The Creation of America Theme Analysis

When many people think of the founding of United States of America, words from the Declaration of Independence come to mind: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In Never Caught, however, historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar demonstrates how equality; liberty; and the chance to pursue happiness, fulfillment, and agency were off-limits to the slaves owned by the Founding Fathers. The enslaved individuals who served the Founding Fathers and who built the nation’s capital from the ground up bore witness to the creation of a new country in which they could not hope to take equal part. Ultimately, Dunbar argues that the creation of America was a fundamentally flawed process that excluded and dehumanized the very people who built the nation.

In telling a little-known story about George Washington’s moral failures relating to upholding the institution of slavery, Dunbar seeks to expose the racism, inequality, and cruelty that have been present in America’s social, political, and economic systems since its inception. As the first president of the United States of America, George Washington assumed great power at a time of intense turmoil and fragility. America, as a fledgling nation, did not even have a fixed capital that all lawmakers could agree on—and yet “rigid laws” in the South fiercely protected the institution of slavery. America, then, was founded on abstract concepts of liberty and freedom but did not extend even the possibility of such things to its vast population of enslaved Black people. Instead, the nation actively sought to keep oppressed and enslaved those whose labor was needed to continue constructing America. Slaveholders knew how essential slave labor was to the growth of America’s economy, so rather than ending slavery, lawmakers sought to deepen the gulf between the free and the enslaved. Edicts such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, signed into law by Washington himself, classified enslaved Black people as property and denied them their essential humanity. Washington’s relentless pursuit of his slave Ona Judge Staines for nearly a decade after her escape from his estate (the central story of Never Caught) is an extended and profoundly disturbing metaphor for the ways in which America’s foundational laws and institutions erased the humanity of an entire swath of this new nation’s population. Even as America sought to write life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness into its core laws, it actively dehumanized its enslaved population and denied them the chance to participate in the same freedoms enjoyed by white Americans. In demonstrating the fundamental flaws written into the American constitution—and American society more largely—Dunbar shows how America failed (and continues to fail) its most vulnerable citizens on its most basic promises. Black people then and now, Dunbar suggests, were and are forced to play pivotal roles in the construction of a society which has never sought to protect or prosper them. 

Later on in the book, Dunbar turns to the construction of the nation’s capital upon the swamps along the banks of the Potomac in Virginia. The capital’s grand buildings, Dunbar writes, were built using slave labor. Slaves, then, were forced to toil in miserable conditions in order to build the infrastructure for a city that would never serve, protect, or even acknowledge them. Slave labor essentially create the American economy through the work enslaved people were forced to complete on large rice, tobacco, and cotton plantations. And with the construction of the capital, the labor of enslaved Black people would also birth the place that would create and govern the social and political foundation of American life. As Dunbar cryptically writes, “black men and women’s unpaid labor would lay the foundation for what would become the seat of America’s power.”

In excavating the rampant injustices which have been present in American society since the nation’s inception, Dunbar indicts revisionist versions of history that portray the Founding Fathers as warriors for justice and liberty. In fact, Dunbar argues, America was built on the backs of those who were not free in order to cater to those who were free; in other words, America is and always has been fundamentally unequal. In telling Ona’s story of enslavement, oppression, and escape, Dunbar suggests that the slaves who worked hard to support the lives of men and women like George and Martha Washington played a fundamental and profound role in the creation of America. Yet, tragically, these individuals were never given credit, glory, or even fair and equal treatment in the society they helped to create.