gland by which he raised funds enough to buy his family's
freedom. At the conclusion of the narrative of their lives Peter and his
wife were domestics in a New Jersey boardinghouse, one of their two
sons was a blacksmith's apprentice in a neighboring town, the other had
employment in a Pennsylvania village, and the daughter was at school in
Philadelphia.[63]

[Footnote 63: Kate E.R. Pickard, _The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, being the
personal recollections of Peter Still and his wife Vina after forty years
of slavery_ (Syracuse, 1856). The dialogue in which the book abounds is,
of course, fictitious, but the outlines of the narrative and the documents
quoted are presumably authentic.]

Solomon Northrup had been a raftsman and farmer about Lake Champlain until
in 1841 when on the ground of his talent with the fiddle two strangers
offered him employment in a circus which they said was then at Washington.
Going thither with them, he was drugged, shackled, despoiled of his free
papers, and delivered to a slave trader who shipped him to New Orleans.
Then followed a checkered experience as a plantation hand on the Red River,
lasting for a dozen years until a letter which a friendly white carpenter
had written for him brought one of his former patrons with an agent's
commission from the governor of New York. With the assistance of the local
authorities Northrup's identity was promptly established, his liberty
procured, and the journey accomplished which carried him back again to his
wife and children at Saratoga.[64]

[Footnote 64: [David Wilson ed.], _Narrative of Solomon Northrup_ (New
York, 1853). Though the books of this class are generally of dubious value
this one has a tone which engages confidence. Its pictures of plantation
life and labor are of particular interest.]

A third instance, but of merely local notoriety, was that of William
Houston, who, according to his own account was a British subject who had
come from Liverpool as a ship steward in 1840 and while at New Orleans had
been offered passage back to England by way of New York by one Espagne de
Blanc. But upon reaching Martinsville on the up-river voyage de Blanc had
ordered him off the boat, set him to work in his kitchen, taken away his
papers and treated him as his slave. After five years there Houston was
sold to a New Orleans barkeeper who shortly sold him to a neighboring
merchant, George Lynch, who hired him out. In the Mexican war Houston
accompani