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A Solomon Northup historical marker is seen on Thursday, March 13, 2014, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Northup was the author of
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SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. (AP) - Historians know where Solomon Northup was
born, where he lived and where he worked. They know whom he married and
how many children he had. They know he played the fiddle and spent 12
years enslaved in the South before being freed.
What historians don't know about the author of "12 Years A Slave" is
when and how he died and where he is buried. It's a lingering mystery in
the final chapter of the life of the 19th-century free-born
African-American whose compelling account of enforced slavery in
pre-Civil War Louisiana was made into the Oscar-winning film of the same
title.
"That's sort of a big blank spot in the story, for sure," said Rachel
Seligman, co-author of "Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the
Author of Twelve Years a Slave," published last year.
This month, "12 Years A Slave" took home the Academy Awards for best
picture, best adapted screenplay and best supporting actress. The
accolades have sparked new interest in Northup's story, which was little
known until recent years even in the upstate New York communities where
he spent most of his life.
Northup was born July 10, 1807, in what is now the Essex County town of
Minerva, in the Adirondack Mountains. His father, a former slave, moved
the family to neighboring Washington County, eventually settling in the
village of Fort Edward, on the Hudson River 40 miles north of Albany.
Northup married Anne Hampton in the late 1820's, and the couple lived in
an 18th-century house in Fort Edward that is now a museum.
Northup worked on his father's farm and rafted timber on the Champlain
Canal between Fort Edward and the southern end of Lake Champlain. The
couple and their children moved to nearby Saratoga Springs when Anne got
a job in one of the growing spa resort town's big hotels. Northup found
work as a musician, and in 1841, two white men lured him to Washington,
D.C., with the promise of more work. Instead, they kidnapped him and
took him to New Orleans, where he was sold into slavery.
Northup endured the next 12 years enslaved on a Louisiana cotton
plantation before friends in Saratoga finally won his freedom. In 1853,
he published a memoir of his ordeal that led to a speaking tour
supported by abolitionists. He got involved in the Underground Railroad,
helping escaped slaves find freedom in the Northeast and Canada. But
around 1863, the height of the Civil War, he dropped out of sight and
was never heard from again. Even the movie notes at the end that "the
date, location and circumstances" of Northrup's death remain unknown.
Theories abound about what may have happened to him. One scenario has
him being captured and killed while serving as a spy for the Union Army.
The man who helped rescue him said he believed Northup had taken to
drink and was kidnapped yet again. Or Northup could have died in a place
where no one knew him or cared to properly bury an African-American at a
time when a war over slavery was tearing the nation apart.
"He may have just wandered around from place to place and died somewhere
nobody knew who he was, and he was buried in a potter's field," said
David Fiske, co-author the 2013 Northup book along with Union College
professor Clifford Brown.
"There's no paper trail for him," Brown added.
Fiske said Northup's descendants also couldn't provide any documents or
hard facts, so he has followed numerous threads while trying to track
down where Northup may have been buried. He checked cemeteries in
communities outside Saratoga and other upstate communities where
Northup's wife and their children later lived, but came up empty. No
death records have ever been found for him. Fiske, a former state
librarian, points out that death records weren't kept in a systematic
form in New York until the 1880's.
For Seligman, a museum curator at Skidmore College, host of this July's
annual Solomon Northup Day, the mystery surrounding Northup's demise and
resting place is part of the allure of being a historian.
"It's what keeps historians going," she said. "It's just a puzzle to be solved."
