar engages with a side of American history that is often swept under the rug. Reconstructing Ona’s story allows Dunbar to speak more broadly about the fundamental injustices surrounding the creation of America even as she focuses on a specific tale of one woman’s journey from bondage to freedom.

Never Caught is not the only historical text published in recent years that seeks to interrogate and reimagine George Washington’s imperfect legacy. Washington is often cast as a complicated man who was morally opposed to slavery, when in reality, he relied heavily on slave labor in an attempt to unbury himself from the debt and economic uncertainty he faced even after ascending to the presidency. Jessie MacLeod and Mary V. Thompson’s 2016 book Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington’s Mount Vernon and Henry Wiencek’s 2003 An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America are two other works of historical scholarship which center the integral role Washington’s slaves played in Washington’s private and professional lives. By focusing on the fundamental injustices inherent within the creation of America, these books (as well as Mary V. Thompson’s The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret: George Washington, Slavery, and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon) pull into the light the oft-overlooked ways in which Washington sought to strengthen rather than abolish the institution of slavery—an institution which served him and other white, wealthy landowners; politicians; and Founding Fathers as well. Additionally, William Wells Brown’s novel Clotel, which traces the lives of two fictional slave daughters of Thomas Jefferson, is similar to Never Caught in that it also focuses on the lived experiences of slaves owned by an American president. Though a work of fiction, Clotel is based upon rumors (which some historians believe to be true) that Jefferson fathered several children with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves.