History of the United States I / Unit 12 USH1 1668 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Solomon Northup at the Market
The idea
Solomon Northup was a free Black man of Saratoga, New York, kidnapped and sold into slavery in eighteen forty-one. He escaped and published Twelve Years a Slave. In the New Orleans slave market he was sold beside a woman named Eliza and her children Randall and Emily. A buyer wanting a coachman took a fancy to Northup and also bought Randall. The little fellow, Northup wrote, was made to jump, and run across the floor, and perform many other feats, exhibiting his activity and condition. Eliza was crying aloud, and wringing her hands. She besought the man not to buy him, unless he also bought herself and Emily. The trader Freeman turned round to her, savagely, with his whip in his uplifted hand, ordering her to stop her noise, or he would flog her, and said that unless she ceased that minute he would take her to the yard and give her a hundred lashes.
In practice
Eliza shrinking before him and trying to wipe away her tears, and it being all in vain, because she wanted to be with her children the little time she had to live, and all the frowns and threats of Freeman could not wholly silence the afflicted mother.
Where people slip
Three things this passage does that no summary can. It shows the mechanism of sale, in which a child is made to perform physical fitness for a buyer, exactly as livestock would be. It shows that separation was not an unfortunate by-product of the trade but its ordinary operation, conducted in public, before witnesses, with a whip raised to silence the objection. And it is testimony, not description. Northup was a free man who was kidnapped, which is why he could write, and the fact that this record exists at all depends on a legal accident. The two hundred thousand people sold in each decade of entry 1666 left almost no such accounts. Teach the passage close to whole, because its detail is its argument, and because a student who has read it will not afterwards describe the domestic slave trade as a transfer of labour.
Your place on the trail
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Builds on
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