SOLOMON NORTHUP KNEW nothing of the fight for Henry Clay’s compromise. Northup knew very little beyond his shrunken existence as a slave. So long as he was the property of William Ford, his life was not unbearable. “I think of him with affection,” Northup recalled of Ford, “and had my family been with me, could have borne his gentle servitude, without murmuring, all my days.” But fate, operating through the cash nexus of the Louisiana economy, had other plans. Ford had guaranteed a note held by his brother, and when the brother failed to pay, the creditors came after Ford. He had to sell some slaves to make the debt good, and Solomon Northup, without a family that Ford knew of, which would suffer as a result of his departure, was one he chose. Northup’s purchaser was a carpenter named John Tibeats. Tibeats couldn’t pay the full price, leaving him on the hook to Ford for four hundred dollars. But Northup became his slave.
Tibeats was a very different master from Ford. He drove Northup relentlessly. “From earliest dawn until late at night, I was not allowed to be a moment idle,” Northup remembered. He did his best, but Tibeats was never satisfied. “He was continually cursing and complaining. He never spoke to me a kind word. I was his faithful slave, and earned him large wages every day, and yet I went to my cabin nightly loaded with abuse and stinging epithets.”
And worse. Tibeats employed a whip against Northup to spur greater effort and to assert his authority. Northup knew the danger of resisting the whip, but one day, when they were constructing a building on a property owned by William Ford, he refused to submit. He had done nothing to warrant the lash, and he told Tibeats so. This angered Tibeats, who vowed to teach him not to answer back. He ordered Northup to strip for punishment.
“I will not,” Northup said.
Enraged, Tibeats leaped upon Northup, seized him by the throat with one hand and raised the whip to beat him with the other. Northup defended himself and wrestled Tibeats to the ground, pinning him to the earth with his foot. He tore the whip from Tibeats’s hand and began beating him with its wooden stock. “I cannot tell how many times I struck him,” Northup recounted. “Blow after blow fell fast and heavy upon his wriggling form. At length he screamed—cried murder—and at last the blasphemous tyrant called on God for mercy. But he who had never shown mercy did not receive it. The stiff stock of the whip warped round his cringing body until my right arm ached.”
The overseer of the property where Tibeats and Northup were working, a man named Chapin, heard the commotion and came running. Chapin, like his boss William Ford, was a kindhearted man, and he judged Tibeats a disgrace to Southern manhood. Chapin let Northup explain himself. Then Chapin and Tibeats consulted privately, and Tibeats rode away in a black mood.
Northup was tempted to run, but Chapin told him to stay. He did so, and an hour later Tibeats returned with two other men. The three approached Northup with whips and ropes. Outnumbered, he didn’t resist. They bound him and put a noose around his neck. They were about to hang him from a tree branch when Chapin reappeared, with a pistol in either hand. He called Tibeats a scoundrel who had deserved the beating Northup had given him. Beyond that, he reminded Tibeats that William Ford was owed four hundred dollars on Northup. Chapin, as Ford’s agent, was not going to see the collateral on that debt—Northup—destroyed. There would be no hanging.
Chapin’s intervention saved Northup, but it didn’t solve Northup’s Tibeats problem. Tibeats lay in wait for a time when Chapin would be absent. The time came, and Tibeats, conjuring a reason for anger at Northup, seized a hatchet and approached him with murder in his eyes. “It was a moment of life or death,” Northup recalled. “The sharp, bright blade of the hatchet glittered in the sun. In another instant it would be buried in my brain.”
Northup again fought back. He grabbed the hatchet arm and kicked Tibeats in the groin, causing him to double over and drop the hatchet. Northup seized the hatchet and weighed using it on Tibeats. But he wasn’t ready to become a murderer, and he tossed the hatchet away.
Tibeats took up a heavy stick and assaulted Northup again. Once more Northup parried the attack and disarmed his attacker.
Angrier than ever, Tibeats reached for an ax lying near. But Northup got his hands about Tibeats’s throat. As Tibeats continued to fight, Northup tightened his grip. The choke hold took effect. “He became pliant and unstrung,” Northup recounted. “His face, that had been white with passion, was now black from suffocation. Those small serpent eyes that spat with such venom were now full of horror—two great white orbs starting from their sockets.”
Still not ready to murder, Northup gave Tibeats’s throat a final squeeze and let him go. This time he had no choice but to run, and off he went. He escaped drowning in the bayous that crisscrossed the region; he dodged alligators and water moccasins; he distanced the dogs Tibeats put on his trail. But after several hours he realized the futility of it all. He was a thousand miles from home and hundreds of miles from free soil. An unaccompanied black man in the slave South was instantly suspect; any white man could seize him as a runaway and expect a reward. He lacked survival skills and even the simplest tools. He would be caught sooner or later; better to turn himself in.
He found his way to William Ford’s plantation and threw himself on the mercy of his erstwhile owner. Ford sheltered him and talked Tibeats into selling him, arguing that Tibeats would kill Northup if Northup didn’t kill him first. Tibeats assented, and Northup found himself with a new master.
EDWIN EPPS WASN’T much improvement over Tibeats. “When sober, he was silent, reserved and cunning,” Northup recalled. But he was very often not sober. “When ‘in his cups,’ Master Epps was a roistering, blustering, noisy fellow, whose chief delight was in dancing with his ‘niggers’ or lashing them about the yard with his long whip, just for the pleasure of hearing them screech and scream as the great welts were planted on their backs.”
Epps had been an overseer before acquiring property and becoming a planter himself. He remained a hard taskmaster, compelling his slaves to toil from first light to last, regardless of weather, season or compromised health. Cotton was his main crop, and during harvest the slaves were required to meet rigorous quotas, averaging two hundred pounds per picker per day, or be whipped for their failure.
Northup never mastered the art of picking. His hands could pull tunes from a fiddle, but they fumbled over the fluffy bolls. Epps whipped him again and again, to no avail. Finally Epps gave up and set Northup to other work.
“Ten years I toiled for that man without reward,” Northup recalled. “Ten years of my incessant labor has contributed to increase the bulk of his possessions. Ten years I was compelled to address him with downcast eyes and uncovered head, in the attitude and language of a slave.”
Yet they were ten years in which he never stopped pondering how he might regain his freedom. His experience with James Birch had convinced him of the folly of proclaiming his true identity so long as he remained in the sealed world of the South. But he continually looked for cracks in the wall that separated his present from his past. On board the Orleans during his passage south, he had met a sympathetic sailor, an Englishman who had lived in Massachusetts. Northup told the fellow his story, and the sailor helped him write a letter addressed to Henry Northup, a white man of the family that had once owned Solomon’s father. Northup explained his circumstances and asked for help. The sailor said he would post the letter at New Orleans. For more than a decade Northup didn’t know whether the letter had reached its destination.
During that time he had no other opportunity. An apparent chance fell through when a man Northup sounded out on sending a letter to friends in New York betrayed his confidence, forcing Northup to swear the man was lying. Finally, though, he met a Canadian named Bass, a journeyman carpenter. Bass was outspoken in his criticism of slavery, and he habitually engaged Epps in debates on the subject. Had he been an American, especially a Yankee, his opinions might not have been tolerated. But because he was a foreigner, and because he seemed slightly daft, Epps and the neighbors let him talk.
Northup overheard and cautiously cultivated him. In time he told Bass his story. Bass said he would help him regain his freedom. He asked Northup for the names of friends in New York who could testify to his having been a free man. He wrote letters on Northup’s behalf. Both hoped for the best.
Months passed with no answer. Solomon Northup began to fear that the letters had gone astray or that his friends, assuming they were still alive, had not seen fit to pursue his case. He concluded he would never regain his freedom.
More months passed. And then, in January 1853, Henry Northup appeared at Epps’s plantation. Northup was astonished and overcome. “As my eyes rested on his countenance, a world of images thronged my brain,” he recalled. “All the scenes and associations of childhood and youth, all the friends of other and happier days appeared and disappeared, flitting and floating like dissolving shadows before the vision of my imagination.” He saw his wife and children, his father and mother. Finally he focused on the man before him. “Henry B. Northup! Thank God—thank God!”
Confirming Northup’s deliverance required satisfying several conditions. In theory Southern law decried trafficking of the sort that had led to Northup’s captivity, for it lent credence to the complaints of the abolitionists against the slave system. In practice Southern authorities threw hurdles in the path of those who would do what Henry Northup was attempting. But Henry Northup knew what he was about. He had consulted lawyers and men with experience of Southern ways. He had taken care not to give Epps forewarning of his arrival, lest Epps cause Northup to disappear. In fact, simply finding Northup had been difficult, for during his whole time in the South he had been known as Platt.
But when Northup, with affidavits carried by Henry Northup, proved his true identity, his shackles fell away. With Henry Northup he boarded a steamboat on the Red River for New Orleans. He saw the slave pen from which he had been purchased by William Ford. Another boat bore them to Virginia. At Richmond, Northup showed Henry the slave pen he had inhabited there.
In Washington, Northup identified the Yellow House and swore out a criminal complaint against James Birch, who was still engaged in his nefarious business. Birch was arrested and brought before a magistrate. But he hadn’t survived in the slave trade without acquiring a few tricks. He produced witnesses who swore that he had come by Northup honestly, or at least innocently. Two men had approached him saying they had a Georgia slave for sale, on behalf of a master who had fallen on hard times. If there was any deception, Birch and the witnesses said, the fault was theirs, not his. The court allowed the testimony of Birch and the witnesses, but it refused to hear Northup’s. As a black man, his testimony was inadmissible in the District of Columbia. The case against Birch was dismissed.
Finally Northup reached home. His wife and children had known he was in bondage, for his letter from the Orleans had reached them. But it gave insufficient information for them to mount a search, which was beyond their unaided means anyway. The long silence that followed made them fear he had died. The children had grown. One daughter was married, with a child of her own, named for the boy’s missing grandfather. Northup’s son had been saving money to purchase his father’s freedom, should he ever learn where Northup was. His wife had continued to hope, even as the basis for hope dwindled.
Twelve years of his life had been lost—but not lost entirely, for he was persuaded to tell his story, and when it was published, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation near the Red River, in Louisiana became a compelling contribution to the case the abolitionists were making against the slave system of the South.