Black History Month For Foodies Series: Solomon Northrop

Solomon Northrop (1808 –circa 1863) was an African American born free in New York’s Hudson Valley. He played the fiddle and often booked parties where he played for pay and thus made extra income. Two white men, Merrill Brown and Abram Hamilton, posing as the representative of a traveling circus approached him at one of his musical outings and engaged him to play for a circus in Washington, D. C. in 1841. Northrop agreed. He traveled to New York City to obtain his freedmen papers then headed to Washington, D.C. which was one of the nation’s largest slave markets. Northrop, who was married with children, thought that the engagement would be short so he did not bother his wife with the details of his trip. Shortly after he checked into his Washington hotel, he met with Brown and Hamilton for a drink. The two men drugged him, stole his free papers, and sold him at a DC auction into slavery in Louisiana. Louisiana was one of the those slave states that masters in the upper south would use as leverage to keep rebellious slaves in line, warning them that if they did not obey either they or a loved one would be sold “down south” where one’s life as a slave proved much more difficult then say in Maryland or Virginia. Northrop would remain enslaved in Louisiana from 1841 to 1953 until he was finally he was able to get a message to a white patron in New York who successfully gained his manumission. After gaining is freedom, Northrop returned to the north where became a noted speaker on the anti-slavery speaking circuit. He would go on to document his ordeal in a published autobiography titled, Twelve Years A Slave by Solomon Northrop. The book undermined the argument of slavocrats who insisted that masters treated their slaves better than bosses treated wage workers in the free states. The book also provides an example of the agency of blacks folk both in and out of slavery to gain their freedom during the antebellum period. I used the book to gain valuable insights into southern foodways which I've talked about in earlier post.

Solomon Northrop on southern foodways: http://frederickdouglassopie.blogspot.com/2010/12/christmas-foodway-series-culinary.html