“Who Will…Pay for their Sufferings?”: New York Abolitionists and the Failed Campaign to Compensate Solomon Northup

Abstract

637 Documents and Interpretations “Who Will . . . Pay for their Sufferings?”: New York Abolitionists and the Failed Campaign to Compensate Solomon Northup Roy E. Finkenbine, University of Detroit Mercy Eighteen fifty-four proved to be an eventful year in American history.1 Many of the year’s events further heightened the growing sectional struggle over slavery. Proslavery politicians facilitated the Gadsden Purchase, annexing a strip of southern Arizona and New Mexico into the Union, thus completing the outline of the continental United States. In one of the most famous renditions of a runaway slave under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, thousands of Bostonians jeered and draped their homes and businesses in black as federal officials and troops marched Anthony Burns to a waiting vessel to return him to Virginia bondage. Hundreds of thousands more in the North were grieved and angered after reading newspaper accounts of the rendition. The Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the decades-old Missouri Compromise, bringing the Second Party System to a resounding end and placing the slavery question squarely at the center of American politics. The Republican Party, a sectional party whose main premise was opposition to the extension of slavery into the new federal territories in the West, came into being. A blustery speech by Senator William Seward of New York in the halls of Congress sounded the opening salvo of what would be years of undeclared civil war between proslavery and antislavery forces on the ground in Kansas, testing the concept of “popular sovereignty” included in the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Working behind 1. Roy E. Finkenbine is Professor of History and Director of the Black Abolitionist Archive at the University of Detroit Mercy. An earlier version of this article was presented at the thirty-second annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in Rochester, New York, July 25, 2010. The author would like to thank Diane Barnes and the anonymous reader for New York History for their comments. 638 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY the scenes, proslavery diplomats maneuvered unsuccessfully to wrest the island slave colony of Cuba away from the Spanish empire and add it to American territory.2 Less heralded, perhaps, but no less important, thousands in the free states read slave narratives in 1854 and were moved to heighten their involvement in the antislavery struggle. Among the most moving of these autobiographies—penned or dictated by former slaves to inform and instruct northern readers of the horrors of bondage—was that of Solomon Northup, a freeborn New Yorker, who was kidnapped into slavery.3 Born in 1807, Northup lived in Saratoga Springs prior to his capture, supporting himself, his wife, and their three children by working as a tradesman , carpenter, and musician. In March 1841, he was lured southward to Washington, D.C., with the promise of lucrative employment. He soon found himself drugged, without his free papers, and in a slave pen awaiting sale. Shipped to New Orleans via the mechanisms of the internal slave trade, he labored for twelve years as a bondsman on cotton and sugar plantations in the Red River district of Louisiana. Solomon Northup was freed in January 1853 through the efforts of his wife Anne and a politically -prominent white patron, Henry Northup. Soon after, he converted his life-story, with the help of local attorney David Wilson, into a booklength narrative entitled Twelve Years a Slave. Published in July 1853, the volume circulated widely over the next few years, selling more than thirtythousand copies by 1856, second only to Frederick Douglass’s slave autobiography . Capitalizing on the public enthusiasm for slavery stories fueled by the recent publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Northup’s tale increased the audience for other slave narratives, convincing publishers to bring out an expanded edition of Douglass’s celebrated 1845 Narrative. Northup himself played a role in generating such enthusiasm, giving antislavery lectures and peddling his narrative across New York, New England, and Canada West (contemporary Ontario) between 1853 and 1857.4 2. David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York: Harper & Row, Publisher, 1976), especially chapters 7–9, remains a valuable narrative of the major slavery-related events of 1854...