Contemporary Authors

• A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2008
• Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge 37 Ink/Atria (New York, NY), 2017

1. Never caught : the Washingtons' relentless pursuit of their runaway slave, Ona Judge LCCN 2017932249 Type of material Book Personal name Dunbar, Erica Armstrong, author. Main title Never caught : the Washingtons' relentless pursuit of their runaway slave, Ona Judge / Erica Armstrong Dunbar. Edition First 37 Ink/Atria Books hardcover edition. Published/Produced New York : 37 Ink/Atria, [2017] ©2017 Description xvii, 253 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm ISBN 1501126393 9781501126390 ebook CALL NUMBER E444 .D86 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE CALL NUMBER E444 .D86 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 2. A fragile freedom : African American women and emancipation in the antebellum city LCCN 2007036454 Type of material Book Personal name Dunbar, Erica Armstrong. Main title A fragile freedom : African American women and emancipation in the antebellum city / Erica Armstrong Dunbar. Published/Created New Haven : Yale University Press, c2008. Description xvi, 196 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. ISBN 9780300125917 (cloth : alk. paper) 0300125917 (cloth : alk. paper) Links Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0727/2007036454.html Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0828/2007036454-b.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0828/2007036454-d.html CALL NUMBER F158.9.N4 D86 2008 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER F158.9.N4 D86 2008 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Paste - https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/03/never-caught-erica-armstrong-dunbar.html

  Erica Armstrong Dunbar Talks Never Caught, the True Story of George Washington's Runaway Slave
  By Lucas Iberico Lozada | March 3, 2017 | 2:54pm
  Author photo by Whitney Thomas
  BOOKS FEATURES ERICA ARMSTRONG DUNBAR
  Share Tweet Submit Pin
  Erica Armstrong Dunbar Talks Never Caught, the True Story of George Washington's Runaway Slave
  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. 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. 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. Whether or not she knew the law’s specifics, Judge understood the manifold challenges she was facing by leaving Philadelphia behind. After all, the couple who claimed her as their property was the most powerful duo in the young nation. Their names were George and Martha Washington.

  Screen Shot 2015-10-26 at 4.07.05 PM.png
  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. Judge was Martha Washington’s* legal property, and Martha’s wealth—heavily concentrated in the humans she claimed—far exceeded her husband’s.

  Dunbar 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. 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.

  “Her name and the situation behind the advertisement were more than intriguing. It seemed a little odd to me,” Dunbar said in a telephone interview with Paste. “Who is this person and what happened to them—and why don’t I know this?”

  Dunbar considered including Judge’s story in A Fragile Freedom, but she decided against it in favor of later creating a project devoted to Judge’s life. That project became Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Dunbar’s sophomore book released in February.

  Ona Maria Judge was born in 1773 to Betty, one of Martha’s most trusted slaves, and Andrew Judge, an English-born white man who had served the Washingtons as an indentured servant. In 1789, when George was unanimously chosen by the U.S. Senate to become President of the United States, Judge was among a small group of slaves who accompanied the “first family” to New York, the nation’s capital at the time. But it was when the capital and the president were relocated to Philadelphia that Judge grew aware of the differences in the public’s acceptance of slavery between Northern and Southern states. Pennsylvania law, Dunbar writes in Never Caught, “required the emancipation of all adult slaves who were brought into the commonwealth for more than a period of six months.”

  “I don’t want us to paint the image of the benevolent North who were against slavery because they understood the moral bankruptcy behind it,” Dunbar said. “There were of course people who did feel that way, but I would also argue it was the economy. A wage labor system that does not work with a system of slavery alongside it would perhaps force some to be against the institution of slavery.”

  Whatever the Pennsylvania law’s roots, it provided the Washingtons with a distinct problem. Their wealth as landed gentry was directly tied to the people they claimed as slaves, and emancipation would cause them financial ruin. After consulting with the nation’s first Attorney General—himself a slave owner who had lost slaves to the Pennsylvania law—the Washingtons turned their legal problem into a logistical one, devising a system to cycle their slaves back and forth to Mount Vernon before their six months were up. Dunbar highlights George’s correspondence with his secretary to show how anxious the president was to preserve his—and his wife’s—wealth as Virginian farmers.

  “I am not a [George] Washington biographer,” Dunbar said. “But he happens to intersect with this woman I’ve chosen to focus on, and I think it’s great. It shows us just how complicated slavery was not just for regular folks, for enslaved people themselves and for fugitives and free blacks, but also for slave owners, who for various reasons by the 1790s were thinking differently about slave ownership.”

  While George may have held misgivings about slavery—culminating in his decision to emancipate his slaves after his death—Judge’s escape after five years spent cycling between Mount Vernon and Philadelphia presented him with a problem requiring a discreet solution. At the time, he was distracted by the 1796 election and the coming succession of John Adams to the presidency.

  “The last thing that [George] Washington wanted to do was have much attention paid to him running after an enslaved young woman,” Dunbar said.

  Judge had fled Philadelphia by sea and settled in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where she passed as a free woman. Dunbar found evidence that Judge married a black sailor named Jack Staines, and their marriage announcement was printed just inches away from a newspaper column about George’s farewell address to the nation.

  “It’s [already] amazing that she resisted him and got married, but then she’s kind of contesting him in print,” Dunbar said.

  Yet marriage didn’t bring Judge respite from her life as a fugitive. Shortly after her arrival in Portsmouth, Judge was spotted on the streets by Elizabeth Langdon, the daughter of George’s associate Senator John Langdon. This catalyzed George’s first attempt to “recover” Judge, in which he deputized a local customs official to approach her and argue that her life on Mount Vernon would be far better than life as a free woman. (Ironically, this circumvented the Fugitive Slave Act, which called for a judge to sign off on the recovery of a runaway slave.) Judge told the customs official that she would meet him—and the ship that would return her to Virginia—at the docks, but she never showed. In his letter to the president admitting to his failure, the customs official sympathized with Judge, even proposing that George consider gradually emancipating his slaves.

  But George wasn’t finished yet. He tried twice more to recover Judge, first with a similar plea to “reason” and then with chains. By George’s third attempt, Judge had fled Portsmouth for the small town of Greenland, eight miles outside of Portsmouth, where she would live out the remainder of her long life.

  Screen Shot 2015-10-26 at 4.07.05 PM.png
  “Of course we want a happy ending for compelling histories like Ona’s story,” Dunbar said. Reality, however, held a different course for Judge, who experienced daily indignities as a domestic laborer and saw her husband and then her children die one by one.

  “In the book, I never use the word free or freedom,” Dunbar said. “Because Judge wasn’t that. She lived as a fugitive for half a century. And what she experienced, this was what life was like for the majority of free black people at that time in America. And that’s what I wanted people to understand. To, in some ways, challenge the myth of the North as the land of milk and honey and opportunity.”

  “What Ona’s story tells us is not just the fragility of a fugitive’s life, but of all black people’s lives at that moment,” Dunbar continued. “Because you have to ask the question: How free is free if slavery exists right next door? What does your freedom mean if, at any moment, you can be captured against your will?”

  As for George, Dunbar thinks that his response to Judge’s escape goes against the theory that he eventually viewed slavery as evil. “It’s convenient to think that [he] knew slavery was wrong and therefore freed his slaves, but it’s clear that he was never at any moment willing to live without the comforts of slavery in his lifetime. He wanted to make sure that the comfort and luxury that came with human bondage were present for his wife.”

  George, Dunbar notes in her book, did not truly emancipate his slaves upon his death, but rather ordered that they be freed upon Martha’s death. While Martha would emancipate George’s slaves before her death, she refused to do the same for her own slaves.

  “We know that [George] Washington had no direct heirs,” Dunbar said, “and I can’t help but think that it would have been a much more difficult decision to emancipate all of his enslaved people—a tremendous amount of wealth—had he had children of his own. Without children, he was able to do what maybe others had contemplated. And while that’s worth mentioning, I don’t necessarily believe that makes him the hero we all want to believe him to be.”

  Screen Shot 2015-10-26 at 4.07.05 PM.png
  Although Never Caught chronicles events that are centuries old, the book has garnered attention for its relevance to current American politics. “I had absolutely no idea that this book would come out at a moment of such turbulence…but I really can’t think of a better moment for a book to arrive where a 22-year old black woman resists the President of the United States. If that isn’t a kind of poignant and important history lesson for all of us, I don’t know what is.”

  “If a woman of no means—who is literally considered the property of Martha Washingtond—stands up and resists, it makes you ask the question: If Ona Judge could do it, what are the rest of us doing?” Dunbar added. “We have to realize that to resist at moments that are the most dangerous and difficult puts almost more power into that action. It’s one thing to resist when the stakes are relatively low. But when you resist and everything is riding on the line—that means something.”

  *For clarity, George Washington is referred to as “George” and Martha Washington as “Martha” in this article.

• Pictorial - https://pictorial.jezebel.com/reconstructing-the-life-of-ona-judge-the-enslaved-woma-1794512425

  Reconstructing the Life of Ona Judge, the Enslaved Woman Who Fled George Washington

  Kelly Faircloth
  4/21/17 12:00pmFiled to: AMERICAN REVOLUTION
  25.0K
  68
  44

  Photograph by Whitney Thomas.
  “Absconded from the household of the President of the United States on Saturday afternoon, ONEY JUDGE,” read the advertisement in Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser on May 24, 1796. Decades later, she would reappear in abolitionist newspapers the Granite Freeman and the Liberator to tell her own story of her escape.

  In Never Caught, professor Erica Armstrong Dunbar reconstructs as best she can the life of a woman who was intimately connected with the American’s first family, but whose story is much less well known. When George Washington took his place as chief executive, Ona was among the enslaved brought from Mount Vernon, as Martha Washington’s personal attendant. She was with the family as they followed the nation’s capitol from New York to Philadelphia. Her time in Pennsylvania technically should have brought her liberty, as adult slaves within the state for more than six months were supposed to be set free; instead, the Washingtons began shuttling Ona and her fellow enslaved back and forth between Philadelphia and Mount Vernon.

  Finally, in 1796, facing the prospect of being blithely handed over to Martha Washington’s granddaughter as a wedding gift, she decided to run. Her life thereafter was hard, but Washington and his heirs never managed to track her down.

  With Never Caught, Dunbar uses the life of Ona Judge to tell the story of slavery in early America, providing a new perspective on the nation’s earliest days. We discussed how she went about telling Ona’s story; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

  JEZEBEL: How did you initially find the story of Ona Judge?

  Erica Armstrong Dunbar: I was working on my first book, A Fragile Freedom, and I was in the archives looking through old newspapers. I wanted to see what everyday life was like in the late 18th century—what was in the newspaper, what were people reading. So I was reading through old newspapers and was reading one that was called The Philadelphia Gazette, and I came across a runaway slave advertisement. And I thought, huh, okay, well, there were runaway slave advertisements in the papers at this point in time. That’s not particularly odd. But I realized that it was from the President’s House and I thought, okay, this is really interesting. The ad goes on to describe a woman they called Oney Judge—I believe that was the diminutive of her name, and I call her Ona, that’s the name she went by toward the end of her life and a marker of adult dignity. I thought, okay, why don’t I know this story? Why don’t I know this woman’s name? What happened to her?

  In many ways the story was with me for years. I couldn’t let go of it. I couldn’t shake it. And so I returned to it. And all in all, the book took about nine years of researching and writing in order to complete.

  As a historian, how do you go about reconstructing the life of someone who—partly as a function of the way the institution of slavery worked and partly by design because she was technically a fugitive for her whole life—left so few traces?

  It’s hard!

  You know, I thought to myself when I first started the project, “Why has no one written on her? This is crazy. It’s an enslaved woman who ran off from the Washingtons and left interviews!” And about three years into the project I realized, oh, nobody’s done this because it’s really hard, because she’s a fugitive and she lived a very clandestine life for nearly half a century.

  Fortunately, she left interviews, which for most of the enslaved did not happen and is a rarity and we’re fortunate that we have those. But the other piece is that George Washington kept fantastic records of everyday life at Mount Vernon, in Philadelphia, in New York, and those records allowed me to piece together more of what was happening, on the everyday level, through Ona’s escape. For black people, for women in particular, we often don’t find ourselves, our voices, in the archives, and we don’t find them there because for the most part, many of us were illiterate or distanced from writing or leaving a written word, and that’s how historians write history. For me, or for anyone who does the history of the enslaved or women, we often have to read between the lines the stuff that is actually not present. There’s no way I could have written Never Caught had I not written my first book, A Fragile Freedom, which was about how black women became free in the north, and I was looking specifically at Philadelphia. So in those spaces where I didn’t necessarily have a piece of evidence, I could speculate—and I’m very careful to make certain that people understand where I’m speculating about Ona’s life—in part because that’s my field, I’m an expert in 19th century black women’s history.

  And so all of these things came together, which is careful record examinations, understanding the nuances in black women’s lives at that time period and also just spending a lot of time trying to trace family lineage, her background, and that also just takes a tremendous amount of time. And then trying to piece together, which was the most difficult part, her life in New Hampshire, because she was undercover for most of it. But I did have those moments of triumph where I found documents in the archives that let me show the reader, look, this is when she marries, and this is who she marries, and much of it came from announcements in the paper or obituaries or county records. These were the things that allowed me to bring these little shards, these fragments of a story to kind of bring them together.

  You’re a historian, but you’re really a detective when you’re writing this kind of work.

  George Washington, Martha Washington, and Martha’s two children from a previous marriage, circa 1761. Photo via Getty Images.
  She runs away from the President’s house. What was her position within the President’s house?

  So, Ona Judge and six other enslaved people are taken to New York, where the nation’s first capital is. There are seven enslaved people that go, only two women, and Ona’s one of them. And Ona really becomes, and had already really become, Martha Washington’s top slave, for the lack of a better term or phrase. She was responsible for the most intimate of responsibilities with Martha. She would help her bathe, she would help brush her hair,she would help her with her clothing and her wardrobe. Ona was a seamstress so she used to make Martha Washington’s clothing, but as the kind of pressures of being the First Lady grew, Martha started to wear more store-bought clothing. She was always on call for Martha, so when Martha went on social visits or had people over to visit, Ona was available to help.

  YOU’RE A HISTORIAN, BUT YOU’RE REALLY A DETECTIVE WHEN YOU’RE WRITING THIS KIND OF WORK.
  One of the things I try to demonstrate in the book is that for what we call a domestic slave, her responsibilities were unyielding. There was very little in the way of free time or space away from the people who called themselves your owner. She more than likely slept in the same room as one of the Washington’s grandchildren, who came to live with them in New York and Philadelphia.

  And when she did run off, this infuriated Martha and also was a bit bewildering, as well, to both Martha and George. We see that in the runaway slave advertisement, when they say, basically, we don’t know why she’s run off. For a modern reader, we’re like, well, she was a slave. That’s why she ran off. That’s a good enough reason. But the correspondence that went back and forth, it really demonstrates how the Washingtons thought that they were “benevolent” slaveholders, that they were good slaveholders, that there’s no reason to want to run off. And Ona proved them wrong.

  One of the interesting points your book makes is that, obviously, a lot of our popular narratives about slavery are pretty bad. But there’s this idea that working in the fields was cruel and horrible and backbreaking but working in the house is somehow less bad. But you make it very clear that it’s just a different—

  A different bad.

  That was one of my goals with the book, was to really dismantle the myth of the house slave and the supposed privileges that came with that position. For so long there’s been this narrative that has the house slave against the field slave. And aside from the fact that they’re horribly stereotypic and not complicated, Ona’s life I think shows us how untrue that really was and that for her, really from the age of 10 up until 22, when she runs away, is pretty much working in the house and learning what it meant to be a “house slave,” someone who was under the constant microscopic watch of their owners. And you know, I make this point in the book, where I say there are no slave quarters to run to when she’s in Philadelphia or New York, where she can visit with friends or laugh or love. None of that is available for her. She is with the Washingtons all of the time and her work is unyielding. And so I’m glad you point out that comment because that was really one of my goals with this book, to show a new understanding and appreciation of what it meant to be a “house slave,” a domestic slave, and working in the house. And Ona’s story gives us that.

  So what’s the event that triggers Ona’s decision to run? Because she’s in Philadelphia and they have this wild scheme where they’re going to circumvent Pennsylvania law by sending them back to Mount Vernon every six months and she finally decides it’s time to take her chances. What finally pushes her to chance it?

  I think there are a couple of things that come together that force—that give Ona the agency to take her own life into her hands and direct her life away from the Washingtons. So these events that come together, one, living for seven years in the north and watching black freedom basically in front of her eyes. She sees free black men and women living a life that was almost unimaginable in a place like Mount Vernon and even very different from what she saw in New York. Knowing that she was in the minority, that she was enslaved, maybe one of a hundred or so in Philadelphia, while there are over 6,000 free blacks in the city—she sees that there’s a different way to live life. And she also notes that black men and women, that they’re entrepreneurs, they’re in the streets, they’re selling fresh fruits and vegetables and oysters and pepperpot soup and they’re building Mother Bethel Church around the corner and she sees this with her own eyes. There’s no way the Washingtons could protect her from witnessing black freedom. And I think this was a huge influence on her as she came of age. She grew up in the north, for the most part, at least her young adult years, 16 to 22. She watches this in front of her eyes. It just lays itself bare.

  But it’s really the change in her ownership plans that pushes Ona to make a final decision. And what she realizes is that no matter how loyal she believed she had been to Martha Washington, it didn’t matter. Martha Washington had made a decision to give Ona Judge away to her granddaughter, Eliza Park Custis Law. Eliza had announced she was getting married and the Washingtons didn’t know this guy and were concerned and Martha felt she was kind of unprepared for this marriage, which in the end was sort of true. So she said, well, I can’t be there to help, but I’m going to give her my very best slave, sort of as a wedding gift.

  We’re not quite certain exactly how Ona catches wind of this but she knows at some point she’s going to become the property of Eliza Custis Law. When this becomes made very clear to Ona, she makes a decision, she says in her interview, that she would never be her slave. It shows us that, you know, there are comparisons—there’s a scale with owners. The Washingtons she managed to survive and live with them, but she did not think that going to live with Eliza Custis Law would do anything but offer her a doomed life. And so as the Washingtons were packing up to go on their summer trip back to Mount Vernon, to reset the slave clock in Pennsylvania, she had made a decision to run off. She never tells us the names of the free black men and women who help her, except she tells us that it was the free black community that really helps her plan her escape. And she doesn’t give us their names for good reason—it was a federal crime to help a runaway.

  She packs her things quietly while they are packing and she says she doesn’t know where she is going to go, actually, but she knew that if she didn’t leave at that moment, she would never have the chance at freedom.

  It’s these things coming together—a change in her ownership, the influence of a free black community in Philadelphia—these things propel Ona to basically steal herself from the Washingtons.

  Philadelphia, the corner of Third and Market Street in 1799. The President’s House was on Market, between Fifth and Sixth. Photo via Getty Images.
  It’s interesting the way you talk about Eliza Park Custis Law. You can see how somebody could take her—she doesn’t follow the rules and she’s gonna march to the beat of a different drummer— and write an entire book in this lionizing way. But you make it very clear that even as she bucks society’s rules, she’s a temperamental woman and as an enslaved person, you’re not going to want to be stuck dealing with her.

  Right, exactly. There are two ways to look at that. In some ways, because she is a woman who marches to the beat of a different drum, who has her own way of living life, she’s kind of empowered yet she’s also thrown under the bus. Her relatives say that she’s kind of crazy, she’s volatile. She’s trapped by the conventions of 18th century life. As a woman she’s not able to make the same decisions that a man would make without being labelled “crazy” or “sentimental” or “volcanic” or whatever. And her family members do kind of paint her in this picture. Now I will say later on she does live a somewhat interesting, strange life and I do think that she was just a little—she was different.

  But the other side of that was Ona was very clear in her words that she was never going to be her slave. She had spent enough time around her—they were about the same age—that she knew that this just could not be a situation that would work for her. And I think it’s important because it tells us that the enslaved made judgements about their ownership. They knew situations that they could work out and situations that were impossible. And Ona saw this as an impossible situation.

  Part of the reason why at the end of the book I do an epilogue on Ona’s sister is because I think it’s really important to see how complicated slavery and freedom is at this moment. The reader is left asking, well, if she had stayed—if she had gone off and lived with Eliza—would Ona have gotten her freedom at some point? We don’t know the answer to that. We know that her sister Philadelphia, who is left or forced to carry the burden that Ona refused to carry, because of her relationship with her husband William Costin and his influence, her life went in a different direction. What I think is so beautiful about Philadelphia’s life, about Ona Judge’s life—and then what we see at the very end of the book with Ona’s namesake, Oney, her niece—all three of these women are looking for and finding freedom or a semblance of freedom in different ways. It reminds us that no matter what your situation was as an enslaved person, you were always looking for a way out of human bondage. And that there were multiple ways of doing it, whether you ran off and you were a fugitive, whether you were emancipated by an owner for whatever reason, or purchased by someone and then eventually set free. These were the mechanisms that black people were using in the 18th and 19th centuries to find some measure of freedom in a nation that counted them as three-fifths of a human being and as property.

  That’s part of the reason why I brought all of these stories in together at the end, to give us the opportunity to look at the lives of women, not just Ona’s life. Ona’s life is the perfect portal for understanding the beginning of the United States of America through the eyes of the enslaved, and that’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to do a hatchet job on George Washington or Martha. I simply wanted to tell the story of the early days of the new nation in a different way and through the eyes of an enslaved woman, and Ona gives us that opportunity because she moves. She goes from Virginia to New York to Pennsylvania to New Hampshire, pretty much covering the south, the Mid Atlantic and New England. So we get to see how different slavery and freedom is in each of these places and look at it through her lens as opposed to the tradition top-down Founding Fathers lens. And there’s interest in that right now, clearly, with Hamilton and other things that are out right now. We’re interested in looking at this history in new ways. And that’s what I tried to do with Never Caught.

• Simon & Schuster - http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Erica-Armstrong-Dunbar/547758150

  Erica Armstrong Dunbar
  Erica Armstrong Dunbar is the Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers University. She also serves as Director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Her first book, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City was published by Yale University Press in 2008. She is also the author of Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave Ona Judge.

• Rutgers - http://history.rutgers.edu/faculty-directory/788-dunbar-erica-armstrong

  Print Email
  Erica Armstrong Dunbar
  Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History
  Ph.D., Columbia University
  M.A., Columbia University
  B.A., University of Pennsylvania
  At Rutgers since 2017
  303A Van Dyck Hall
  848-932-8352
  erica.dunbar@rutgers.edu
  https://ericaarmstrongdunbar.com

  RESEARCH INTERESTS
  I am a late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century scholar with a specialization in African American women’s history. I have interests in urban slavery, emancipation studies, and the intersection of race and gender in American history. My focus on early African American history serves as a natural bridge to my directorship of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

  TEACHING AREAS
  African American History to 1865

  African American Women’s History

  American Slavery

  PUBLICATIONS
  Books

  The Politics of History: A New Generation of American Historians Writes Back. Co-authored with, Jim Downs, Timothy Patrick McCarthy, and T.K. Hunter. (In progress)
  Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. (Atria/37 Ink, February 2017)
  A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City. (Yale University Press, 2008)
  Selected Articles/Essays

  “Ringing the Freedom Bell” The Nation (November 2016)
  Daina Ramey Berry and Erica Armstrong Dunbar, “The Unbroken Chain of Enslaved African Resistance and Rebellion.” In The Birth of a Nation: Nat Turner and the Making of a Movement, edited by N. Parker, 35-61. New York: Atria/Simon and Schuster, September 2016.
  “[“]I knew that if I went back to Virginia, I should never get my liberty.” Ona Judge Staines: The President’s Runaway Slave.” In Women in Early America, 225-245, edited by Tom Foster. New York: NYU Press, 2015.
  Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, guest co-editor of special issue on the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. (January 2013)
  Freedom Bound: The Sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation – with Readex, a division of Newsbank. Volume 7 Issue 3 (October 2012)
  “African-American Women and Indentured Servitude.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, edited by Bonnie G. Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
  “Writing for True Womanhood: African American Women's Writings and the Anti-Slavery Struggle.” In Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation, edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart, 299-318. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007
  “A Mental and Moral Feast:” Reading, Writing, and Sentimentality in Black Philadelphia” in The Journal of Women’s History (Spring 2004)
  Op-Eds

  “Melania Trump’s Reluctance Matches a FLOTUS Before Her” TIME.COM (January 2017)
  “George Washington, Slave Catcher” The New York Times (February 2015)
  “Echoes of Slavery Era in Reaction to Ferguson” Philadelphia Inquirer (December 4, 2014)

• Erica Armstrong Dunbar Home Page - https://ericaarmstrongdunbar.com/

  ABOUT

  I LOVE A GOOD STORY...
  When I was a young girl I would read for hours at a time, completely captivated and lost between the covers of a book. I sat in small classrooms at my Philadelphia Quaker school and found myself more and more attracted to what I called “true stories” or what I would later recognize as the field of history.

  I attended the University of Pennsylvania where I received my BA in the departments of History and what was then called the Department of Afro-American Studies. By the age of twenty-one, I began my formal journey to the historical profession, eventually receiving my MA and PhD from Columbia University. I followed my interests and my heart- I became a historian of the African American experience and I committed myself to telling the stories of black women who lived, loved, struggled, worked, prayed, and fought to survive in a nation that still recognized many of them as property.

  My writing, teaching, and lecturing focus on the uncomfortable concepts of slavery, racial injustice, and gender inequality. While there is deep pain associated with these topics, I marvel at the incredible triumph of survival and the beautiful history of resistance.

  black women website 9.jpegblack woman website 2.jpegblack women website 10.jpegblack woman website 3.jpegblack woman website 4 .jpegBlack woman website.jpegblack women website 8.jpegblack women website 4 .jpegblack women website 11.jpegblack women website 5.jpegblack women website 7.jpegblack women website 12.jpegblack women website 13.jpegblack women website 14.jpeg
  PROFESSOR

  CHARLES & MARY BEARD PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT RUTGERS UNIVERSITY
  I am honored to be counted among only a handful of distinguished scholars who study the lives of women of African descent who called America their home during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am a social historian, a scholar of urban history, women’s history, and Philadelphia history. In addition to my books, I have written articles, essays, encylcopedia entries, and book reviews and I have given numerous scholarly talks across the country. I enjoy teaching undergraduates and doctoral students who work with me on projects connected to African American history and the larger African diaspora.

  DIRECTOR OF THE PROGRAM IN AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AT THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA

  In 2011, I became the Inaugural Director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia. The program brings together scholars and interested members of the public to explore and discuss the experiences of people of African descent in the Americas from the beginnings of European colonization through 1900. At the Library Company I work with some of the very best graduate students as well as junior and senior scholars, who are contributing groundbreaking work to the field. The Program in African American History is committed to the strong need to diversify the professoriate and at the Library Company of Philadelphia, I work with a growing network of scholars who support and promote this mission.

Never Caught: Ona Judge, the Washingtons,
and the Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway
Slave
Laura Chanoux
Booklist.
113.11 (Feb. 1, 2017): p16.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Never Caught: Ona Judge, the Washingtons, and the Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave.
By Erica Armstrong Dunbar.
Feb. 2017. 304p. Atria/37INK, $25 (9781501126390). 973.4.
Ona Judge was born into slavery as the property of Martha Washington. She became a favorite house slave,
attending to Martha at all hours of the day. When George Washington won the presidency, she joined the
First Family in New York and later Philadelphia. At the time, Pennsylvania law declared that slaves must be
emancipated after six months in the state. In order to skirt the law, Washington regularly sent his slaves
back to Virginia to "reset" their six-month clocks and keep them enslaved. When Martha Washington
decided to give Ona to her daughter as a wedding present, Ona escaped to New Hampshire. The
Washingtons pursued her for years, refusing to accept that she wanted to be free. In this narrative history,
professor Dunbar explores the horrific nature of slavery through the lives of Ona and other slaves in
Washington's household. Ona's story provides critical insights into the experiences of slaves and free black
people in the antebellum period. Never Caught is an important read for anyone interested in American
history.--Laura Chanoux
YA: YAs interested in American history will connect with both Dunbar's nuanced explorations of difficult
subject matter and Ona's fascinating life. LC.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Chanoux, Laura. "Never Caught: Ona Judge, the Washingtons, and the Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway
Slave." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 16. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A481244736/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a1658bec.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481244736
12/24/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1514150747588 2/4
Dunbar, Erica Armstrong: NEVER
CAUGHT
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 1, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Dunbar, Erica Armstrong NEVER CAUGHT 37 Ink/Atria (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 2, 7 ISBN: 978-1-
5011-2639-0
The story of a favored slave of the Washingtons who had the "impudence" to flee a life of benevolent
servitude.A runaway slave who happened to be among the household of the first president of the United
States, Ona Judge Staines (1773-1848) shared her break for freedom nearly 50 years after the fact in an
account in the May 1845 issue of the Granite Freeman. Dunbar (Black Studies and History/Univ. of
Delaware; A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City, 2008)
unearthed an advertisement for the runaway slave and became determined to tell her story--and she tells it
well. A "dower" slave--i.e., she was the property of Martha Washington's first husband, Daniel Parke
Custis--Ona was born in Mount Vernon, the product of a favored house seamstress, Betty, and a white
indentured servant, Andrew Judge. At age 15, Ona, slender, fair of complexion, and a good seamstress, was
chosen among the few household slaves out of hundreds to make the trek to the temporary capital of New
York City, where Washington had just been sworn in as the new president of the nascent republic. She
would mingle with the free blacks of the bustling city, and, later in Philadelphia, when the capital was
moved there, she was responsible for over six years for Martha's wardrobe, a role that relieved her of the
drudgeries of kitchen and field work. In Philadelphia, there was a growing abolition movement, and when it
was decided by the Washingtons that Ona was going to be given as a wedding present to the first lady's
objectionable granddaughter, Ona had had enough. On May 21, 1796, she slipped out of the executive
mansion in Philadelphia, boarded a transport to New Hampshire (probably with help from the free black
community), and started a new life there--but not without being hounded by Washington's slave hunters. A
startling, well-researched slave narrative that seriously questions the intentions of our first president.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Dunbar, Erica Armstrong: NEVER CAUGHT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A471901853/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1ba26b65.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471901853
12/24/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1514150747588 3/4
Dunbar, Erica Armstrong. Never Caught:
Ona Judge, the Washingtons, and the
Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave
Nicholas Graham
Library Journal.
141.19 (Nov. 15, 2016): p98.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Dunbar, Erica Armstrong. Never Caught: Ona Judge, the Washingtons, and the Relentless Pursuit of Their
Runaway Slave. Atria. Feb. 2017.272p. illus. notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9781501126390. $26; ebk. ISBN
9781501126437. HIST
As President George Washington's second term was coming to a close, one of his household slaves escaped
to freedom, never to return. Oney "Ona" Judge (1773-1848) was born into slavery and worked as a
dressmaker and attendant for First Lady Martha Washington. Her story is remarkable for its daring, success,
and what it reveals about the personal lives and beliefs of the Washingtons. Judge fled to New Hampshire
where she lived for nearly another half century as a freewoman, despite repeated attempts by an angry
Washington to capture and return her to his plantation. Dunbar (history, Univ. of Delaware) has the difficult
task of reconstructing a slave narrative when few facts are from Judge herself. Other than a handful of
interviews given at the end of her life, Judge's experiences were never recorded, leaving Dunbar to build the
account from the extensive record of the Washington family's domestic life, filling in likely details from
other slave autobiographies. VERDICT This work adds new insights into the little-known story of Ona
Judge and provides an important look at America's first president from the perspective of a woman he
enslaved. Recommended for readers interested in U.S. history.--Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Graham, Nicholas. "Dunbar, Erica Armstrong. Never Caught: Ona Judge, the Washingtons, and the
Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave." Library Journal, 15 Nov. 2016, p. 98. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A470367231/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c061b51e.
Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A470367231
A slave's flight from our first president
Matt Damsker
USA Today. (Feb. 21, 2017): Lifestyle: p05D.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Byline: Matt Damsker, Special for USA TODAY

If there's an irony to the fact that February, Black History Month, also contains Presidents Day, Erica Armstrong Dunbar's new book brings that irony into sharp relief.

Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (37Ink/Atria, 253 pp., **** out of four) is a chronicle that throws considerable shade on America's founding fathers for their slaveholding hypocrisy.

In this case, we learn how our first president, George Washington, skirted Philadelphia's anti-slavery laws during the five years he and his wife, Martha, resided there, while the nation's eventual capitol was being built along the Potomac River. As Dunbar, a professor of black American history at the University of Delaware, recounts, Washington brazenly cycled his slaves in and out of his Virginia home, Mount Vernon, to avoid Philadelphia's time limit on slaveholding.

But this legal issue is hardly the book's subject. Instead, the human drama of one particular slave, Ona Judge, a Mount Vernon-born mulatto woman who became Martha Washington's prized servant, takes center stage. For in her life away from the Southern locus of slavery, Ona Judge breathed the freer air of the Northern states, and in 1796 she stole away from the Washingtons, dying free in New Hampshire, outliving her owners by nearly a half century.

The Judge saga is a well-known matter of human bondage and presidential history, but Dunbar's book is touted as the first full-length account of Judge's life. Even for those who know the basics, Never Caught is a crisp and compulsively readable feat of research and storytelling.

Indeed, Judge suffered as much in freedom as in slavery, it seems, preferring a shadowed, secret life to the relative privilege of her slave stature. For her pains, George Washington never ceased in his efforts to recapture her, through hired minions and with an obsessiveness that reminds one of Javert, the iconic pursuer of Les Miserables.

Believing at one point that Judge, who would become Ona Staines through marriage, was pregnant, Washington could only have thought that his legal property had increased by the sum and value of an unborn slave. Strategic as ever, he encouraged a customs collector named Whipple to spirit her quietly to Virginia rather than to Philadelphia, lest the last few months of Washington's presidency endure bad publicity in the North.

But Whipple, and others, failed in their efforts to persuade their fugitive quarry to leave New Hampshire, where a free black community and the strong stirrings of abolition protected her to a fair degree. A final attempt to recapture her by force failed when the Staineses slipped away.

And so Ona Judge Staines lived free, though in the sort of poverty that most ex-slaves could rarely overcome. She would grieve the deaths of two daughters, and sorrow over the enslaved family members she had left behind.

CAPTION(S):

photo Gannett Photo Network

Chanoux, Laura. "Never Caught: Ona Judge, the Washingtons, and the Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 16. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A481244736/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017. "Dunbar, Erica Armstrong: NEVER CAUGHT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A471901853/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017. Graham, Nicholas. "Dunbar, Erica Armstrong. Never Caught: Ona Judge, the Washingtons, and the Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave." Library Journal, 15 Nov. 2016, p. 98. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A470367231/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017. Damsker, Matt. "A slave's flight from our first president." USA Today, 21 Feb. 2017, p. 05D. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A482115043/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.

Word Count