Solomon Northup Was Not the Only Free Black to Be Kidnapped
The story of Solomon Northup’s kidnapping and enslavement before the Civil War was told in the Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave. But Northup’s case was not an isolated incident. Economics and governmental actions made such crimes profitable, and many citizens–primarily free blacks–were victimized.
This criminal practice has largely been overlooked by scholars. Documentation of such kidnapping cases is scattered across historical newspaper reports, anti-slavery literature, local history books, and academic publications. David Fiske, whom Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has called “an historian with astounding research skills, honed by years of tracking down every available clue about the legendary author of Twelve Years a Slave,” has gathered much factual information on victims of such crimes, and presents it in a new book titled Solomon Northup’s Kindred: The Kidnapping of Free Citizens before the Civil War.
In addition to disrupting–even ruining–the lives of victims, the practice of kidnapping added to the sectional friction that resulted in the American Civil War. The liberty of free blacks was under constant threat, and the disappearance of those who fell prey to kidnappers caused disruption and evoked sympathy in their communities, increasing anti-slavery sentiment.
This book tells the stories of dozens of people who were kidnapped and sold into slavery, and also explains why and how it occurred, and how governmental actions allowed it to continue. Victims included were from all regions of the nation: the North (New York, Massachusetts), the Midwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas), the Middle Atlantic (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware), and the South (Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia). They were sold in slave markets in Virginia, the District of Columbia, Georgia, and Louisiana.
Read an Associated Press announcement of the new book: http://www.fresnobee.com/entertainment/article56228800.html