Solomon Northup

Summary:
Solomon Northup (July 1808–1863?)[1][2] was an American abolitionist and the primary author of the memoir Twelve Years a Slave.
A free-born African American from New York, his father was a freed slave and his mother was a free woman of color. A farmer and violinist, Northup owned land in Hebron, New York. In 1841 he was kidnapped by slave traders, having been enticed to Washington, D.C. (where slavery was legal) with a job offer as a violinist with traveling entertainers.
Shortly after he and his employers arrived in DC, they sold him as a slave, apparently having drugged him into unconsciousness to effect the kidnapping. He was shipped to New Orleans where he was sold to a planter in Louisiana. He was held in the Red River region of Louisiana by several different owners for 12 years, mostly in Avoyelles Parish. Aside from a brief communication when he was first kidnapped, his family and friends had no knowledge of his whereabouts. He attempted to get word to them and to regain his freedom, but the systems guarding slaves were too pervasive to allow it. Eventually, he confided in a Canadian working on his plantation, who opposed slavery and was willing to risk contacting Northup's family and friends.
They enlisted the help of the Governor of New York, Washington Hunt, to his cause, since state law provided for aid to free New York citizens kidnapped into slavery. Northup regained his freedom on January 3, 1853 and returned to his family in New York.

Northup's memoir was adapted and produced as the 1984 television film Solomon Northup's Odyssey and the 2013 feature film 12 Years a Slave. The latter won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture, at the 86th Academy Awards.

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Solomon Northup was born in the town of Minerva in Essex County, New York on July 10, 1807[5] or July 10, 1808.
His mother was a free woman of color, which meant that her sons, Solomon and his older brother Joseph, were born free according to the principle of partus sequitur ventrem.
Solomon described his mother as a quadroon, meaning that she was one-quarter African, and three-quarters European.

His father Mintus was a freedman who had been a slave in his early life in service to the Northup family.
Born in Rhode Island, he was taken with the Northups when they moved to Hoosick, New York, in Rensselaer County. His master, Henry Northrop, manumitted Mintus in his will, after which Mintus adopted the surname Northup. His surname was sometimes spelled Northrup in records. Upon attaining his freedom, Mintus married and he moved to Minerva with his wife.

According to Northup, his father was "a man respected for his industry and integrity".
A farmer, Mintus was successful enough to own land and thus meet the state's property requirements for the right to vote.
His sons received what was considered to be a good education for free black people at that time.
As boys, Northup and his brother worked on the family farm.
He spent his leisure time playing the violin and reading books.

Solomon Northup married Anne Hampton in Fort Edward, New York, on December 25, 1829 on November 22, 1829 by Justice of the Peace Timothy Eddy.
Anne was the daughter of William Hampton. She was born March 14, 1808 and grew up in Sandy Hill.
A "woman of color", she was of African, European, and Native American descent.
They had three children: Elizabeth (born c. 1831), Margaret (born c. 1833), and Alonzo (born c. 1835).

At the start of their marriage, the couple lived at Fort House, "the old yellow house", in the southern end of Fort Edward. In 1830, they moved to Kingsbury,[28][29] both of which were small communities in Washington County, New York.
After selling their farm in 1834, the Northups moved 20 miles to Saratoga Springs, New York, for its employment opportunities. There, Solomon drove a horse-drawn taxi for a businessman, and during the tourist season he worked for the United States Hotel, where he was employed by Judge James M. Marvin, a part-owner of the hotel. He played his violin at several well-known hotels in Saratoga Springs. He also worked on the construction of the Troy and Saratoga Railroad.

Anne was known for her culinary expertise. She worked for local taverns that served food and drink, and at the United States Hotel. When court was in session at the county seat of Fort Edward, she worked at Sherrill's Coffee House in Sandy Hill.

In March 1841, Anne went 20 miles to Sandy Hill where she ran the kitchen at Sherrill's Coffee House during the session of the court. She may have taken their oldest daughter Elizabeth with her. Their two youngest children went to stay with their aunt. Northup stayed in Saratoga Springs to look for employment until the tourist season.

In 1841, at age 32, Northup met two men who introduced themselves as entertainers, members of a circus company. They offered him a job as a fiddler for several performances in New York City. Expecting the trip to be brief, Northup did not notify Anne, who was working in Sandy Hill. When they reached New York City, the men persuaded Northup to continue with them for a gig with their circus in Washington, D.C., offering him a generous wage and the cost of his return trip home. They stopped so that he could get a copy of his "free papers", which documented his status as a free man.

The city had one of the nation's largest slave markets, and slave catchers were not above kidnapping free blacks. Northup was severely beaten to stop him from saying he was a free man. He and other slaves were shipped to New Orleans. Renamed Platt, he caught smallpox during the voyage. While on the brig Orleans he met John Manning, an English sailor who took an interest in him and agreed to get him a sheet of paper, ink, and a pen. At night, while Manning was on watch, he hid in a place where he could write a note to Henry B. Northup in secret. Manning posted the letter. Henry was a lawyer, a relative of Henry Northrop who had held and freed Solomon's father, and a childhood friend of Solomon's. The letter was delivered to Governor Seward by Henry, but it was not actionable because Northup's location was unknown.

Solomon Northup, renamed Platt, was sold to a Baptist preacher named William Ford.
When Ford came into financial difficulties, "Platt" was sold to John M. Tibaut, a carpenter who had been working for Ford on the mills. Tibaut had helped construct a weaving house and corn mill on Ford's Bayou Boeuf plantation and Ford owed Tibaut money for the work. Since the amount Ford owed Tibaut was less than the purchase price agreed upon for Northup, Ford held a chattel mortgage on Northup for $400, the difference between the two amounts.

Under Tibaut, Northup suffered cruel and capricious treatment. Tibaut used him to help complete construction at Ford's plantation. At one point, Tibaut whipped Northup because he did not like the nails Northup was using. But Northup fought back, beating Tibaut severely. Enraged, Tibaut recruited two friends to hang Solomon but Ford's overseer Chapin interrupted and prevented the men from killing Northup, reminding Tibaut of his debt to Ford, and chasing them off at gunpoint. Northup was left bound and noosed for hours until Ford returned home to cut him down. Northup believed that Tibaut's debt to Ford saved his life.

Tibaut hired Northup out to a planter named Eldret, who lived about 38 miles south on the Red River. At what he called "The Big Cane Brake", Eldret had Northup and other slaves clear cane, trees, and undergrowth in the bottomlands in order to develop cotton fields for cultivation. With the work unfinished, after about five weeks, Tibaut sold Northup to Edwin Epps.

Epps held Northup for almost 10 years, until 1853, in Avoyelles Parish. He was a cruel master who frequently and indiscriminately punished slaves and drove them hard.

In 1852, an itinerant Canadian carpenter named Samuel Bass came to do some work for Epps. Hearing Bass express his abolitionist views, Northup decided to confide his secret to him.
Bass was the first person he told of his true name and origins as a free man since he was first enslaved Along with mailing a letter written by Northup, Bass wrote several letters at his request to Northup's friends, providing general details of his location at Bayou Boeuf, in hopes of gaining his rescue.

At great personal risk, Bass wrote several letters to people Northup knew in Saratoga Springs: one went to his former employer Judge James M. Marvin and another reached Cephas Parker and William Perry, storekeepers in Saratoga. Parker and Perry forwarded the letter to Northup's wife, Anne, who contacted attorney Henry B. Northup, the son of Solomon's father's former master. Henry B. Northup contacted New York Governor Washington Hunt, who took up the case, appointing the attorney general as his legal agent.
Solomon did not know if Bass had reached anyone with the letters. There was no means of communicating, because of the secrecy they needed to maintain, and the necessity of preventing Northup's owner from knowing their plans.

Henry gathered documentation and depositions and stopped off in Washington, D.C. to meet with Pierre Soule, a legislator from Louisiana, and the Secretary of War in preparation for his rescue effort in Louisiana. He did not have Bass's name because Bass did not reveal his own name in the letter but Henry still managed to find him in Marksville (the postmark on the letters), and Bass revealed that Solomon Northup was held by Edwin Epps on his plantation. Henry had legal paperwork prepared based upon the documentation that proved that Northup was free The sheriff went with Henry to give the news to Epps and take Northup off the farm.

Northup later wrote, "He [Epps] thought of nothing but his loss, and cursed me for having been born free." Attorney Henry B. Northup convinced Epps that it would be futile to contest the free papers in a court of law, so the planter conceded the case. He signed papers giving up all claim to Northup. Finally on January 4, 1853, four months after meeting Bass, Northup regained his freedom.

After he made it back to New York, Solomon Northup wrote and published his memoir, Twelve Years a Slave (1853). The book was written in three months with the help of David Wilson, a local lawyer and writer.
It was published by Derby & Miller of Auburn, New York. In the period when questions of slavery generated debate and the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe was a bestseller, Northup's book sold 30,000 copies within three years, also becoming a bestseller. Northup traveled and went on a lecture tour in Northeastern states to tell his story and sell books. The book became the backbone of other books about him, such as Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the Author of Twelve Years a Slave.

Northup was one of the few kidnapped free black people to regain freedom after being sold into slavery. Represented by attorneys Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, General Orville Clark, and Henry B. Northup, Solomon Northup sued Birch and other men involved in selling him into slavery in Washington, DC. The historian Carol Wilson documented 300 kidnapping cases in her 1994 book, and believes that it is likely that thousands more were kidnapped who were never documented.

As Solomon Northup and Henry Northup made their way back to New York, they first stopped in Washington DC to file a legal complaint with the police magistrate against James H. Birch, the man who had first enslaved him. Birch was immediately arrested and tried on criminal charges. However, Northup was unable to testify at the trial due to laws in Washington DC against black men testifying in court. Birch and several others who were also in the slave trade testified that Northup had approached them, saying he was a slave from Georgia and was for sale. No note of his purchase was made in Birch's accounting ledger, however. The prosecution consisted of Henry B. Northup and another white man asserting that they had known Northup for many years, and he was born and lived a free man in New York until his abduction. With no one legally able to testify against Birch's tale, Birch was found not guilty. However, the sensational case immediately attracted national attention, and The New York Times published an article about the trial on January 20, 1853, just days after its conclusion and only two weeks after Northup's rescue.

The New York trial opened on October 4, 1854. Both Northup and St. John testified against the two men. The case brought widespread illegal practices in the domestic slave trade to light. Through testimony during the court case, various details of Northup's account of his experience were confirmed. The respective counsels argued over whether the crime had been committed in New York (where Northup could testify), or in Washington, DC, outside the jurisdiction of New York courts. After more than two years of appeals, a new district attorney in New York failed to continue with the case, and it was dropped in May 1857.

Solomon worked again as a carpenter after he moved back to New York. He became active in the abolitionist movement and lectured on slavery in the years before the American Civil War. During the summer of 1857, Northup was in Canada for a series of lectures. In Streetsville, Ontario, a hostile Canadian crowd prevented him from speaking.

After 1857, he was not living with family and there was speculation by family, friends, and others that he was enslaved again. The 21st-century historians Clifford Brown and Carol Wilson believe it is likely that he died of natural causes, because he was too old to be of interest to slave catchers.

According to John R. Smith, in letters written in the 1930s, his father Rev. John L. Smith, a Methodist minister in Vermont, had worked with Northup and former slave Tabbs Gross in the early 1860s, during the Civil War, aiding fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad. Northup was said to have visited Rev. Smith after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which was made in January 1863.

There is no contemporaneous documentation of his death.
It is believed by historians that he died in 1863 or 1864.

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links

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Northup
• https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/summary.html
• https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Solomon-Northup
• https://www.hnoc.org/virtual/purchased-lives-new-orleans-and-domest...
• https://www.history.com/news/solomon-northup-after-his-12-years-a-s...
• https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/the-cotton-revolution/solomon-n...
• https://ushistoryscene.com/article/12-years-a-slave/
• https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/northup-solomon-...
• https://archive.org/details/puttinonolemassa00osof
• https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4700706/solomon-northup-12-years-slave