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12016-03-22T13:00:10-07:00Calvin Schermerhorn72410f8bbde58a1e8e60023cf6749d711494714689063Chapter 6plain2016-03-24T13:03:40-07:00Calvin Schermerhorn72410f8bbde58a1e8e60023cf6749d7114947146Chains of ViolenceChapter 6Violence was enslavers’ great economizer. The hard brutality of the slave trader Theophilus Freeman’s supply chain illustrates the human costs of a mechanical market taking shape in the 1840s. Solomon Northup witnessed Freeman’s string of allied firms as a chained commodity in a blasted succession of bolted souls, a pitiable procession of wrecked humanity. Slavers’ profit margins grew in proportion to the violence, and kidnap victims like him offered great potential. Northup was born free in New York, and his family was part of Saratoga Springs’s braided history of people of European and African descent. His skin color was described as “yellow,” and he stood five feet seven inches tall. In late winter 1841 the thirty-three-year-old was living near Lake Saratoga on a railroad route, with his wife, Anne, née Hampton, and three children, Margaret, Elizabeth, and Alonzo. Like so many African-descended Americans, he worked at a variety of jobs. Northup labored on the Champlain and Erie canals, visiting Canada and Great Lakes cities, including Rochester and Buffalo. Northup was a small entrepreneur. After helping build improvements near Glens Falls, New York, he built a small business rafting timber down the Champlain Canal. Rafting required a constellation of skills, including leadership, carpentry, and mechanics. No stranger to a culture of drinking and fighting, he got in trouble with employers and ran afoul of the law. In consequence, he had some trouble keeping his business afloat.
Solomon Northup was consigned to the brigantine Orleans in the spring of 1841. To cover up his kidnapping, the Orleans's master and owners signed a slave manifest listing him as "Plat Hamilton." Northup did not hear the name Plat until landing in New Orleans.
