SOLOMON NORTHUP ARRIVED in Washington at the moment of William Henry Harrison’s funeral. Northup was a black man, free from birth, who lived with his wife and three children in Saratoga Springs, New York. The town was a summer vacation spot for residents of New York and the surrounding region; Northup worked various jobs connected to the hospitality trade. During winter the opportunities dwindled, and he took whatever employment he could find. He built railroads and canal boats; he sawed wood and drove wagons; he played fiddle for weddings and other celebrations.
His fiddle attracted the attention of two visitors, who introduced themselves as Merrill Brown and Abram Hamilton. They said they had connections with a circus based in Washington, D.C., to which they were about to return. They staged small exhibitions while they traveled, and they needed a musician. Would he join them as far as New York City? He would receive one dollar per day, plus three dollars for each night’s show; his travel expenses would be covered as well. With nothing better at hand, Northup accepted the bargain. He didn’t think to write to his wife, who had traveled to another town to serve as a cook during a session of the circuit court there. One of the children was with her, and the two others were with an aunt; he didn’t inform them, either. He expected to be back before any of them knew he had gone.
The three men journeyed by carriage to Albany and on to New York. The nightly shows drew disappointing crowds and so were suspended. Brown and Hamilton said it was better if they continued directly to Washington. They asked Northup to go with them. They promised him a regular job at higher pay than he could make in Saratoga. He had never been to Washington, and he assented.
As a precaution, they said, he should secure papers proving he was a free man. They would be entering slave territory, and one could never be too careful. Northup took their advice, even while wondering if the precaution was necessary. “I thought at the time, I must confess, that the papers were scarcely worth the cost of obtaining them,” he wrote afterward. But Brown and Hamilton seemed to have done this kind of thing before, so he took their word for it. “Paying the officer two dollars, I placed the papers in my pocket and started with my two friends to the hotel.”
They traveled to Baltimore by stagecoach and from Baltimore to Washington by train. They arrived the night before the funeral of Harrison and were lucky to find rooms at Gadsby’s Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. Brown and Hamilton paid Northup forty-three dollars, which was more than they owed him but which they ascribed to his willingness to take the circus job on short notice. They warned him to be very careful with the money and with himself, because Washington was full of characters with no compunctions about preying on those new to town. “I was certainly much prepossessed in their favor,” Northup recalled. “I gave them my confidence without reserve and would freely have trusted them to almost any extent.” They suggested he stay off the streets at night, when trouble was most likely; he went straight to his room and locked the door.
The next day brought the capital’s first funeral of a president. “The roar of cannon and the tolling of bells filled the air, while many houses were shrouded with crape, and the streets were black with people,” Northup recounted. “As the day advanced, the procession made its appearance, coming slowly through the Avenue”—Pennsylvania Avenue—“carriage after carriage, in long succession, while thousands upon thousands followed on foot, all moving to the sound of melancholy music.”
Northup stuck close to Brown and Hamilton amid the crowds. “We stood together as the funeral pomp passed by. I remember distinctly how the window glass would break and rattle to the ground after each report of the cannon they were firing in the burial ground. We went to the Capitol and walked a long time about the grounds. In the afternoon, they strolled towards the President’s House, all the time keeping me near to them and pointing out various places of interest.” Northup wondered why they hadn’t seen the circus, but with much to distract him, he didn’t raise the question with his companions.
Presently they entered a saloon, to toast the departed president. Brown and Hamilton ordered liquor, and all three drank up. They visited a second saloon and drank another round. Northup felt more confident of his friends than ever. Late in the afternoon, after yet another round, he began feeling ill. “My head commenced aching—a dull, heavy pain, inexpressibly disagreeable,” he recalled. “At the supper table, I was without appetite; the sight and flavor of food was nauseous.” Brown and Hamilton helped him back to their hotel and expressed hope he would feel better in the morning.
Northup’s distress only intensified. “The pain in my head continued to increase until it became almost unbearable. In a short time I became thirsty. My lips were parched. I could think of nothing but water—of lakes and flowing rivers, of brooks where I had stooped to drink, and of the dripping bucket, rising with its cool and overflowing nectar from the bottom of the well.” Unable to sleep, he stumbled through the hotel, hoping to find a source of water. He entered the basement kitchen, where a slave woman fetched him a glass of water, and then a second. The relief was temporary; by the time he had staggered back to his room, the thirst caused him greater agony than ever.
He drifted into a state between sleep and delirium. He sensed people in his room. They told him through his daze he needed to see a doctor. They helped him pull on his boots and guided him down a hallway, through an alley and onto the street. He could detect a light glimmering in a window. They seemed to walk toward it. He thought it must be the doctor’s house.
The next thing he knew he was lying alone, in darkness and in chains. He had no idea where he was or how long he had been there. His hands were cuffed and his ankles fettered to an iron ring in the stone floor. His coat and hat were missing, and with them his money and the papers attesting his freedom. He spoke, then shouted, but no answer came back. Gradually he reasoned his way to the conclusion that he had been robbed and kidnapped. But why? By whom? “There must have been some misapprehension, some unfortunate mistake,” he recalled thinking. “It could not be that a free citizen of New York, who had wronged no man nor violated any law, should be dealt with thus inhumanly.”
No one came for him. No one answered his calls for help. The longer he lay there, alone and chained, with the effect of the drug he had been given wearing off, the more he realized his position was no accident. His new friends had not been friends at all. “It was a desolate thought, indeed. I felt there was no trust or mercy in unfeeling man and, commending myself to the God of the oppressed, bowed my head upon my fettered hands and wept most bitterly.”
DAY BROKE, AS Solomon Northup inferred from the crowing of roosters and the rumble of carriage wheels on the street outside and above his dungeon cell. But no light entered until a key clattered in the door lock, the door groaned back on rusty hinges, and two men entered. The dominant figure of the two was James Birch, as Northup later discovered, a slave dealer infamous even among those who didn’t denounce slavery itself.
“Boy, how do you feel now?” Birch inquired.
Northup said he was ill. He demanded to know why he was there and why in chains.
Birch replied that he was his slave and was about to be shipped to New Orleans.
Northup protested that he was not a slave. He was a free man and a resident of Saratoga, New York. He had a wife and children, also free. He had been falsely imprisoned. He demanded to be released.
Birch swore at Northup and said he was a slave, from Georgia.
Northup protested that he was no man’s slave. Birch must unchain him and let him go.
Birch refused, most angrily. “He flew into a towering passion,” Northup recounted. “With blasphemous oaths, he called me a black liar, a runaway from Georgia, and every other profane and vulgar epithet that the most indecent fancy could conceive.” Birch told the other man, named Radburn, to get the paddle and the cat-o’-nine-tails. Radburn left the room and soon returned, bearing a flat-sawn board not quite two feet long and a whip of unraveled rope, with each of the strands tied into a knot at the end. Birch and Radburn roughly stripped Northup bare and laid him over the bench, with Radburn holding him down. Birch beat him with the paddle a dozen times. He paused and asked Northup if he still thought he was a free man. Northup said he was. The beating resumed. Again the question; the same response. More blows. Birch switched to the whip. “This was far more painful than the other,” Northup remembered.
In time he could not respond at all to Birch’s question. Birch lashed him several more times. Finally he ceased. Cursing again, he told Northup that if he ever again said he was a free man or that he had been kidnapped, he would receive even worse punishment. He and Radburn left.
For a few days Northup saw only Radburn, who brought him water and food, the latter consisting of bread and fried pork. Radburn, clearly Birch’s subordinate and less violent than his superior, spoke to him in the tones of a counselor, saying he would be wise to heed Birch’s warning. If he wanted to survive, he should never again talk about being free and having been kidnapped.
Eventually Northup was allowed out of his cell into an enclosed yard. It had a wall of brick, perhaps ten feet high, and a shed roof along the wall. The center of the yard was open to the sky. Northup later saw the yard from the outside. “The building to which the yard was attached was two stories high, fronting on one of the public streets of Washington,” he observed. “Its outside presented only the appearance of a quiet private residence. A stranger looking at it would never have dreamed of its execrable uses. Strange as it may seem, within plain sight of this same house, looking down from its commanding height upon it, was the Capitol. The voices of patriotic representatives boasting of freedom and equality, and the rattling of the poor slave’s chains, almost commingled. A slave pen within the very shadow of the Capitol!”
THE SLAVE POPULATION of the United States at the time of the 1840 census was nearly 2.5 million, out of a total population of 17 million. Virginia had the largest number of slaves, with South Carolina second and North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama roughly tied for third. Yet Virginia’s slave population was smaller than it had been in the immediately previous census, and those of the Carolinas were essentially stable, while the slave populations of the states of the Gulf Coast were increasing dramatically. The cotton industry was growing rapidly there and with it the demand for slave labor.
This fact of agricultural economics made America’s founders look shortsighted or cynical. The bargains the fathers of American republicanism talked themselves into over slavery were premised on the idea that slavery was a dying model of labor mobilization. The soils of Virginia and the Carolinas were exhausted by generations of tobacco culture, and long-staple cotton, which was easier on the soil than tobacco, grew well only near the coast. Already slavery had become economically unattractive in most of the North, where legislatures were acknowledging reality and giving the institution a decent burial. Slavery was expected to die of its own inflexible weight in the South, too. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other slaveholders uneasy with their own and their region’s complicity in bondage assumed that time would solve the remaining slave problem peacefully.
But a Connecticut tinkerer and a Tennessee soldier proved them wrong. Eli Whitney invented an engine for efficiently removing seeds from short-staple cotton, which flourished more widely than the long-staple variety. Whitney’s cotton gin dismantled the single biggest barrier to the transformation of cotton cloth from a luxury product purchased by the few to a staple of the wardrobes of the many. The potential market for cotton expanded enormously.
The Tennessee soldier was Andrew Jackson, whose battles with Indians before, during and after the War of 1812 opened huge tracts of the Gulf Plain to settlement by cotton entrepreneurs. These were the planters who required the slaves whose numbers swelled so fast in the 1820s and after.
Part of the demand for slaves in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas was met by procreation among slaves the new planters took with them, but the larger growth was the result of the importation of slaves from states of the Atlantic coast. Plantations in Virginia and Maryland had difficulty competing with plantations of the Deep South, where land was cheaper and more fertile. Had field crops been the only export of those Eastern plantations, many would have failed commercially. And had those plantations failed, their owners and others in their states might have lost interest in slavery. But the plantations exported something else—slaves—and so remained viable.
The demand for slaves was insatiable. It drove prices to record levels, until slaves became the most valuable asset of Southern planters, more valuable than the planters’ land. Slaves served as collateral for loans, so that planters who might have considered freeing their slaves couldn’t do so until their creditors were paid. Because many planters ran regular debts, often to Northern banks, the silent underwriters of slavery, emancipation was out of their hands and largely out of the question. Writ large, emancipation was out of the question for most of the Southern states; it would have been the ruin of their economies.
The rising demand had other ramifications. It made slaveholders in the Eastern states not merely indifferent to the possibility of resuming the importation of slaves from Africa, but downright opposed. If slaveholders had been as convinced of the positive effects of slavery on the slaves as John Calhoun professed to be, they might have clamored to extend its benefits to Africans not yet enslaved. But they didn’t. Instead they became protectionists, much like the protectionist manufacturers they criticized, and for the same reason. Protection—in this case not simply a tariff on imported slaves but a ban—pushed prices higher than they would have been in an open market. Slave owners in the Gulf states would have been happy to revive the overseas slave trade, but they were outweighed politically by the slave owners of the East.
Meanwhile the economics of the internal slave trade made access to new markets—that is, new slave territories and states—essential. In time the Gulf states would become saturated with slaves, and prices for slaves would start to fall. But new markets—in Texas, in territory taken from Mexico directly, in the West Indies perhaps—could keep demand and prices high. The political debate over the extension of slavery was typically couched in terms of regional balance, with the South insisting that it not be marginalized in Congress. New Northern states must be offset by new Southern states. But beneath the politics was the basic economics of supply and demand. Slavery in Mississippi made slavery in Virginia profitable today; slavery in Texas would make it profitable tomorrow.
The rising value of slaves meanwhile drove the criminal activities to which Solomon Northup fell victim. A healthy young man could fetch more than a thousand dollars at sale, and though Northup, in his early thirties, was older than the slaves who typically brought the highest prices, his experience and skills—including his musical talent—offset his age. The profit motive inspired slave dealers and their agents to range as far as New York and New England to find unsuspecting blacks like Northup, whom they would lure close enough that they might be kidnapped, transported to New Orleans and sold to the planters of the Deep South.
THE SLAVE PEN in which Solomon Northup was confined was owned by William Williams. It was often called the Yellow House, for the color it showed to the street. Nearby was a similar facility, Robey’s Tavern, operated by Washington Robey in conjunction with the slave-trading firm of Joseph W. Neal and Company. The two structures were, as Northup remarked, within sight of the Capitol, and although the slaves confined in them could not hear the voices of Henry Clay, John Calhoun, Daniel Webster and the others debating their fate, the senators and representatives could hear the melancholy rattle of the chains of slaves as they shuffled in coffles to and from the Yellow House, Robey’s Tavern and wharves on the Potomac.
Northup took his place in such a coffle and was marched to the river. He thought of crying out that he was a free man, but James Birch and his whip were always close by. He realized that even if he managed to utter a few words before being beaten silent, the words of Birch, a white man, would weigh more with the authorities in the city. He reasoned that greater hope of escape lay in acting submissively, biding his time and watching for the moment when Birch’s attention flagged.
He was trooped aboard a steamboat that dropped down the Potomac. He and the other slaves in his coffle were shoved into the hold, to find such places to sit or lie as they could among the crates and barrels there. The ship’s bell tolled as they steamed past Mount Vernon and the grave of George Washington. “Birch, no doubt, with uncovered head, bowed reverently before the sacred ashes of the man who devoted his illustrious life to the liberty of his country,” Northup remarked later, with bitter irony.
At Aquia Creek the steamboat stopped and Birch and his slaves debarked. They boarded a stage for Fredericksburg. Birch was in good spirits. Three of the slaves were children; Birch bought them gingerbread at a roadside tavern. He encouraged Northup to appear less glum. “He told me to hold my head up and look smart,” Northup recalled. “That I might, perhaps, get a good master if I behaved myself.”
At Fredericksburg they switched from the stagecoach to a train for Richmond. At the Virginia capital they were marched to a slave pen similar to the Yellow House in Washington, but larger. The owner, William Goodwin, apparently did regular business with Birch, and he greeted Birch warmly. He examined the slaves Birch had brought, including Northup. “Boy, where did you come from?” he asked Northup.
“From New York,” Northup replied, without thinking.
“New York! Hell, what have you been doing up there?”
Northup noticed Birch’s face turning livid. Catching himself, he mumbled that he had simply been traveling there. Goodwin didn’t pursue the matter, but Birch shortly spat in Northup’s ear that if he ever said another word about New York, it would be his last. “I will kill you,” Birch said. “You may rely on that.”
Richmond was the gathering spot for slave cargoes bound for New Orleans. Once a sufficient number of slaves had been collected, Northup was driven with the coffle aboard a sailing vessel, the Orleans. This was the last he saw of James Birch until years later, under very different circumstances. Birch returned to Washington to do to other unfortunates what he had done to Northup.
The Orleans sailed down the James River to the Chesapeake Bay and thence to Norfolk. The ship took on more slaves and set to sea. The shackles were removed from the slaves and they were allowed onto deck. But their relative comfort didn’t last, for a storm struck terror into many and made nearly all wretchedly sick, with their vomit rendering their close quarters odious and filthy. Still worse was smallpox that appeared among the slaves and carried some of them off. Northup contracted the disease, though its symptoms didn’t surface until after the ship had reached its destination.
At New Orleans, Northup was taken in hand by Theophilus Freeman, partner to James Birch. Where Birch was the procurer of slaves, Freeman was the distributor. He ordered Northup and the fifty other slaves in his pen to wash and groom themselves. They were given fresh clothes and instructed to look as presentable and attractive as possible. They largely obliged. Freeman’s aim was profit; theirs was to be purchased by a wealthy, genteel master who would treat them better than a struggling planter desperate to wring the last ounce of effort from them.
For Northup, Freeman initially asked a price of fifteen hundred dollars. But after Northup became ill with smallpox, nearly died, and emerged from the experience with the facial scars characteristic of the disease, Freeman let him go for one thousand dollars. The purchaser was William Ford, who had a plantation on the Red River in northwestern Louisiana.
Ford seemed a decent man, a good Christian, to Northup. He spoke in a kindly fashion and treated his slaves well, although he evinced no doubt of the morality of slavery as an institution. “He was a model master,” Northup allowed, “walking uprightly, according to the light of his understanding, and fortunate was the slave who came into his possession. Were all men such as he, slavery would be deprived of more than half its bitterness.”
Northup was tempted to tell his story to Ford. But he couldn’t be sure Ford was everything he appeared to be. Ford had spent a thousand dollars on him, and even a good master would be loath to lose that. The slave system didn’t brook contradiction, and the contradiction it brooked least of all was the claim that a slave was in fact a free man. “I knew well enough the slightest knowledge of my real character would consign me at once to the remoter depths of slavery,” Northup recalled. “I was too costly a chattel to be lost, and was well aware that I would be taken farther on, into some by-place, over the Texas border, perhaps, and sold; that I would be disposed of as the thief disposes of his stolen horse, if my right to freedom was even whispered. So I resolved to lock the secret closely in my heart—never to utter one word or syllable as to who or what I was—trusting in Providence and my own shrewdness for deliverance.”