sentences:  Seventeen of these, fourteen men and three women, escaped to a British warship that anchored in the Potomac River near Mount Vernon in 1781.In general, the best chance of success lay with second- or third-generation African-American slaves who had good English, possessed skills that would allow them to support themselves as free people and were in close enough contact with their masters to receive special privileges.Thus it was that Judge, an especially talented seamstress, and Hercules escaped in 1796 and 1797 respectively and eluded recapture.