Two prizewinning books detail the life of a woman who refused to be a possession of the nation’s first president and the Michigan city’s troubled past

Ona Judge, the enslaved woman who fled President George Washington to live for decades as a fugitive, gave just two interviews in her lifetime. The will of Lisette Denison, born in 1786, is the only surviving document generated by an enslaved resident of Detroit.

From such tatters of history, researchers have reshaped the historical narrative around slavery in the US, building a fuller picture of the country’s greatest crime.

And this week, two of those historians were celebrated for presenting the first in-depth portraits of Judge and of slavery in Detroit.

At the Yale Club in New York, Tiya Miles and Erica Armstrong Dunbar accepted the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the most outstanding nonfiction book in English on the subject of slavery, abolition or antislavery movements. The award was established in 1999 in honor of the slave from Maryland who escaped to become one of the most celebrated abolitionists and orators in history.

In The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits, Miles brings to light a little-acknowledged world where native children were traded for animal pelts.

In her exploration of Judge’s life in Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge, Dunbar presents a stark portrait of life for black women in the 18th century and of the president who refused to free her from slavery.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Erica Armstrong Dunbar, author of Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. Photograph: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

“To run off, as a twentysomething-year-old woman and to make a life for herself was courageous and almost unimaginable, given who her owners were, but I think the fact that she does it and is successful at remaining never caught allows readers to see her, her story and to recognize her the way we recognize George Washington as a hero,” Dunbar told the Guardian.

Judge was enslaved in the Washington household, where she drew baths for Martha Washington and cared for her when she was sick. She would go to stage productions and the circus with the family but never had freedom of her own and was constantly under surveillance.

Eventually, she fled the Washington household while the family was having dinner, aided by free black people in Philadelphia.

The book is called Never Caught because the Washington family never gave Judge her freedom and for the rest of her life she was technically a fugitive.

“She knew that although she escaped the clutches of her owners, that no matter what she did, she was still property and that she could be, legally, dragged back into the job of slavery at any moment,” Dunbar said. “So she lived her life as a fugitive, looking over her shoulder.”

Dunbar, the Charles and Mary Beard professor of history at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said Judge’s life resembles what is happening with undocumented immigrants in the US today.

“We’re asking those same questions about people who are living in the United States and constantly looking over their shoulders and thinking about whether or not they have the ability to live in this country legally or they will be sent back somewhere else,” she said.

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There are few primary sources about Judge, and what there is is mostly written by white men in positions of power. But Dunbar does not use that an excuse, instead building a world using her decades of research into the lives of black women in the urban north in the 18th and 19th century to shape a dusty, post-revolutionary city. Deploying the words “could have” and “may” with precision, she helps the reader form their own vision of life for the enslaved, Judge taking center stage as she walks the streets of Philadelphia, passing the homes of free black people before returning to her life of forced labor in the home of the first president.

Dunbar calls her technique “informed speculation”.

“In many ways to do this as a historian is a risk,” Dunbar said. “It kind of goes against everything we’re trained to do as scholars. But I argue if we want to get at the stories and lived experiences of people of African descent from the 18th and 19th century, there is almost no other way to do it.”

To write enslaved people back into history, researchers must look at documents in new ways, she says, must dig deep into documents for a shred of evidence about the enslaved and piece together fragments.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest George Washington never gave Ona Judge her freedom and for the rest of her life she was technically a fugitive. Photograph: Stock Montage/Getty Images

To capture this in Detroit, which has no historical marker acknowledging its own history of slavery, Miles said she looked at documents with enslaved people at the center.

“If enslaved people are talked about at all, which usually they are not, but if they are, they are going to be in the margins of the stories we tell about American history,” said Miles, a professor at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

“Once you hunt for them, you realize that there are more people there than you thought to begin with.”

What Miles found transformed her understanding of Detroit. It is, she writes, “not the scene of natural disaster, but rather the scene of a crime – a crime committed by individuals, merchant cabals, government officials and empires foaming at the mouth for more”.

In a short period, Detroit belonged to its indigenous population, the French, the British and the US. These groups were in the wild north, isolated from other parts of the country, and the legal conditions of the territory were frequently changing. This meant the terms of slavery were constantly shifting too.

When the Northwest Ordinance was adopted in 1787, it meant French and British families could keep their slaves and their children could inherit those slaves, but new Americans could not have slaves. Those Americans could, however, marry into slave-holding families.

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“It was a place where various groups of people, and often Detroiters as a whole, felt they were vulnerable to attacks from various quarters,” Miles said. “So in many ways they had to turn to each other, they had to turn inward and that meant relationships formed in surprising ways.”

Miles said Detroit’s history of slavery was buried under the celebration of the city as a key stop on the underground railroad, a network that routed the enslaved to free territories. She said those celebrations do “productive cultural work”, but have been used in Detroit to ignore the earlier, more complicated period in which the city was complicit with slavery.

“There was a silence around this,” she said, “and I couldn’t ignore the silence.”