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Solomon Northup: From freeman in NY to slave in New Orleans [1]
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Date: 2025-07-14
“In the same way that Detroit is shorthand for auto manufacturing and Hollywood is shorthand for filmmaking, New Orleans was, for generations, known essentially as the place one went to buy African American people.” — Calvin Schermerhorn, historian, Arizona State University, “‘As I Have Seen and Known It,’ Ex-Slave Autobiographers and the New Orleans Slave Market” from “New Orleans: A Literary History”
The following is an account of what it was like for some of those enslaved people to make the weeks-long journey by ship from the mid-Atlantic states to be sold in the New Orleans slave market of the 1840s. Thousands of others were forced to march to the city over hundreds of miles of primitive roads and trails. The events described here are based on historical documents and the first-hand accounts of the enslaved people themselves, including narratives from Henry Bibb, John Brown, William Wells Brown, Josiah Henson, and Solomon Northup.
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Spring arrived late in 1841. Mid-April storms dumped more than a foot of snow from Philadelphia to New York City, 2 feet in parts of New Jersey and 18 inches in parts of Massachusetts.
William Henry Harrison, the nation’s ninth president, had died on April 4 from what doctors at the time believed was pneumonia he contracted while delivering his 1 hour and 45-minute inaugural speech — still the longest on record — without a coat or hat on a cold, damp Washington, D.C., March 4 morning. He was just one month into his term.
Faced with the first death of a president in office and a vagueness in the Constitution, official Washington was scrambling to understand what that meant for the nation’s leadership. Was Vice President John Tyler to serve the rest of Harrison’s term or only until a new election could be held? Did he become president, acting president, or remain vice president?
The constitutional crisis and presidential funeral were not likely top-of-mind for the crew steering a steamboat down the Potomac River, ringing its bell as it passed George Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon to honor Harrison’s first predecessor. The ship’s business was commerce, moving the barrels and boxes of freight in the steamer’s hold to points of transfer and sale downriver.
Like hundreds of other steamers in the previous and coming decades, it also carried a group of men, women, and children shackled and secured for transport in the damp darkness below deck, part of the interstate slave trade that had grown steadily since the U.S. Congress banned the trans-Atlantic trafficking of enslaved people in 1808.
The flow of captives from the Mid-Atlantic and Upper South — by waterway or through lands seized from Indigenous nations forcibly removed in the brutal Trail of Tears from 1830 to 1850 — to markets and plantations in the Deep South or expanding settlements in the West was a major cog in the nation’s economy. And likely no city benefited more from this cruel economic exchange than New Orleans.
Solomon Northup Credit: Public Domain
The ship making its way down the Potomac would become noteworthy only because one of the captive migrants onboard was a man named Solomon Northup. His memoir, “Twelve Years a Slave,” would reveal intimate details of the horrors and cruelty of the slave trade in a dramatically personal way. Northup’s harsh treatment under a cruel Louisiana slave holder paralleled Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fictional “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which became the best-selling U.S. novel of the 19th century, boosting the abolitionist movement, enraging Southern slaveholders, and pushing the nation closer to civil war.
Northup’s story also provides real-life insight into what it meant to be sold through the New Orleans slave market from the point of view of the enslaved person.
A Black man born free in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Northup has been lured to Washington, D.C., drugged, and kidnapped into slavery. In an apparent attempt to hide that crime, he is listed on the manifest of the ship that takes him to New Orleans as Plat Hamilton.
During his journey and his years in slavery, Northup sees families being torn apart, fellow captives beaten and broken, and traders and enslavers enforcing their wills without empathy or conscience while never losing hope that he will eventually be freed and returned to his family.
Initially, Northup formed a close bond with another captive. Number 38 on the manifest’s list, her name is Eliza, but she was listed as “Drady Cooper,” aged 22, and five feet five inches tall. She was being taken south with her two children, Randall and Emily. Randall is about 10 years old, and Emily is 7.
The family had been sold to James H. Birch, a well-known slave trader who had been operating in Richmond, Va., since the 1830s. He was among the most visible and frequent advertisers for buying and selling people in the Chesapeake, Va., newspapers, sometimes even running the same advertisement for buying groups of enslaved people every day for months.
Like many young women exploited in slavery, Eliza was used sexually by the man who owned her. When the man married, his new wife despised and mistreated Eliza. The man deceived Eliza into thinking he would free her and the children, but instead sold her, Randall, and his own daughter, Emily, to Birch.
Typical of the often complex travel routes, Northup, Eliza, and the other captives are transferred from the ship to stagecoaches for the leg to Fredericksburg, Va., where they are forced to board railcars for the 60-mile journey to Richmond, Va. The use of rail lines, with the ongoing national improvements to roads, bridges, and other infrastructure, helped to make it easier for enslavers to move their captives more cheaply by bypassing coastal and overland routes, another example of how the nation’s expansion fueled the slave trade.
Northup and the others are held in a slave pen between a railroad depot and the James River. Now far from the homes they have known and uncertain of the future, Northup observes Eliza sitting in a corner, singing hymns and praying for her children.
Credit: Public domain
The captives are marched through the streets of Richmond the next day. Slave coffles were a common sight in port cities along the route. The group is herded to a two-masted sailing ship, the brig named Orleans, rigged and loaded with tobacco. The Baltimore-built ship, a regular slaver, holds the equivalent of about two semi-trailers worth of cargo today.
The Orleans’ master, and the man who signed the pre-printed “Manifest of Slaves” along with ship owner Luther Libby and customs collector Thomas Nelson, is William Wickham.
About 40 enslaved men and women, carrying rolled-up blankets, tin cups, and spoons, walk on board the Orleans around 5 p.m. on April 27, 1841.
The brig sails down the James River, into the Chesapeake Bay, and arrives in Norfolk, Va., where four more enslaved people are brought aboard.
After a night in the cargo hold, the captives are allowed to remain on deck, uncuffed during the day, as the ship sails southward. They are fed fried cornmeal cake and bacon twice a day, at 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., and forced back into the hold after dark. The hatch is barred shut.
The trips from the Upper South to New Orleans were not as long or as dangerous as the brutal trans-Atlantic voyages in which 12 million captives were hauled from Africa to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries.
But there were still perils along the way. A violent storm strikes just after the Orleans loses sight of land as it heads down the coastline, pushing the ship off course. When the brig makes it to calmer waters, the captives discuss whether they should try to take the Orleans by force and make way for freedom in New York. Just a month before, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that enslaved Africans who had successfully rebelled and taken control of the Spanish schooner La Amistad were free to return to their homeland.
But the plan aboard the Orleans comes to nothing after one of the conspirators contracts smallpox and dies four days before their arrival in New Orleans. Like the thousands who died in the Middle Passage of the trans-Atlantic trade, his body was dumped into the sea.
Only five months later, the slave ship Creole, traveling on the same route from Richmond to New Orleans, was taken over in a rebellion by the 128 enslaved Africans aboard and diverted to Nassau, Bahamas, where their freedom was granted under the sovereignty of Great Britain, which had abolished slavery in 1833. Freedom for Northup, Eliza and the others had been that close.
The brig docks in New Orleans on May 23, 1841. As was common practice, slave traders and consignees came aboard. Although well-known for its large and busy auction houses, the sale of captives can happen almost anywhere in New Orleans — the docks, slave pens, private homes, and coffee shops. Due to the threat of yellow fever and malaria during the hot summer months, the local slave selling season traditionally runs from January through late March. The Chesapeake sellers hope for higher prices with less competition.
The men and women of the Orleans sit handcuffed at the dock. There is a roll call of first names: “Stand up when you hear your name.”
Theophilus Freeman, Birch’s business partner and one of the most infamous slave traders in the nation, calls for “Plat.” When no one answers, he points to Northup as matching the description: 26 years old, 5 feet, 7 inches tall, “yellow” coloring.
Freeman, who has a thin face and bent posture, makes his money running a multi-state slave-trading network, a business he has been in since the late 1830s. He works freelance or under contract to collect enslaved people from the Upper South and transport them to the lower Mississippi River valley.
The ironically named Freeman (in Greek, Theophilus means God lover) will be listed in the 1842 New Orleans city directory with the occupation “trader,” and is considered by many in the city a man of ill repute, not because he was selling human beings but because he was often accused of shady business dealing and was notably violent to his captives. One of the wealthiest men in the country, in about 19 years he will die in poverty in New Orleans, on the run after having been accused of stealing enslaved people and defrauding creditors.
Part of the 1400 block of Chartres Street, where Theophilis Freeman held enslaved men, women and children in pens for sale in the New Orleans slave market. Credit: Ben Estes / Verite News
A chain gang works on the levee as the enslaved people from the Orleans are marched to Freeman’s slave pen at the corner of Esplanade Avenue and Chartres Street. Many such groups of captives are at work around the city, building canals, levees, and other infrastructure. Much of the commerce — the many banks, the markets, the produce exchanges — is tightly woven into the web of the slave trade.
Freeman’s operation is adjacent to several other similar slave pens and is surrounded by a variety of professional and retail businesses: doctors, accountants, carpenters, blacksmiths, tailors along with clothing, furniture, and jewelry stores.
The pen takes up about an acre, consisting of a block of houses forming a graveled square littered with trash and stones. Its yard is surrounded by upright planks with sharpened ends. Northup is put in with a group of about 50.
Slave pens generally have a “flogging room,” where punishment takes place. Facing the prospect of a new lifetime under malevolent owners and brutal working conditions on the sugar and cotton plantations, the captives are not always eager to comply. Cutting the skin by lash or bruising in conspicuous places on the body is avoided so as not to lower the slave sale price.
Punishment tools include hickory “flogging paddles” with holes drilled in them and “flops,” 1½-foot-long leather straps with wooden handles. Those who resist or don’t comply quickly enough — men, women, and children — are stripped naked and beaten for up to half an hour while they lie face down, their hands tied by rope to cleats attached to the floor and their feet usually held down by another enslaved person forced to cooperate.
Eliza and the others leave their blankets in a small building, are fed, and then allowed to roam the pen until nightfall. They sleep under a shed, in a loft, or out in the open yard. The women and children are given separate rooms.
The next day, Freeman wakes his “stock,” as the slave merchants call them, by kicking some and by cracking his whip at others, getting the captives ready for sale. They wash thoroughly with greasy dishwater — perhaps to bring a glisten to the skin — and the men comb their hair and shave. Gray hairs are plucked or dyed. The appearance of robust health, youthfulness, and “looking smart” is vital for the best price.
They are assigned grades, depending on their prospective usefulness as farmhands or some other less taxing job. Their skin color is painstakingly and dehumanizingly recorded: dark, brown, griff, mulatto, yellow, etc., etc.
The men are given hats, coats, shirts, pants, and shoes. They are cheap but clean. The women get calico dresses and kerchiefs for their heads.
The best of the “stock” will be sold in the slave pen; the others will be taken to various coffee houses, exchanges, and other auction locations scattered around the city.
Unlike the city of Richmond, where the multimillion-dollar slave-trade business largely takes place in undesirable parts of the city, New Orleans sales often take center stage at venues such as the St. Louis Exchange Hotel and the St. Charles Hotel.
The most famous of these is the St. Louis, on the corner of what is now Chartres and St. Louis streets. The auctioning of human beings takes place under a 100-ton copper-plated dome “every day except the Sabbath.” Bidders sit at a massive bar under 19-foot ceilings, sipping drinks from French glasses and watching the auctions.
Things are much less elegant back at the Esplanade pen, where Freeman is the stern and threatening director of a theatrical pre-sale rehearsal. The trader orders men to one side of the room and women to the other, arranged by height, with young Emily at the end of the line.
Freeman, carrying his ever-present whip, cajoles the captives to look alert and happy, sometimes threatening and sometimes promising favors. They are forced to parade and dance. Northup, an experienced musician, plays the fiddle as if he were entertaining at a Virginia reel barn dance. But the music and the marching mask the dark underbelly of cruelty and terror.
“Look smart!” “Be bright!” “Stay spry!” “Stand here!” “Dance!” “Hold your head up!” Freeman commands his captives.
The Solomon Northup historical marker at Esplanade Avenue and Chartres Street notes the place where Northup, a free man of color kidnapped in Washington, D.C., was held after being transported to New Orleans to be sold in the slave market. Credit: Ben Estes / Verite News
Customers arrive to examine them, feeling their hands, arms, and bodies. They open their mouths and inspect their teeth as if they are buying a horse. Some are taken out back, stripped, and inspected more thoroughly, often sexually assaulted. Those with scars on their bodies are harder to sell, the marks on their backs suggesting they could be “rebellious.”
The buying commences at 10 a.m. and continues until 1 p.m. The enslaved people are fed, and the afternoon sale goes from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Those not sold are returned for another night in the slave pen.
Eliza cries as her son, Randall, is purchased by a Baton Rouge planter, who makes the child jump, run across the floor, and perform other activities before completing the deal. Despite being threatened with 100 lashes by Freeman, she begs the man not to separate her family, to take her and Emily as well.
“I love my boy!” she cries over and over again. “I’ll be faithful! I’ll obey! I’ll work day and night until I die!”
But the planter explains that he can’t afford to buy her, times being what they are. Randall will be his only purchase.
Eliza runs to the boy, hugs and kisses him, her tears streaming as Freeman again threatens to “give her something to cry about.”
“Don’t cry, mama. I will be a good boy. Don’t cry,” Randall tells his mother as he is led out the door by the man from Baton Rouge. His ultimate fate is unknown.
Almost all of those who traveled aboard the Orleans fell sick that night, complaining of back pain and violent headaches. A doctor confirms they, like the unfortunate man earlier in the forced journey, have contracted smallpox. They are taken to a hospital, not out of compassion but to guard the bottom line. Northup goes temporarily blind. The doctor wonders if he’ll recover.
After about two weeks, Northup and Eliza are better and are returned to Freeman’s slave pen. Again, they are paraded. Again, they are inspected and examined. Again, they are forced to grin and dance.
A middle-aged man arrives a few days later, in late June. He acts friendly and cheerful, asking the enslaved men and women questions about their skills and the types of jobs they are accustomed to. “Would you like to come live with me? Will you be good boys?” he asks.
Freeman offers to sell Northup for $1,000, and Eliza for $700. The man accepts the offer.
Eliza breaks down when she realizes she will be torn from her remaining child, Emily. She clings to her daughter, and Freeman roughly grabs her arm, cursing and hitting her while she staggers back.
“Mercy, mercy, master!” Eliza cries. “Please, master, buy Emily. I can never work if she is taken from me: I will die.”
The man, William Ford, a Baptist preacher who has a plantation along the Red River in what was known as the Great Pine Woods, seems to take pity and offers to buy Emily as well for a “reasonable” price.
But Freeman, a pimp as well as a trader, is having none of it. There are buyers who would pay $5,000 for the light-skinned Emily when she gets a little older, he argues. The sale of young women to work in brothels or to provide sexual services to their owners can be lucrative for the seller.
“There were heaps and piles of money to be made for such an extra fancy piece as Emily would be,” Freeman pronounced in the crudest terms, according to Northup. “She was a beauty — a picture — a doll — one of your regular bloods — none of your thick-lipped, bullet-headed, cotton [pickers].”
Eliza shrieks. “I will not go without her! They shall not take her from me!”
But Freeman tears Emily away from her mother as the child cries for Eliza not to leave her. “Come back — don’t leave me — come back, mama!”
But Eliza, renamed Drady, and Northup are forced to leave with their new owner, boarding a steamer named the Rodolph to travel upriver.
Eliza never sees her children again.
She is overcome by loss and grief, and can’t do the grueling work in the cotton field. Eliza, who has become thin and haggard, is ultimately sold again to a new owner, who beats her mercilessly to force her to work.
Uncared for and unable to overcome the unimaginable burdens placed upon her by the institution of slavery, she soon dies in a dilapidated cabin in Louisiana, far from home and with no family to comfort her.
Thousands of more enslaved men, women and children would experience the same cruel journey from the mid-Atlantic and Upper South to New Orleans over the next 20 years until the evil slave trade is finally brought to an end with the Civil War.
Nicholas Paskert contributed research to this story.
The Foundation for Louisiana provided financial support for the publication of this series.
If you have genealogies, documents, photos, or other information linking your family to those enslaved people brought to New Orleans in the 18th and 19th centuries, we want to hear from you. Please answer some questions using this link or the form below to share your story with us.
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