Twelve Years a Slave - Enhanced Edition (37 page)

79.
Sam is not on the list of slaves belonging to Beulah Baptist Church in Cheneyville, but he was very likely a member of the church. It was said that there were more black members of the church than whites, which would have been likely, since in plantation country, as in Cheneyville on Bayou Boeuf, there were seven or eight blacks to one white. Walton, Ford’s slave, was one of a number of slaves listed as members of Beulah Baptist Church in Cheneyville [Beulah Baptist Church Membership List].

80.
The name Taydem was not found in the 1850 United States Census for Louisiana. As scattered as settlers were during the settlement period, there were likely many missed by the census taker.

81.
Rafting was nothing new to Louisiana, with nearly a third of its surface covered with trees, according to Dr. John Tarver, retired professor of history, Louisiana State University Agricultural Center [Tarver, 1992]. Northup may have been the first to raft logs over this particular route, which necessitated the narrow cribs and required rafting down Indian Creek to Bayou Clair and then to Bayou Lamourie. However, Louisiana forests are laced with streams, and the Indians would have developed rafting skills centuries before the Europeans came. Pioneers then settled these flat lands, learning from the Indians how to traverse and use the bayous and then adding their own improvements.

82.
An unknown author described the Indians of the time:

The tribe of Indians that was spoken of as living on Indian Creek were Choctaw Indians and there were few Indians of any other tribe. Banks, his wife, Maria, and Maria’s mother, Aunt Betsy, were Biloxi Indians and of a much higher type than the Choctaws. Aunt Betsy was very old when I remember her living at Lecompte (in about 1887) and she made the most beautiful baskets. The Indians congregated at Lecompte, La., on a given date to be taken to the Indian Territory. Through miscarriage of plans, they were not sent for but for the kindness and generosity of James P. Moore, they would have suffered greatly. They were given camping grounds at the back of Mr. Moore’s farm at Lecompte and they picked cotton and made baskets to pay for a few provisions to add to the wild game which they killed.

Mr. Moore gave them potatoes and corn. They pounded the corn and made a thick mush of it. The women hung their papooses up in the trees when they went to work, and the babies never cried. Mr. Moore knew Mr. Cascalla and his son-in-law, John Baltise. Ole Blue Eyes, son of the last chief of the Choctaw tribe, gave Mr. Moore his father’s silver crown and some ornaments in the shape of crescents and a beaded belt that belonged to his father, the chief. [Author unknown, document dated 1827, sent to Sue Eakin by Agatha Brewer]

83.
The Indians lived in the “Great Pine Woods” in Avoyelles Parish, neighboring parish to Rapides.

84.
John M. Tibaut, an itinerant living in Rapides Parish, gave his occupation as manufacturing and trade in U.S. Census 1840. He owned one slave. He lists no one in his household but himself (Tibaut is referred to as Tibeats or Tibbets in
Twelve Years a Slave
as well as some other documents).

Chapter Eight

85.
Franklin Ford was the sixth son of Jesse and Dully Barry Prince Ford of Kentucky. While William Prince Ford, his brother, was a Baptist minister, Franklin became a distinguished Presbyterian minister in Shreveport, Louisiana. He opened a private boarding school for girls in Minden, Louisiana. William Prince Ford co-signed a note with him to finance the school. When Franklin could no longer pay an increasing indebtedness on the school, William Prince Ford had to make the payment, for which he had no funds. This forced him to sell some slaves, including Solomon Northup, to meet his obligation [See Stafford,
Three
Rapides
Families
, 279].

The three major yellow fever epidemics during the decade of the 1850s and the increasing conflict between the South and North with threat of war undoubtedly affected the enrollment at the Minden Female Boarding School. The school did not close during those years, however. A Cheneyville native, Esther G. Wright Boyd, attended Franklin Ford’s boarding school until shortly after the war began. She related in an interview:

Went in fall to Minden, La. [after graduating from Mansfield Boarding School] because Miss Brainard was teaching there. I was there three years, going home every vacation and graduating in July, 1861. Minden Female College was undenominational & our Pres. was the Rev. Jesse Franklin Ford [Presbyterian]. Miss Brainard’s health failed & she returned to Brooklyn before I left Minden. I always roomed in the building called “Miss Brainard’s house” and roomed next door to her.

She was a fine woman, yet I did not become especially attached to her. As I look back on the five years I was off at school I understand perfectly why Mr. Boyd was so sure boarding schools were bad places for girls. I had a fine time, but with a mob of girls whose rudeness was hardly neutralized by the refinement of the teachers. It must have been during the John Brown episode that for several nights we were much alarmed by talk of negro insurrections. A dozen or more girls were gathered in my room one night with the door locked talking over the reports of such insurrections when there was a knock at the door & the voice of a mulatto woman who waited in the dining room was asking for me. We thought the tragedy was at hand! My recollection is that it was only an ordinary message.

My sisters and brother at school in New Haven [
sic
] [CT] heard of some of the agitation over ‘bleeding Kansas,’ and Miss Dutton, the Principal at Grove Hall, presented a flag to someone & made the presentation remarks. I do not remember that there was any sectional feeling aroused among the Southern pupils.

On my graduation day there were few young men in the audience for they had gone to the war. Their drills before leaving were of great interest to us but we had no idea of the seriousness of the situation. After examinations were over, my roommate, Annie Conway, and I were notified one day that we were wanted in Mr. Ford’s study. We went down & he informed us that I had received the Valedictory address & she the salutatory. The other girls of the class came over to congratulate us. We wrote our compos—every word, & therefore they were honest at least. And so my school days ended. I was anxious to go to school, but was prevented. Sally Stafford went back to Minden the following session, but as the war grew more serious she was sent for & returned before the close of the session. Before we came home in 1861 her father (my bro.-in-law) and brother (17-years-old) had joined the Army of Virginia. From Minden we went by carriage to Mr. McFarland’s plantation, which was on Red River. The river was very low and we stayed there several days waiting for a boat. Mrs. McFarland was Bro. Leroy’s half sister & was a handsome woman with black eyes & black hair. She had been married before & had two pretty brunette children—Ruffie (Ruffin, I suppose) & Nina. On the Sunday we spent there, July 21, the Battle of Bull Run was fought, but we knew nothing of it then. [Boyd interview. Esther Wright Boyd was the wife of LSU President David French Boyd. A transcript of the interview is available in the Jesse Wright Collection, LSU Archives.]

86.
Peter Baillio Compton was born April 17, 1818, the son of John Compton and Amelia Baillio. He married Esther Eliza Tanner, daughter of Lodowick and Ann Martha Tanner, who owned Tiger Bend Plantation in the same area where Edwin Epps would buy land later. Although Peter Baillio Compton was born on his father’s estate at Meeker, three miles south of Lecompte, his own plantation was located on Red River thirty miles away. Unless the property was a part of his father’s vast estate of 6,200 unimproved acres and 2,300 improved acres, no slaves are listed for Peter Baillio. He could not have operated a plantation without slaves. The John Compton Estate (his father’s property) included 377 slaves, so probably there were some living on his son’s plantation [See Stafford,
Three Rapides Families . . .
, 153; and Menn, 377].

87.
Tibeats owed William Prince Ford $400, and Northup himself was the collateral for that money. Later in the narrative, as Northup implies, the existence of the mortgage of $400 literally saved Northup’s life as Tibeats became enraged and planned to hang him.

88.
Bayou Boeuf and the land surrounding it are accurately described here:

Bayou Boeuf rises in a cypress lake near McNutt’s Hill, and, after receiving several clear streams from the pine woods, becomes a bold, broad bayou some six or eight miles below Alexandria, and so continues throughout its course. Its total length to the junction with Bayou Cocodrie is not much less than eighty miles. It receives, as a distributary from Red River, Bayou Robert, which debouches from the river . . . and enters Bayou Boeuf twelve miles from that place. Three miles farther it sends off Bayou Lamourir [
sic
] through an extensive swamp back to Red River . . . The Boeuf has at all seasons a steady current of pure water and is one of the prettiest bayous of Louisiana. On either side of the Boeuf and Bayou Robert throughout their length are, or rather were [before the four years of the Civil War] some of the finest plantations in the state. The front lands of Bayou Boeuf are fertile in the highest degree—light, sandy, reddish colored, and easily worked . . . The Boeuf and the Cocodrie by their junction form Courtableau, . . . [See Lockett, 78] and,

The northern section of the Bayou Boeuf to which Northup was brought as a slave was not settled until around 1812 because of its remoteness to New Orleans when Louisiana became a state. Supplies had to be obtained and farm products shipped on the Boeuf. After the inland port of Washington developed on Courtableau Bayou, large warehouses were constructed in which cotton, sugar cane, molasses, and other products from the Boeuf plantations were stored to wait for a steamboat coming from New Orleans to transport crops to market and secure farm and family supplies. The Bayou Boeuf region developed a busy commerce, serving as the lifeline of the pioneer families migrating to establish plantations there. [See Eakin,
Washington . . .,
3-9. See a present-day photo of Bayou Boeuf taken at the old William Prince Ford property in the Extras & More section of our website at
www.TwelveYearsASlave.org
]

89.
Peter Tanner, who was the son of Robert Tanner, one of the founders of Cheneyville, with his wife Providence, became an influential planter, first owning a plantation south of Cheneyville adjoining that of his brother, Jabez. The Ford children crossed a small bridge across the bayou to attend private school at the Peter Tanner plantation “Big House” [See Bennett, S.P.B.; see a present-day photo of the Big House owned by Jabez Tanner and a sugar cane field on the property in the Extras & More section of our website at
www.TwelveYearsASlave.org
].

Porter and Barbra Wright’s detailed account of people buried in the cemetery of Bayou Rouge Baptist Church, Evergreen, Louisiana, in their
The Old Burying Ground
, provides insights into the person who was Peter Tanner:

Wheeler dealer Tanner was a big man even among the Grandees on the Rio Boeuf. 3,400 acres it is said, his home and all, he sold because he and his next door neighbor, brother Jabez, in 1859 had this violent disagreement over who was the rightful owner of a $5 gin pole. That was the cause, as handed down to Great Grandson Dan Brunson, for the sale and the move to Tanner Hill in Evergreen. The Tanners were known to have these outbursts among themselves. But for an outside intruder, caveat! We have no reason to believe the two brothers were not reconciled. Both were extremely religious. Jabez was the founding father of the Christian Church in Cheneyville and Peter was a deacon at Beulah Baptist Church there. They often preached at their respective meeting houses. The church book at Bayou Rouge Baptist does make mention of an 1846 resolution requesting Peter Tanner ‘to preach here as often as convenient . . .’ Peter Tanner served in the Louisiana Legislature from Rapides Parish. [See Wright, 74-75]

90.
Anderson Leonard Chafin [spelled “Chapin” in text] married Sarah Ann Providence Rutledge and lived at the edge of the Great Pine Woods about a dozen miles from the settlement later called Lecompte. He was in the tanning business [See Stafford,
Three
Rapides Families . . .
, 33).

91.
The term “Great House” reflects a misunderstanding of what was meant by “the Big House” originally and then elaborated upon by people without knowledge of plantation country. The “Big House” was probably first applied by slaves on plantations, and it was adopted by people mostly outside the South in its literal meaning. In reality, the expression meant to slave workers the designation of the site of the home of the planter, or master. Some of these houses were modest log buildings when Northup arrived on Bayou Boeuf. The inference of wealth comes from use of the term by outsiders, but planters often had little or no wealth. Thousands of acres of land were awarded to some men by the Spanish government for surveying land, but it took years of work to convert the land into cultivation. Land appreciated from a nominal value of fifty cents to several dollars in the first decade, beginning in 1812 when Louisiana became a state, to $40 or $50 an acre by the 1850s. When unsettled lands lay from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, land was either there for the taking or bought for a pittance [See Eakin and Culbertson, 194].

A plantation was a place employing a kind of farming involving a relatively large work force on a relatively large area of land. It was also a lifestyle. There were many plantations of 200-1,000 acres of land in the Lower Red River Valley. When Solomon Northup was in the area, land was still being cleared of woodlands and made ready for cultivation, which meant that even large landholdings ordinarily did not indicate the size of the area cultivated.

For the pioneers among whom Northup lived, land was of relatively little value at a time when thousands and thousands of acres to the Pacific were open for settlers. Land on the Boeuf sold by speculators to settlers ranged from about $1.25 an acre to $5.00. As late as the early 1900s, the railroad companies issued large numbers of booklets to promote settlement along their lines. The available land not yet settled included some in the Bayou Boeuf area. One of the monthly brochures,
The New Southwest Devoted
to the Great Southwest
—actually a tabloid-sized, slick-paper publication of about twenty-eight pages—was published by the Missouri Pacific-Iron Mountain System in Saint Louis, Missouri, and advertised such things as “Special One-Way Colonist Excursions” and “Winter Tourist Rates for Colorado, Texas, Louisiana, and Mexico,” emphasizing the vast amount of unsettled land that was available. In the March brochure, the Missouri Pacific Railway and Iron Mountain Route also advertised “Homeseeker’s Excursions” through Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Kansas, Missouri, Indian and Oklahoma Territory.” [See
The New Southwest Devoted to the Great Southwest
, published by Missouri Pacific Immigation Bureau]