Solomon Northup

Solomon Northup (July 10, — unknown; after 1857) was an American abolitionist and the primary author of the memoir Twelve Years a Slave. A free-born American of mixed race from New York, he was the son of a freed slave and a free woman of color. Northup was a professional violinist, farmer, and landowner in Washington County, New York. In 1841, he was offered a traveling musician's job and went to Washington, D.C. (where slavery was legal); there, he was drugged and kidnapped into slavery. He was shipped to New Orleans on April 24, 1841 by James H. Birch aboard the Brig Orleans from Richmond, VA. Northup was purchased by a planter and held as a slave for nearly twelve years in the Red River region of Louisiana; mostly in Avoyelles Parish. He remained enslaved until he met Samuel Bass, a Canadian working on his plantation who helped get word to New York, where state law provided aid to free New York citizens who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery. His family and friends enlisted the aid of the governor of New York, Washington Hunt, and Northup regained his freedom on January 3, 1853. 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 enslaved in his early life by 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 moved to Minerva with his wife.

Northup said 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. Northup and his brother worked on the family farm as boys. His mother died during Northup's enslavement (1841 to 1852). According to her daughter-in-law Anne and Nicholas C. Northup, she died around 1846 or 1847 in Oswego County, New York.

Marriage and family

Solomon Northup married Anne Hampton on December 25, 1829, one month after the death of his father, A "woman of color", she was of African, European, and Native American descent. both of which were small communities in Washington County. for its employment opportunities. When court was in session at the county seat of Fort Edward, she worked at Sherrill's Coffee House in Sandy Hill.

After Northup was kidnapped, Anne and her oldest daughter, Elizabeth, went to work as domestic servants in New York City at Madame Jumel's Mansion on the East River in the summer of 1841. Alonzo was with them. Margaret, their youngest daughter, went to Hoboken, New Jersey, to live with a friend of Madame Jumel, who also had a young daughter. He purchased land in Glens Falls near his daughter.

After selling their land in Glens Falls, Anne Northup moved to the household of her daughter and son-in-law, Margaret and Philip Stanton, in Moreau, Saratoga County, where she again was recorded as married. However, Solomon was not with the family. Anne did laundry, cooking and chores for a Moreau man. who kept the Middleworth House hotel in Sandy Hill. or 3) with his son, Alonzo in Fort Edward, New York.|name=lost Anne Northup lived in Kingsbury in Washington County, New York, in 1875. By that time, she was identified as a widow. She died in 1876 while performing her chores in Moreau.

Life

Canal worker, farmer, and violin player

In the winter of the year that he married, Northup worked as a laborer repairing the Champlain Canal. He then bought two horses and contracted to tow lumber on rafts to Troy from Lake Champlain beginning the following spring. He employed two workers. He played his violin at several well-known hotels in Saratoga Springs. He also worked on the construction of the Troy and Saratoga Railroad. At this time, 20 years before the Civil War, the expansion of cotton cultivation in the Deep South had led to a continuing high demand for healthy slaves. Kidnappers used a variety of means, from forced abduction to deceit, and frequently abducted children, who were easier to control.

It is possible that "Brown" and "Hamilton" incapacitated Northup. His symptoms suggest that he was drugged with belladonna or laudanum, or with a mixture of both. After which he was taken to Gadsby's Hotel and later sold to Washington slave trader James H. Birch for $650, and lied that he was a fugitive slave. However, Northup stated in his account of the ordeal in Twelve Years a Slave in Chapter II, "[w]hether they were accessory to my misfortunes – subtle and inhuman monsters in the shape of men – designedly luring me away from home and family, and liberty, for the sake of gold – those who read these pages will have the same means of determining as myself." Northup told Birch that he was a free man from the state of New York, but Birch and Ebenezer Radburn, his jailer, severely and cruelly tortured and beat up Northup to prevent him from saying he was a free man. Birch then lied and falsely presented Northup as an enslaved man from the state of Georgia. Northup was held in the Yellow House, the slave pen of trader William Williams, close to the United States Capitol. Birch shipped Northup and other slaves by sea to New Orleans, in what was called the coastwise slave trade, where Birch's partner Theophilus Freeman would sell them. 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.

The New York State Legislature had passed a law in 1840 that made it illegal to entice or kidnap an African-American out of North and sell them into slavery.]]

At the New Orleans slave market, Birch's partner Theophilus Freeman sold Northup (who had been renamed Platt) along with two other individuals, Harry and Eliza (renamed Dradey) to William Prince Ford, a preacher who engaged in small farming on Bayou Boeuf of the Red River in northern Louisiana.

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 enslaved people 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.

thumb|right|Restored [[Edwin Epps House, a plantation house. Now located on the Louisiana State University of Alexandria campus]]

Epps held Northup for almost 10 years, until 1853, in Avoyelles Parish. He was a cruel enslaver who frequently and indiscriminately punished enslaved people and drove them hard. His policy was to whip slaves if they did not meet daily work quotas he set for pounds of cotton to be picked, among other goals.

In 1852, itinerant Canadian carpenter Samuel Bass came to do some work for Epps. Hearing Bass express abolitionist views, Northup eventually 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 kidnapped and 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.

Bass did this at great personal risk, as the local people would not take kindly to a person helping an enslaved person to the detriment of an enslaver. In addition, Bass's help came after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which increased federal penalties against people assisting enslaved people to escape.

Restoration of freedom

Bass wrote several letters to people Northup knew in Saratoga Springs: one went to his former employer Judge James M. Marvin

Court cases

thumb|"The Avoyelles Slave Case", [[The Times-Picayune, February 6, 1853]]

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.

As Solomon Northup and Henry Northup made their way back to New York, they first stopped in Washington, D.C., 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 could not testify at the trial due to laws in Washington, D.C., 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 an enslaved person from Georgia and was for sale. However, Birch's accounting ledger made no note of his purchase. 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. Testimony during the court case confirmed various details of Northup's account of his experience. In the summer of 1857, he traveled to Canada to deliver a series of lectures; however, in Streetsville, Ontario, a hostile 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 reenslaved. The 21st-century historians Clifford Brown and Carol Wilson believe it is likely that he died of natural causes, Northup was said to have visited Rev. Smith after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which was made in January 1863. Historians believe that he died in 1863 or 1864.

Historiography

Although the memoir is often classified among the genre of slave narratives, the scholar Sam Worley says that it does not fit the genre's standard format. Northup was assisted in the writing by David Wilson, a white man, and, according to Worley, some believed he would have biased the material. Worley discounted concerns that Wilson was pursuing his own interests in the book. He writes of the memoir:

<blockquote>Twelve Years is convincingly Northup's tale and no one else's because of its amazing attention to empirical detail and unwillingness to reduce the complexity of Northup's experience to a stark moral allegory.

The scholar Kenneth M. Stampp often referred to Northup's memoir in his book on slavery, The Peculiar Institution (New York, 1956). Stanley Elkins in his book, Slavery (Chicago, 1959), like Phillips and Stampp, found Northup's memoir to be of credible historical merit.
Since the mid-20th century, the civil rights movement, and an increase in works of social history and in African American studies, have brought renewed interest in Northup's memoir. Co-edited by professors Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon, this well-annotated LSU Press publication has been used in classrooms and by scholars since that time and is still in print.
In 1998, a team of students at Union College in Schenectady, New York, with their political science professor Clifford Brown, documented Northup's historic narrative. "They gathered photographs, family trees, bills of sale, maps and hospital records on a trail through New York, Washington [DC] and Louisiana."
In his book Black Men Built the Capitol (2007), Jesse Holland notes his use of Northup's account.

Legacy and honors

In 1999, Saratoga Springs erected a historical marker at the corner of Congress and Broadway to commemorate Northup's life. The city later established the third Saturday in July as Solomon Northup Day, to honor him, bring regional African American history to light, and educate the public about freedom and justice issues.
In 2000, the Library of Congress accepted the program of Solomon Northup Day into the permanent archives of the American Folklife Center. The Anacostia Community Museum and the National Park Service-Network to Freedom Project have also recognized the merits of this multi-venue, multi-cultural event program. "Solomon Northup Day – a Celebration of Freedom" continues annually in the City of Saratoga Springs, as well as in Plattsburgh, New York, with the support of the North Country Underground Railroad Historical Association.
Annual observances have been made to honor Solomon Northup. A 2015 conference at Skidmore College had a gathering of Northup's descendants, and the speakers included Congressman Paul D. Tonko.
On January 4, 2026 (the 173rd anniversary of his release from slavery), Hope Out of Darkness, a bronze statue of Northup created by American sculptor Wesley Wofford, will be unveiled in Marksville, Louisiana. Commissioned by the Solomon Northup Committee for Commemorative Works, the sculpture depicts Northup breaking free from chains with papers (his narrative) as a torch, symbolizing freedom and resilience.

Representation in media

Former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Rita Dove wrote the poem "The Abduction" about Northup, published in her first collection, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980).
In 1984, Twelve Years a Slave was adapted as a PBS television movie titled 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 Follow the North Star, a musical composition inspired by Northup's life.
The episode "Division" of the 2010 television miniseries America: The Story of Us depicts Northup's slave auction. Significant emphasis is placed on Eliza being separated from her children, and the actor portraying Northup does voiceover of direct passages from Twelve Years a Slave.
The 2013 feature film 12 Years a Slave, adapted from his memoir, was written by John Ridley and directed by Steve McQueen. British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor portrays Northup, for which he earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role. The film was nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning 3for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, for John Ridley, and Best Supporting Actress for Lupita Nyong'o, who played the slave Patsey in her debut film role.