By Sharon Lim, ’16
Solomon Northrup’s and Charles Dickens’ visit to Richmond, and subsequent personal testimonies shed insight into the institution of slavery, through the very different eyes of a freeborn African American and an acclaimed British author. Their vastly different social standing affected how they documented their experiences with slavery, and on what they chose to focus. Northrup’s testimony about slavery is based on his background as a well-educated, freeborn slave while Dickens’ narrative of the institution of slavery and its effect on Richmond, Virginia reflect his experiences as a British author. Their accounts of Richmond as a place and space, reception of their memoirs, and their individual vocabulary allowed Northrup to present slavery from a personal view, while Dickens showed it as an institution.
Richmond, Virginia was a slave city that was intertwined with urbanization and industrialization The growth of the tobacco, wheat, coal, and iron manufacturing industries in Richmond, VA contributed to its quick rise in status in Virginia. With the multiple demands in industrialization came the need for labor and slaves. By 1840, slaves made up 37 percent of the city’s population. Because of the rise of transportation, communication, and industrialization, as well as its location, Richmond served as the prime hub for the internal slave trade, transfer of millions of slaves from the Upper South to the plantations of Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas.. From the 1830s to the Civil War, Richmond served as the second largest trading slave-trading hubs in America, trailing only New Orleans..
While Richmond was one of the greatest slave-trading hubs, it was also a center for abolition. While fighting for abolition, personal narratives, when published, became one of the most effective ways of educating the public on horrors of slavery. Whether that narrative was one by a former slave such as Solomon Northrup or Frederick Douglass, or by a white sympathizer like Charles Dickens or William Lloyd Garrison, the personal nature of reactions affected the audience because of the intimacy of eyewitness account. The first-hand knowledge and experience of slavery, and its effects on society offered insight into the lives of black slaves. It allowed for a new dialogue regarding slavery and educated vocabulary for whites. The publication of slave narratives and other personal testimonies of slavery created a place for national debates and challenged Americans to live up to national ideals of freedom and democracy for all. It humanized blacks as people, as mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, sisters and brothers.
Solomon Northrup, an educated freeborn African-American farmer and musician, was kidnapped in Washington, DC, and sold into slavery in 1841. Merril Brown and Abram Hamilton lured Northrup to Washington from Saratoga Springs, New York, under the pretense of a job offer with their circus. Washington, DC, during this time, legalized slavery and had one of the nation’s largest slave markets. Here, Northrup’s legal free status was moot. Northrup was sold for $650, and was forced to Richmond, Virginia, where he was sold to John M. Tibaut, and later Edwin Epps, under whom he toiled for the next decade. In 1852, Northrup met Samuel Bass, a Canadian carpenter. Northrup confided in Bass his legal free status, and Bass wrote letters to Northrup’s friends and family, eventually leading to his freedom on January 4, 1853. Later that year, Northrup wrote and published his memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, which documented his experiences.
The publication of Twelve Years a Slave occurred at a time of intense national debate about slavery and abolition: Southern lawmakers forced the Fugitive Slave Act through Congress in 1850 and Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. Northrup attempted, he wrote, to “speak of Slavery only so far as it came under my observation…to give a candid and truthful statement of facts; to repeat the story of my life, without exaggeration, leaving it for others to determine, whether even the pages to fiction present a picture of more cruel wrong or severer bondage.” Twelve Years A Slave allowed readers to experience a part of what slavery meant for those in bondage. It gave slaves names, roles, emotions, and purpose.
Northrup experienced Richmond on a smaller, more personal scale than Dickens did. In Twelve Years A Slave, Northrup’s view of Richmond is confined to the slave pen in which he was held and the scenery he witnessed while being transported to and from that slave yard. His trip to Richmond consisted of the slave pen and beatings. Northrup’s account of Richmond is an insider’s point of view as he is actually being sold, exploited, and beaten. The first-hand account of the violence he endured and the inhumanity he and others were treated with is a more horrifying and emotionally-wrenching story than Dickens’ account of Richmond.. While Dickens does have a poor opinion of slavery, Dickens is still an observer and his writing is aimed to show slavery as an institution.
Charles Dickens visited the United States for the first time in 1842 when he stopped at cities such as Richmond,Washington, DC, and Boston. Marginalized populations fascinated Dickens, as he stopped at prisons, insane asylums, schools for blind and deaf children, industrial factories, plantations, and slaves’ homes. Dickens witnessed slavery and its effects on society in Richmond. As a visitor to Richmond and the United States, Dickens saw what slavery did to the social and physical landscape. He saw slavery for not just what it did to those incarcerated, but also to the city and society as a whole. Where slavery exists, Dickens wrote, there were “deplorable tenements, fences unrepaired, walls crumbling into ruinous heaps.”
In his travelogue American Notes, published in 1842, he recorded not only his observations of slavery is Richmond, but also dedicated a whole chapter to “Slavery.” Dickens criticized Americans for both their complicity and deliberateness in institutionalizing slavery. He denounced the public opinion that “has made the laws and denied the slaves legislative protection…knotted the lash, heated the branding-iron, loaded the rifle, and shielded the murderer…threatened the abolitionist with death, [and] burned a slave alive at a slow fire in the city of St. Louis.” While Dickens wrote about the institution of slavery, Northrup experienced it.
Northrup documented the abuses and cruelty he endured at the hands of white men during his time as a slave. When Northrup insisted on his legal free status, there was “blow after blow inflicted upon [his] naked body.” He was repeatedly beat into submission. He described his situation and those of other slaves similarly to abused animals. As they were “fed twice a day – always receiving the same kind and quantity of fare…drive into the hold, and securely fastened down” He compares his situation to one of a “dumb beast—chained and beaten without mercy.”
As families were broken apart and family members sold separately, Northrup was able to document watching the experience with vivid details. As Eliza, a slave and a mother of three, was separated from her children, Northrup recalled, “she kept on begging and beseeching them, most piteously not to separate the three. Over and over again she told them how she loved her boy…how very faithful and obedient she would be; how hard she would labor day and night, to the last moment of her life, if he would only buy them all together.” Such desperation from a mother is something that to which other mothers could relate. The pain of losing a child is universal. Northrup was able to convey the familial relations, portraying Eliza as more than a slave, as a mother.
For Dickens, Slavery affecteds not only those enslaved, but those who live and are nearby where slavery exists. In Richmond, Dickens found a “ district, as in all others where slavery sits brooding, there is an air of ruin and decay abroad, which is inseparable from the system.” Rather than focusing on the humanity of slaves and inhumanity of slavery, Dickens looked towards the effects of slavery on the landscape and ideals of American democracy. In Richmond, Dickens was confronted by the “the darkness – not of the skin, but of the mind” that “brutalized and blotted out all the fairer characters traced by Nature’s hand.”
Dickens’s American Notes brought an international audience to the rising abolitionist movement. It showed that slavery was not a purely a cause for blacks or just for Americans. The institution of slavery itself was against democratic ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As an acclaimed British author who was well-known and well-respected both in Europe and the United States, Dickens already had an audience. He had privilege, power, and most importantly, a voice that others listened to. Northrup was able to humanize slavery. He put a face and a name to African-American slaves. Twelve Years A Slave served as a personal, brutal, and honest narrative of what it meant to be captive, to be considered property. His first-hand experiences show the ugly truth of slavery. By showing the humanity of the slaves, Northrup is able to show the inhumanity of slavery.
Two visitors to Richmond, one white, the other black, one free, the other captive, both educated, both abolitionists, and both authors. Northrup forced the United States to pay attention by detailing the horrors of slavery and the lack of empathy in his captors. He was able to convey his own humanity and those of the other captives, while showing the inhumanity of the captors. Dickens, on the other hand, appealed to an international audience as he approaches slavery from an institutional point of view. He showed how slavery pervaded the city and was not an issue that white people could ignore. Even Northerners and those abroad were forced to face the issue for it was not limited to the South, but had the ability to infect all those around it. Both abolitionists documented how they viewed slavery from their own experiences and backgrounds. Abolition did not belong to one race. Today, as in Northrup’s and Dickens’ time, the fight for freedom, equality, and rights is for everyone, and fell on the shoulders of all. It is a burden that is should not just be carried by solely by whites or blacks. As Dickens points out, it pervades not only those enslaved, but the larger society and landscape as well.
Further Reading
Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation. London: Chapman and Hall, 1842.
Gregg D. Kimball, American City, Southern Place: A Cultural History of Antebellum Richmond.Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2003.
Midori Takagi, “Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction”: Slavery in Richmond, Virginia, 1782-1865. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003.
Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, 1853.