Varying Motives during the Epidemic of Freedom in Early United States
Freedom is Contagious
One of the most important documents of the United States of America, the Declaration of Independence, demonstrates that all men are created equal. However, history proves that the utopian promise was half-empty: The institution of slavery and indentured servitude, which largely contributed to resolving the chronic labor shortage from the very beginning of the American colonization, strongly resisted any attempts to abolish it. Enslaved African Americans had been gradually emancipated and became free, but that was almost totally dependent on the slaveowner’s will. Therefore, some enslaved people gambled their lives to evacuate the cruelty, and if succeeded, lived the rest of their lives as a runaway, constantly fearing getting caught back in inhumane cages. This seeming contradiction of the promise of freedom and the continuation of slavery makes almost no sense to contemporary readers. If they learn that George Washington, the first president of the United States and the most well-known founding father of the country, also held dozens of slaves during his life, the confusion gets furtherly intensified: How could no one stop the inhumanity, even though they knew it was wrong?
Erica A. Dunbar’s Never Caught: the Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge re-discovers Ona Judge, a courageous female who served for the first lady Martha Washington and ran away northwards to seek her freedom. Following the Washington family’s shuttling route between the significantly emancipated North and largely enslaved South, Dunbar urges that the president saw the flow of the Black liberation movement as an “epidemic” (64). This view not only pretenses the human instinct towards freedom, but also supposes the existence of plural views and dynamic contentions among them. The book suggests that the seemingly contradictory behaviors can be disentangled if we acknowledge there were no single but strongly polarized stances regarding slavery in the newly formed United States.
If contagious social turbulence, say, COVID, occurs, there could be two main thinking ways to solve the problem: one would restrict any random contacts to minimize loss, and the other would urge for fundamental social change. Southern slaveowners and enslaved people like Washingtons and their slaves acted as the former, and free Black communities in the Northern United States, especially Philadelphia, acted as the latter. Since both sides had understandable reasons as stated below, it is hard to make a clear dichotomy and simply accuse one party’s immorality. In other words, we should see the problem as not a contradiction but a continuum. In between two extremities of conservative and progressive ways, White northerners and Black fugitives acted with their own balance sheets regarding their everchanging political stance. Never Caught carefully depicts this bipolar political spectrum on slavery without any ad hoc moral presumptions.
Two Polarities: Conserve versus Progress
On the one end of the spectrum, people were trying to protect the status quo and be responsible for the tradition. Washington family and its enslaved people were the epithets of this extremity. They lived in a world that regards enslaved ones as not human but property (137). Even if they might have questioned its immorality, they were stringent on keeping up their daily roles and reassured themselves for the sake of responsibility (36).
George and Martha Washington, the strategist war hero couple, actively resisted anti-slavery and deliberately tried to re-catch the runaway, Ona. Their pursuit origins not only from personal resentment: even though they raged against Ona’s “ingratitude” (140) who betrayed the presidential couple’s benevolence to treat her more “like a family member than a slave” (138), there were also legal and economic reasons for them to seek the fugitive. In contrast to the southern states which were predominantly run by the enslaved labor force, the northern states, relatively independent of slaves, gradually enacted the laws of emancipation. Philadelphia, the new capital of the United States, required southern slaveholder Washington’s family to shuffle their slaves every six months not to lose them (66). George Washington had to carefully build up a slave-shuttling plan, not because of his greediness, but because lots of the enslaved were not his but bound to Martha-related Curtis estate (137). To avoid reimbursement worsening his “cash-strapped” (18) condition, he had ““to deceive” the [Northern] public” (67) and even to try “the act of [forced] capture” (150) of Ona if needed. By the concerted effect of these, the president could not help but sign the Fugitive Slave Act which legally pardoned “the capturing and reclaiming of fugitive slaves” (105) and try to benefit himself using the Act.
Most of the southern Black enslaved people were also strongly tied up with the concept of responsibility (36) struggling with the “uncertainty of life.” (23) In contrast to enslaved Ona who had the opportunity to become a “rarity” (65) in freeing city Philadelphia, most of Washington family’s slaves in Mount Vernon, Virginia, accepted the slavery as ordinary and constant. Although exceptional cases like Ona’s story created small turmoil in the slaves’ mind, recalling that freedom might be achieved given “the right opportunity,” the extremely low possibility of success made them remind Ona’s courage as a “legend,” not theirs (188-9). In the suffocating sight of their owners’ “constant and watchful eye,” (134) they had to accept their lack of any privacy or predictable future (87). Enslaved people were fully aware that any whimsical moment of the owner could irreversibly drive their life into a much worse condition. Lack of hope inhibited them from imagining radical social change and forced them to remain in their current circumstances.
Nevertheless, there was gradually emerging the opposite end of the ideological spectrum in the New England. In cities like Philadelphia or New York, lots of free Black people struggled to immerse themselves into the White-predominant society and prove their reliability. In the middle of “a frightening closeness to poverty,” (39) newly emancipated Black people had to realize the price of freedom: mostly illiterate and not well-educated, they worked in the dirtiest condition with “the smallest of financial rewards.” (80) Therefore, some of the heroic forerunners in Black rights movement such as Richard Allen and Absalom Jones of Pennsylvania (83) called for solidarity among free Black people. During the life-taking pandemic of yellow fever in 1793, the Black movement leaders believed their race was immune to the deadly disease and tried to help Whites’ health crisis. However, their good intentions were not enough to prevent them from adverse effects, such as accusations of robbing vulnerable White patients and their “rejected and scorned” reputation as “the inferior race.” (85)
During the epidemic of freedom, neither conservative nor progressive held the hegemony. Each side weighed their possible options with equally heavy pros and cons. Of course, there were also several oscillatory bridges between these two extremities in the spectrum, and they – Ona Judge and the northern White community, to name a few – eventually contributed to pushing the balance of slavery into the emancipatory side.
One Oscillatory Bridge: A Story of Ona Judge
Ona Judge, the former slave of Martha Washington, secretly left the presidential family in Philadelphia to restart her free new life in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. During and after his presidential service, George Washington dispatched two of his underlings to recatch her, first by sweet persuasion and second by force. However, Ona was so firm about not going back to Virginia, even if that choice promised her much better economic conditions than her vulnerable free state. When she was asked “why she did not remain” in slavery in an interview, she incited the first and foremost reason as that “she wanted to be free.” (205) Even though her desire for freedom was so strong and consistent, that did not mean that she could choose her way of life anytime in reality. There were equally compelling pros and cons in the “balance sheet” (93) of running away, making Ona stuck in the middle of the ideological spectrum stated above. The crucial factor that ultimately led Ona to step out of the door was Martha’s decision to give her slave to her newlywed granddaughter.
In the interview, Ona gave only two explicit reasons to run away – one was the notion of free, and the other was her disgruntlement to Eliza Curtis, Martha’s granddaughter (205). However, the author discovers several other reasons not/to escape slavery that might be unconscious. According to Dunbar, one of the main advantages of a free state was the legal “sanction” (98): Free Black people could own or change their labor, marry the ones they wanted to, and share properties and children by law. Considering the harshness of living conditions, the legal sanction such as marriage would act as not a restriction but a protection for Ona. Of course, most fugitives aged between 16 to 35 (102) and their stamina also helped young people like her to bet their life on the unknown world of freedom.
Being a fugitive was attractive but also had many downsides. If caught again, the enslaved people became subject to harsh physical punishments such as whipping or could even be sold to random overseer slaveowners. Even if the runaway succeeded, the fugitives had to say farewell to their enslaved families forever (94) and face the cruel reality of poverty and ridicule (184). What’s more, the family who ruled Ona was one of the most prestigious, (supposedly) wealthy, and (arguably) benevolent masters (133). Suspecting all pros and cons of achieving freedom in Philadelphia, Ona should have deeply contemplated alone, on whether or when she should commit to the mission.
Because Ona had all good or bad reasons to run away, she needed the crucial factor to ultimately tip the balance sheet. Dunbar urges Martha’s decision, to “bequeath Judge to Eliza Law as a wedding gift,” (95) gave Ona the critical “bravery, the grit, and the power to leave.” (93) Although both bizarre sexual interest of Mr. Law and the “stormy reputation” (96) of Mrs. Law must have bothered Ona’s mind, the most deeply disturbing feature of her fate would be the realization of her property-ness. To Martha, Ona was no more important than any slave who served the family and was replaceable at any time (95). This led her to tip her personal balance sheet to the road of freedom.
Another Oscillatory Bridge: Northern White Community
Ona’s tipping of personal balance sheet may not be sufficient to explain the whole history of Black emancipation: without the help of the social atmosphere that helped the mission, Ona might be re-caught, sold, or even dead. The second half of the story is mainly illuminated with the northern white people in the free-Black community, who contributed to letting the society move to freedom. White northerners were prestigious because they were able to ignore the problem and avoid any moral accusations regardless of their decisions toward the fugitives. There were also pros and cons for them to support Black people’s rights, and their several audacious decisions made a progress by saving some fugitives.
Why on earth would the northern free White people protect illegal runaway slaves from sending back to their home states? Realizing the contradiction of freedom and slavery was indeed a dominant reason. Confronting moral dilemma, White Americans “were sorting out their feelings” (136) towards Black people that they are not properties. Virtually no one was ignorant of the cruel condition of enslavement: even Washington’s stance had been softened to “gradual abolition” (149) in his later life. Northerners were easier to detect the strangeness of slavery than Southerners, partly because the number of Black residences itself was significantly low, about “2 or 3 percent” (121) in New Hampshire. Compared to southern states of plantation, northern states were relatively independent of enslaved labor, so they could detect and abolish the inhumane institution earlier.
However good their wills were, there were also strong pressures pushing White Northerners to ignore the dilemma and follow the force. Economic consideration played a large role: even though the revised tax code in 1789 declared the enslaved people “cease to be known and held as property,” (125) slaveowners deliberately misinterpreted the statement, perpetuated the slavery, and tried to avoid tax on slaves that were not properties anymore. Social and Political pressure from their fellow White communities, especially from southerners, was also significant. George Washington carefully asked for the “tricky task of attempting to reclaim a slave” to his friends in New Hampshire, urging that the tolerance only on Ona Judge would make her a “dangerous precedent” (164) to his other slaves. The friends in the northern area might partly understand Washington’s situation and worsened their agony.
Sharing all these considerations, Portsmouth’s customs collector Joseph Whipple, and Senator John Langdon had to decide whether to follow Washington’s order. To keep their moral sense, they had to think even more strategically and deliberately than Washington to declare audaciously that they couldn’t, thus wouldn’t, catch the fugitive. Washington’s attempts to recapture Ona ultimately failed. Furthermore, Whipple even dared to tell the first president of the United States that “gradual emancipation was the best route to follow.” (147)
Of course, this boldness does not come from nowhere: Several reasons ensured Whipple’s safety. The retirement as president was under Washington’s nose, and Whipple also knew that the soon-former-president had waned his political energy and governmental power. Furthermore, the regional and political distance between New Hampshire and George Washington was getting farther; Washington moved his residence from Philadelphia to his more southern-located hometown Virginia, and Whipple and Langdon “had shifted away from the Federalist Party” (152) which made them Federalist Washington’s political colleague. Everchanging political dynamics tipped another social balance sheet, keeping the autonomy and safety of the newly freed Ona Judge.
Many a Mickle Makes a Muckle
With her bold decision, Ona Judge changed her world from slavery to freedom. However, it would be hard to say that her surprising episode changed the world; Slavery and its abolishment continued extremely slowly, regardless of Ona’s existence. Black rights movements did not end at all, and chimes even for now.
The book Never Caught does not focus on Ona’s heroic character or exceptional motive: it depicts various agents’ pursuits and reasons in an ideological spectrum of slavery. Dealing with the contagious social change of African American emancipation, the typical northerners and southerners positioned themselves in the progressive and conservative ends respectively, and of course, there were also intermittent agents in between the extremities, wandering the spectrum and continuously questioning their very next step.
Individuals, including Ona, could work only as one bridge in a continuum, not as the total game-changer. As I stated above in Ona’s and Whipple’s stories, every tipping of individual balance sheet contributed to the gradual social change. As a precedent, a legend, a promise, an audacious, or a strategist – every small movement of all agents has pushed slightly the sluggish tip of the gigantic balance sheet of epidemic named Freedom, towards its prevalence nowadays.