Solomon Northup’s Ordeal
1841
Solomon Northup held his aching head in his hands as he winced in pain. Fragmented visions of the previous night floated in his mind: two men, dinner and draught at a tavern, the sudden onset of feeling ill. Then visions of Solomon’s hometown of Sarasota Springs, New York, came to mind: images of his wife and family, the hack he drove for the hotel, his carpentry work, playing his violin for his three children. Suddenly an intense shooting pain brought Solomon slowly to consciousness. The weight and the sound of clinking chains fully awakened him.
A sliver of light came from a barred window high on the wall, barely illuminating a sole wooden bench in the small room. He sat up abruptly and adjusted his eyes to the dark. The dank smell indicated he was below ground. Solomon was chained in shackles and caged up like an animal in a dungeon. This was no dream from his bed in Sarasota Springs—it was the beginning of a nightmare.
Solomon Northup tried to piece together the chain of events that had led him, a free black citizen of New York, to this barren cell. Though his head was pounding, he vaguely recalled meeting two affable men on the corner of Congress Street and Broadway in Sarasota Springs—Merrill Brown and Abram Hamilton. They were associated with a traveling circus from Washington, DC, and had praised his skills as a fiddler. Unfortunately, Solomon had agreed to provide musical accompaniment for their acts.
Sarasota Springs, New York, was a resort town located in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains where people came for the cool mineral spring waters and their healing effects. Both Northup and his wife, Anne, worked at the United States Hotel. She was a cook and Solomon drove a hack among other part-time jobs. Due to a lull in the tourist season that March of 1841, Solomon agreed to take the part-time job with the two strangers. He regretted not leaving his family a note before he departed.
Solomon berated himself for taking up with these unknown villains who had surely tricked him. His stomach wrenched with fear: Had he been kidnapped and sold into slavery? The thought seemed preposterous, yet it was common knowledge that free black citizens in the North were kidnapped off the streets and sold into slavery. Solomon and his family lived a comfortable and respectable life, never once imagining such horror. He regrettably had become complacent.
Brown and Hamilton seemed trustworthy and had paid Solomon handsomely, so he accompanied his abductors to New York City. After asking Solomon to continue with them to Washington, DC, they even took him to get free papers in case his free status was ever questioned. After that, Solomon’s recollections became fuzzy.
Just then the lock of Solomon’s cell opened and two repugnant-looking men walked in. Solomon soon learned that James H. Birch and Ebenezer Radburn were slave dealers. Birch asked his prisoner how he felt, and an indignant Solomon Northup stated his name, insisted he was a free man from Saratoga Springs, New York, and told them a terrible misunderstanding had taken place. Birch angrily responded that Solomon was a runaway slave from Georgia whom he had bought and was sending to New Orleans. Solomon could barely comprehend what the man said and vehemently protested.
Immediately Solomon was stripped of his clothes and his dignity. He was then thrown over a wooden bench, where Radburn held him down with his foot on the wrist chain and shackles. Birch took a thick paddle with holes bored into it and beat Solomon mercilessly blow after blow, repeatedly asking him if he was a free man. A proud and stubborn Northup insisted it was true despite the cruel flogging.
His tormentor eventually switched to a knotted rope with cat-o’-nine-tails, whipping him like a madman and tearing the flesh off Solomon’s back. Through the fiery pain Solomon would not give up his insistence that he was a free man. An irate Birch stopped lashing him for fear of killing Solomon and wasting the money he had spent purchasing his piece of property. This newly initiated slave might bring him $1,000.
With blistering pain of both body and soul, Solomon realized his awful yet incomprehensible fate and wept bitterly. He was completely overcome with feelings of betrayal, despair, and hopelessness. He was a thirty-three-year-old free man. His father had been freed upon the death of his master when he was twenty years old. His mother was free. Solomon’s wife and children were free.
Solomon was soon confined in William’s Slave Pen in Washington, DC. After a few days he was let out into a yard where he met other slaves in the same predicament as his. Though not knowing it at the time, one of the men, Clemens Ray, would play a part in Northup’s eventual release years later.
Ray was to be sold down south in New Orleans. Another man in the yard had been abducted from his master in an attempt to collect a debt. His master arrived, paid up, and reclaimed his slave property. A refined black woman and her two children had been brought to the city under false pretenses of being liberated, yet instead were sold to a slave trader. Thus was Solomon’s indoctrination into the grim and illegal slave trade business that operated beneath the eyes of his nation’s sleeping capital.
Solomon Northup’s journey began in upstate New York and ended in Bayou Beouf, the marshy river outlet in central Louisiana below the lower Red River. Solomon quickly learned to lose any appearance of intelligence in speech or manner and never reveal that he could read and write for fear of death. Instead he took off his hat and had downcast eyes when talking to any master, of which he had several during his twelve years in bondage laboring on cotton and sugarcane plantations.
A glimmer of hope came aboard the brig Orleans on his way to New Orleans. An English sailor named John Manning took pity on Solomon after hearing his plight and secreted a letter from Solomon to an attorney in Sandy Hill, New York, named Henry B. Northup, whom Solomon had known as a child.
Upon arriving in New Orleans, Solomon was given the name of Platt, examined like a common animal, and sold for $900 to William Ford. Reverend Ford was a Baptist minister of Rapides Parish who operated a sawmill in the heart of Louisiana swampland. He proved to be a good master, but one of Ford’s men, named Tibaut, had it out for Northup. The man whipped Solomon without cause, attempted to hang him, and came after him with a hatchet, whereupon Northup fled. Solomon outran Tibaut’s pack of dogs and waded through an alligator- and snake-infested Cocodrie Swamp before circling back to the plantation. Reverend Ford sold Solomon, knowing the evil-minded Tibaut would kill him otherwise.
Solomon Northup’s worst nightmare was realized when he came to his third owner, Edwin Epps, in 1843. Epps owned a three-hundred-acre cotton plantation on Bayou Beouf (near Holmesville) in central Louisiana. Driven by narrow profit margins and poor temperament, Epps took his frustrations out on his slaves. He proved to be barbaric—the vilest excuse of a man Northup had ever met. He rode horseback through the cotton fields, cracking his whip upon the backs of his Negro laborers, especially if their pickings did not exceed the previous day’s take. When Epps took to drink he sunk to even lower levels of brutality, ruthlessly whipping his slaves without provocation.
Master Epps turned his affections to a young slave Solomon befriended named Patsey, which incensed Epps’s hateful, insanely jealous wife. Patsey was often whipped to within an inch of her life. Solomon suffered the mental anguish of being forced to partake in whippings, yet he was often the recipient of countless cruel floggings himself.
In 1852 an antislavery Canadian carpenter named Samuel Bass came to work on Epps’s plantation. A desperate Solomon debated risking his life in seeking Bass’s empathy. Previous mistrusted attempts had nearly gotten him killed. Northup approached Bass and explained his plight, which ultimately set the wheels in motion for his release from bondage.
Bass carried a letter written by Solomon on August 15 as well as letters Bass himself wrote. The letters implored judges and important connections in Saratoga Springs, New York, and the surrounding area to inquire about Solomon’s free status and secure free papers as proof.
At daybreak on January 3, 1853, a carriage arrived at Epps’s plantation with two distinguished-looking white gentlemen. One was the sheriff from Avoyelles Parish in Louisiana, and the other was Henry B. Northup, the lawyer from New York whom Solomon had known since childhood, the very man the English sailor on the brig Orleans had secreted a letter years earlier. Henry B. Northup’s great uncle, Captain Henry Northup, had owned Solomon’s father, Mintus Northup, hence they shared the same surname.
Henry B. Northup was an agent of New York’s governor, ironically named Washington Hunt, who was authorized to search out and return free black citizens that had been kidnapped into slavery. In the lawyer’s possession were letters proving Solomon Northup’s free status from his wife, a senator, a Supreme Court justice, and acquaintances, all vouching for Solomon.
An incensed Master Epps was informed of the situation and shown the appropriate papers proving “Platt” was indeed Solomon Northup, a free man from New York. Over the years Solomon’s hopes of attaining freedom had risen and fallen. Just two days prior, he had received fifteen lashes from Master Epps’s whip for oversleeping, yet unbelievably here he was about to have his free status proven.
Solomon’s kidnappers, the men who had convinced Solomon to come away with them, Merrill Brown and Abram Hamilton, were actually named Alexander Merrill and Joseph Russell. They, along with the men who sold him into slavery, James H. Birch and Ebenezer Radburn, were arrested and brought to trial. However, the legal system in Washington, DC, and New York failed Solomon Northup: All were acquitted, and Solomon himself was disallowed from testifying because he was black.
On January 22, 1853, forty-six-year-old Solomon Northup, after twelve years of enslavement, was reunited with his wife, Anne, and his children, Elizabeth, Margaret, and Alonzo, who were aged ten, eight, and five when their father was kidnapped. It was a surreal reunion for everyone.
Solomon Northup learned that Clemens Ray, the slave he had met years ago in the yard in William’s Slave Pen in Washington, DC, had gotten word to Northup’s family. Clemens had managed to escape, and on his journey to Canada’s free soil, he happened to stay at the safe house of Solomon’s brother-in-law in Saratoga, whereupon he informed Solomon’s family of his kidnapping and enslavement. Solomon’s letter to Henry B. Northup, which was carried by John Manning, the sailor from the brig Orleans, had also arrived—but Solomon was unreachable in such a remote and isolated area, lost in the bowels of Louisiana.
The same year Solomon was freed, he wrote and published a book titled Twelve Years a Slave. It became a bestseller, with eight thousand copies sold the first month. Solomon worked to aid the abolishment of slavery by speaking on the antislavery lecture circuit around the North, as well as starring in theatrical performances about his enslavement and rescue. He also became an active participant in the Underground Railroad, aiding fugitives’ escapes from Vermont to Canada. He gave generously, giving what little money he had to the cause.
Solomon Northup was last mentioned in a newspaper in 1857, but no public records give an account of him after the mid-1860s, leaving his death a mystery. There is speculation that his captors re-enslaved him, that he changed his name and worked anonymously with the clandestine Underground Railroad, or that he died of unknown causes in an unknown region.
Interest in Solomon Northup’s story continues to this day. His journey can be traced along an established Northup Trail, which begins at the Louisiana State University in Alexandria on through Rapides and Avoyelles Parishes, where visitors can tour various plantations on which Solomon labored.
In 1999 Saratoga Springs, New York, began hosting the annual Solomon Northup Day—A Celebration of Freedom, now run by Skidmore College. Descendants of Solomon Northup have attended the event over the years, including his great-granddaughter, Victoria Northup Linzy Dunham, who lived to age ninety-eight. Descendants of those who were instrumental in Northup’s release, such as the Canadian-born abolitionist-minded Samuel Bass, have also come to honor him. It was Solomon Northup’s great-great-granddaughter who astutely stated that Northup’s astonishing saga teaches us all “about persistence and determination in the face of extraordinary adversity.”