Solomon Northup

Solomon Northup (born July 1808, died c. 1863) was a free-born African American from New York state noted for having been kidnapped while on business in Washington, DC in 1841 and sold into slavery at the age of 32 in the Deep South; in January 1853 he regained his freedom, one of very few to do so in such cases. Held in the Red River (Mississippi River) region of Louisiana for twelve years by different owners, he got news to his family, who contacted friends and enlisted the New York governor in his cause. New York state had passed a law in 1840 to recover blacks who had been kidnapped under such conditions.

Northup sued the slave traders in Washington, DC, but lost in the local court, as the District law prohibited him as a black man from testifying against whites. Returning to his family in New York, Northup became active in abolitionism. He published an account of his experiences in Twelve Years a Slave (1853) in his first year of freedom, and lectured widely on his experiences throughout the Northeast to end slavery. He was last known to be in Boston, Massachusetts in 1863, and the circumstances of his death are uncertain.

His memoir was reprinted in 1869. An annotated version was published in 1968. The memoir was adapted as a TV movie on his life, directed by Gordon Parks in 1984. Saratoga Springs, New York, where Northup and his family had lived, celebrates an annual Solomon Northup Day.

Family history and education

Solomon's father, Mintus Northup, was a freedman, who had been a slave in the early part of his life in service to the Northup family. Born in Rhode Island, he was taken with the Northups to Hoosick, New York in Rensselaer County. The master Northup manumitted Mintus by his will. Freed as a young man, Mintus took the surname Northup.

Mintus married and moved north with his wife, a free woman of color, to the town of Minerva, Essex County, where their two sons were born free. She was of African, European and Native American ancestry, whom her son described as a quadroon. Mintus Northrup was a farmer and successful enough to meet the state's property requirements so that he could vote. He provided an education for his two sons, at a level considered high for free blacks at the time. He and his wife last lived near Fort Edward. He died in November 1829, and his grave is located in Hudson Falls Baker Cemetery. His wife died later, during the period of Solomon's captivity.

Marriage and family

On Christmas Day in 1829, Solomon Northup married Anne Hampton. She was also of mixed race, with African, European, and Native American ancestry. They had three children: Elizabeth, Margaret and Alonzo. They owned their own farm in Hebron in Washington County and, working also at other jobs from time to time, made a prosperous life. Northrup kept up with the violin, which he played well.

Work

After selling the farm in 1834, the Northrups moved 20 miles into Saratoga Springs, New York for its opportunities but found its seasonal cycles of employment difficult. It was very busy during the summer, but work was hard to find at other times. Solomon worked in different jobs: building the Champlain Canal and the railroad, working as a carpenter, and playing music. Anne worked from time to time at the United States Hotel and other public houses, as she had a reputation as a cook. During court sessions in the county seat of Fort Edward, she returned to Sherrill's Coffee House to work to make some extra money.

Kidnapping

Because of the high demand for slaves in the Deep South, free blacks were at risk of kidnapping, particularly in the border states, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware. Even free blacks in more distant states were at risk. Kidnappers used a variety of means, from forced abduction to deceit, and frequently abducted children.

In 1841, Northrup was looking for work in Saratoga Springs. He met two men, who introduced themselves as Merrill Brown and Abram Hamilton. Saying they were entertainers, they offered him a job as a fiddler for some of their performances in New York City. Expecting the trip to be brief, Northrup had not written to his wife of his travel. When they reached New York, the men persuaded him to go with them to the circus in Washington, DC, offering him a generous wage and the cost of his return trip home. They stopped so that he could get a copy of his "freedom papers", to prove his status as a free man. His status was a concern, as he was traveling to Washington, D.C., where slavery was still legal and the city had some of the nation's larger slave markets.

The party arrived in Washington on April 5, 1841, the day before the funeral of President William Henry Harrison in the city. They stayed at Gadsby's Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, and went to some taverns together. Northup began to feel ill and they returned to the hotel. At some point, some men helped him from the room, saying they were taking him to a doctor. When he regained full consciousness, he realized he had been kidnapped as he was in chains. Robbed of his money and freedom papers, Northup learned he was locked in the basement of the Yellow House, one of several slave markets located in the area of the present-day National Mall, within sight of the US Capitol.

Life as a slave

Northrup was severely beaten and threatened with death by James H. Burch (spelled as Birch in some accounts), a slave trader, and Ebenezer Radburn, his turnkey, to stop him from saying he was a free man. Burch wrongfully claimed that Northrup was a runaway slave from Georgia, and sold him as such. At age 32, Northup suffered severely from the drastic changes in his life - suddenly being subjected to the slave conditions of violent punishment, meager diet, a dirt-floored slave cabin, and emotional pain.

Forced by abuse to go along and unable to stop the sale, Northrup was shipped by sea to New Orleans, during which he and many other slaves caught smallpox. During the trip, Northrup persuaded John Manning, an English sailor, to send a letter to his family, to tell them of his illegal kidnapping and enslavement. His wife went to Henry B. Northup, a local lawyer and member of the family that had once held her father-in-law Mintus Northup as a slave. The New York legislature had passed a law in 1840 requiring the state to recover any free blacks kidnapped and sold into slavery, but the lawyer could not act without knowing where Northup was held.

After his recovery in the pen of Theophilus Freeman, Burch's partner, Northup was sold under the name of Platt to William Ford, a planter on Bayou Boeuf of the Red River in northern Louisiana. Ford was also a Baptist preacher, whom Northup wrote later was a good man, considerate of his bondspeople. At his place in Pine Woods, Northup proposed making log rafts to move lumber down the narrow Indian Creek, to get them to market less expensively. He was familiar with this from his previous work, and his project was a success. He also built textile looms, copying from one nearby, so that Ford could set up mills on the creek. With Ford, Northup found his efforts appreciated.

The planter came into financial difficulties, in part through helping a brother, and had to sell 18 slaves to settle his debts. He owed money to John M. Tibeats, a carpenter who had been working for him on the mills, as well as a weaving-house, and corn-mill at the Bayou Boeuf plantation. In the winter of 1842, Northup was sold to Tibeats, at a price that left the carpenter owing money on him.

Under Tibeats, Northup suffered cruel treatment. They had returned to Ford's plantation, where there was more construction to complete. They were supervised by Ford's overseer Chapin, who saved Northup from a lynching after he fought with Tibeats. Chapin reminded Tibeats of his debt to Ford of $400 for the purchase of Northup. This debt saved his life. After another fight with Tibeats, in which he defended himself from attack with an axe, Northup ran away and escaped into a swamp, making his way back to Ford. The planter convinced Tibeats to hire out Northup.

Northup was hired out to Mr. Eldret, who lived about 38 miles south on the Red River. At what he called "The Big Cane Brake", he had Northup and other slaves do the heavy work of clearing cane, trees and undergrowth in order to cultivate cotton. With the work unfinished, after about five weeks Tibeats sold Northup to Edwin Epps.

A former slave driver and overseer, Epps leased a cotton plantation on Bayou Huff Power from his wife's uncle, about five miles from that of Ford. Northup was held by him for ten years and later described his frequent whippings for punishment, as well as his drinking and forcing the slaves to dance for him. He said of Epps: "A rough, rude energy, united with an uncultivated mind and an avaricious spirit, are his prominent characteristics." He treated slaves cruelly, as chattel, not human beings. In his book, Northup describes this time in detail, including the daily and seasonal work associated with cotton and sugar cane cultivation, slave diet and living conditions, and other aspects of their lives near the bayou.

In 1845 Epps bought a plantation nearby on the bayou, and took nine slaves with him, including Northup, to cultivate it. Northup was held by Epps until being freed but, because he was not good at picking cotton, he was hired out to sugar plantations and to do other work. He led a sugar cutting gang of from 50-100 men at another plantation for three years under such arrangements.

Freedom

While held by Epps, in 1852 Northup secretly befriended Samuel Bass, an itinerant Canadian carpenter working for him. Bass wrote to Northup's family with details of his location at Bayou Boeuf in hopes of effecting his rescue. Bass did this at great personal risk; in the bayou country, he likely would have been killed had the secret become known before the intervention of authorities. Anne Northup appealed again for help to their family friend Henry B. Northup. He contacted the state, and the New York governor took up the case, appointing him as his legal agent. In cooperation with the senator and local authorities of Louisiana, Henry B. Northup located Solomon and on January 4, 1853, he was free again. When confronted with the evidence that Northup was a free man, and told he had a wife and children like the planter, Epps cursed the man (unknown) who had helped him and threatened to kill him if he discovered who it was. Northup later wrote, "He thought of nothing but his loss, and cursed me for having been born free."

Court cases

One of the very few to regain freedom under such circumstances, Northup later sued Birch and other men involved in selling him into slavery. (The historian Carol Wilson documented 300 such cases in her book, Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780-1865 (1994). She believes it is likely thousands more were kidnapped who were never documented.)

At the time, Northup did not make a claim against the men with the circus, as they could not be found, and he doubted their complicity). The case was tried in Washington, DC where, as a black man, Northup was prohibited by law from testifying against whites. One of the accused men in turn sued Northup, who had to defend himself in court. The charges were eventually dropped, and Northup remained a free man. The case received national attention, with New York Times publishing an article on the trial on January 20, 1853.

After Northup's book was published, Thaddeus St. John, a county court judge in Fonda, New York, recalled seeing two old friends, Alexander Merrill and Joseph Russell, traveling with a black man to Washington at the time of Harrison's funeral. He saw them again while returning from Washington, no longer with the black man, and recalled an odd conversation with them. Contacting Henry B. Northup, St. John testified about the events and helped track down the two; Solomon Northup recognized them, and they were charged in his kidnapping. The courts argued over whether the crime had been committed in New York, where Northup's testimony would have been accepted, or Washington, DC. After two years of appeals, a new district attorney in New York did not continue to push the case, and Merrill and Russell were never tried.

Memoir

Solomon Northup published an account of his experiences, Twelve Years a Slave (1853), written in three months with the help of David Wilson, a local writer and Union College graduate. Published when the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was a bestseller, Northup's book sold 30,000 copies within three years.

Included in the genre of slave narratives, the book has been issued as an electronic version with supporting material at the website of the University of North Carolina's Documenting the American South. Out of copyright, it is available free for reading and download at Project Gutenberg and Google Books websites.

Northup's full and descriptive account has been used by numerous historians researching slavery. His description of the Yellow House, in view of the Capitol, has helped researchers pursuing the history of slavery in D.C. For example, in his book Black Men Built the Capitol, Jesse Holland notes his use of Northup's narrative. The scholar Kenneth M. Stampp referred to it in his book on slavery, The Peculiar Institution (1962).

Life as a free man again

Northup rejoined his wife and children. He became active in the abolitionist movement and lectured on slavery to audiences throughout the Northeastern United States in the years before and during the American Civil War.

Northup was listed in the 1860 Federal U.S. census at the following address:

Town: Queensbury,

County: Warren,

State: NY,

P.O. Glens Falls.

He last appeared in records in 1863. The date, location, and circumstances of his death are unknown. He was absent from the 1865 New York census, but his wife Anne Northrup was reported as still living at the same address.

Northrup was last known to have been staying in Boston, Massachusetts in 1863 to give lectures. As his health was probably declining due to his age and years of captivity, historians such as Clifford Brown and Carol Wilson believe he likely died of natural causes. In 1876 a local historian speculated he was kidnapped or killed by persons unknown while in Boston, but by then he was too old to be of interest to slave catchers.

Historiography

Northup's memoir was reprinted in 1869, but over time, his story was overlooked. The growth of works in social history and African-American studies in the late twentieth century brought it to light again. A newly annotated version of his memoir was published in 1968. In 1984, a made-for-TV movie directed by Gordon Parks was released based on his memoir.

In 1998, a team of students and their professor Clifford Brown at Union College in Schenectady, New York undertook a project to document Northrup's historic narrative. "They gathered photographs, family trees, bills of sale, maps and hospital records on a trail through New York, Washington and Louisiana." Their exhibit of this material ran at the college's Nott Memorial building. The revival of interest in Northrup's story in New York state led in 1999 to Saratoga Springs naming a day in his honor. It has become an annual celebration. (See below)

Representation in other media

• In 1984, Twelve Years a Slave was adapted as a PBS television movie entitled Solomon Northup's Odyssey, directed by Gordon Parks. Northup was portrayed by Avery Brooks.
• In 2008, composer and saxophonist T.K. Blue, commissioned by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), recorded a musical expression of Northup's story on an album entitled Follow the North Star.

Legacy and honors

• 1999, the mayor of Saratoga Springs declared Solomon Northup Day; a historical marker was placed at the corner of Congress and Broadway, as well as an exhibit panel on his life at the Heritage Park Visitor Center.
• On May 23, 2000 as part of the Bicentennial Local Legacies project, his descendant Victoria Northup Linzy Dunham Moore and other Americans were honored at a reception in the Library of Congress (LOC) Great Hall, Washington, DC. Solomon Northup Day is included in an exhibit at the Folklife Center.
• The Saratoga Springs City Council established "Solomon Northup Day" as an annual celebration to highlight the city's diversity, history and culture.
• The Historical Society of Saratoga Springs, along with the Mayor's office, have established a permanent exhibit in the Visitors Center to celebrate Solomon Northup Day, the first to honor an African American of the city.

Bibliography

• with David Wilson, Twelve Years a Slave, 1853
• In 1968, Sue Eakin, a Louisiana historian and professor, published an annotated version of Northup's narrative, which provides information and context for his account and references. "Richard P. Sharkey, "Noted Louisiana historian Sue Eakin of Bunkie dead at 90"". Alexandria Daily Town Talk. http://www.thetowntalk.com/article/20090919/NEWS01/909190350/1002/NEWS01/Noted-Louisiana-historian-Sue-Eakin-of-Bunkie-dead-at-90. Retrieved September 21, 2009. 

External links

• Solomon Northup, David Wilson, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, Auburn, N.Y.: Derby and Miller, 1853, at Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina.
• Genealogy of Solomon Northup's 4th generation ancestor, Joseph M. Linzy Sr. - Chart 1
• Genealogy of Solomon Northup's 4th generation ancestor, Joseph M. Linzy Sr. - Chart 2
• America's Story: "Solomon Northup Day", Library of Congress
• "Solomon Northup: From Freedom to Slavery to Freedom Again", Slavery in America website
• "Snatched Up and Sold Into Slavery: The Story of Solomon Northup", US Trek, Odyssey (complements history curriculum for junior high and high school students)
• Gordon Parks, director: Solomon Northup's Odyssey, a 1984 made-for-TV movie