‘12 Years a Slave’ author’s death still a mystery

SARATOGA SPRINGS, New York (AP) ― Historians know where Solomon Northup was born, where he lived and where he worked. They know whom he married and how many children he had. They know he played the fiddle and spent 12 years enslaved in the South before being freed.

What historians don’t know about the author of “12 Years a Slave” is when and how he died and where he is buried. It’s a lingering mystery in the final chapter of the life of the 19th-century free-born African-American whose compelling account of enforced slavery in pre-Civil War Louisiana was made into the Oscar-winning film of the same title.

“That’s sort of a big blank spot in the story, for sure,” said Rachel Seligman, co-author of “Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the Author of Twelve Years a Slave,” published last year.

This month, “12 Years A Slave” took home the Academy Awards for best picture, best adapted screenplay and best supporting actress. The accolades have sparked new interest in Northup’s story, which was little-known until recent years even in the upstate New York communities where he spent most of his life.

Northup was born on July 10, 1807, in what is now the Essex County town of Minerva, in the Adirondack Mountains. His father, a former slave, moved the family to neighboring Washington County, eventually settling in the village of Fort Edward, on the Hudson River 64 kilometers north of Albany. Northup married Anne Hampton in the late 1820s, and the couple lived in an 18th-century house in Fort Edward that is now a museum.

Northup worked on his father’s farm and rafted timber on the Champlain Canal between Fort Edward and the southern end of Lake Champlain. The couple and their children moved to nearby Saratoga Springs when Anne got a job in one of the growing spa resort town’s big hotels. Northup found work as a musician, and in 1841, two white men lured him to Washington, D.C., with the promise of more work. Instead, they kidnapped him and took him to New Orleans, where he was sold into slavery.