Twelve Years a Slave

by Solomon Northup

  68. William Prince Ford (1804-1861) was one of the first pioneers to establish a plantation in the picturesque country bordering Hurricane Creek, near present-day Forest Hill. A native of Tennessee, he was brought to Louisiana as a boy of thirteen by his parents, who settled near Cheneyville. He married Martha Tanner (1808-1849), eleventh child of Robert Tanner, founder of Cheneyville. Although he operated a 200-acre plantation south of Cheneyville that Martha inherited, he and Martha made their home at the place on Hurricane Creek. There he operated a variety of small businesses, including a mattress manufacturing shop, a brick manufacturing facility, and a “pony” sawmill in partnership with William Ramsay. The sawmill was built January 3, 1840, in “the Great Pinewoods” about ten miles north of Ford’s home on Hurricane Creek. His partnership purchased 79.87 acres at $99.84 per acre. Copies of the sale documents are in the United States Land Office, District of Opelousas, Rapides Courthouse.

  Ford was a minister at Spring Hill Baptist Church, which he and a small group of Cheneyville summer residents established on Hurricane Creek. He was also headmaster at Spring Creek Planters Private Academy. Children of Cheneyville planters comprised the largest number of the students, but a few students from Bayou Rapides planters also attended [See Stafford, 280].

  A letter from W.P. Ford from “Wallfield,” apparently the name he gave his place on Hurricane Creek, was written on September 10, 1859, to President William T. Sherman at the Louisiana State Seminary, scheduled to open in 1860. The letter provides an insight to Ford’s variety of small business enterprises:

  Dear Sir:

  I was in Alexandria several days ago for the purpose of seeing the Committee appointed to have the State Institution of learning prepared for the reception of students. I saw only Mr. Henarie, who told me you were absent from the Parish. He recommended that I should see you on your return, or write to you. I wish to furnish the Institution with mattresses; and my object is to get you to recommend that the person who makes the purchases in that line for you, come and see my factory before he makes engagements elsewhere. I know that I can make it the permanent interest of the Institution to buy from me. If necessary, I will meet you in Alexandria any day that you will name. [signed] W.P. Ford [See Ford to Sherman]

  Ford was a highly respected leader among the white planters in this area of Bayou Boeuf. His strategy regarding the treatment of slaves was not unusual; it was the modus operandi of many slave owners in the area. Later in Northup’s narrative, Ford is quoted in an admonition to Tibeats, who mistreated Solomon:

  This is no way of dealing with them, when first brought into the country. It will have a pernicious influence and set them all running away. The swamps will be full of them. A little kindness would be far more effectual in restraining them, and rendering them obedient, than the use of such deadly weapons. Every planter on the bayou should frown upon such inhumanity. It is for the interest of all to do so [Northup, 150].

  Since plantations formed the base of the Southern economy, policies related to master-slave relationships had been developed over the centuries of plantation operations from the time the first plantations were settled by the Virginia Company in 1616-1617. Plantations were originally considered “small colonies.” To expand the population of the Virginia colony, Sir Edwin Sandys proposed societies of adventurers to send at their own expense with tenants, servants, and supplies; the associates were given certain governmental powers over the settlement that allowed them to effectively create an independent colony. These were “the hundreds of particular plantations” which saved the colony [See Robinson, 17-18,and Dowdy, 3-10].

  69. “The Great Piney Woods” was a sixty-mile stretch of virgin long leaf pine forest extending west from the end of the alluvial soil from Indian Creek to the Sabine River, forming the borderline between Louisiana and Texas.

  70. Alexandria, established in 1805, was named for its founder (or his daughter), Alexander Fulton. Fulton, migrating from Pennsylvania in the early 1790s, became an Indian trader with a monopoly ceded to him and his partner, William Miller. Both acquired huge tracts of land. Their trading post was located at the present site of Alexandria on Red River. Miller married Mary Henrietta Wells, daughter of Samuel Levi Wells, whom the traders employed as surveyor of their lands. Alexandria grew slowly, having fewer than 2,500 residents in 1860. In 1812, when Louisiana became the eighteenth state in the Union, Major Amos Stoddard wrote that “Most of the settlers have planted themselves some miles back, and the whole population may be computed at about 640 whites and 200 slaves” [See Eakin, A Source Book: Rapides Parish History, 11, 13].

  71. A small settlement called Lamourie developed on a small bayou of the same name that flowed into Bayou Boeuf. This settlement of pioneers included a large mill that produced shingles from logs supplied from the nearby woods to send to the Oklahoma Territory. A boarding house, a small general store, and a few primitive dwellings were located at the settlement. The entrepreneur, Ralph Smith, worked to secure construction of a gate which would help control the water flow. In the 1850s, after years of lobbying the state legislature, funds were made available to provide a brick gate in Bayou Lamourie with the purpose of regulating the water level of Bayou Boeuf into which the smaller bayou flows. The locks can still be seen about twelve miles south of Alexandria, Louisiana, from LA Highway 71 [See Eakin, Washington, Louisiana, 50-52; Eakin, Rapides Parish: An Illustrated History, 25; and Eakin, The Centennial Album, Alexandria Daily Town Talk, 158-160].

  72. The first railroad built west of the Mississippi River was the Red River Railroad (later renamed for its founder, Ralph Smith Smith) in 1837. Smith had been employed in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad project, one of the early railroads built in the United States. The Connecticut engineer, who had laid a mile of railroad in New Orleans, apparently was contacted by planters on the remote northern end of Bayou Boeuf with serious problems getting their produce to the New Orleans market. Smith, envisioning a transportation empire, purchased one of the first newspapers published in Alexandria, The Planter Intelligencer, and the Rapides, Avoyelles, and Catahoula Advertiser, to promote shares of stock to build the first railroad. With the first sale he built twelve miles of railroad from Alexandria to Lamourie [See Eakin, Ezra Bennett and the World He Lived In].

  A planter’s daughter living before the Civil War near Cheneyville left memoirs providing some insight into the situation of the little railroad; her recollections referred to the railroad after six more miles were added in 1842 to provide a terminal in Lecompte:

  When I was a child in the 1850’s there was one (possibly more than one) railroad in Louisiana running into New Orleans and another one about 15 miles long between Alexandria and Lecompte. Lecompte was about 8 miles from Cheneyville, and we went there by carriage and took the car for Alexandria. We had coffee and a light breakfast very early, and left Lecompte at 8 or 9 A. M. and got back before dark. The “train” consisted of a locomotive, baggage car, and passenger car. When the Yankees destroyed the road they “laughed until they cried” over the “loco” which was so antique that they had never seen the like. But the road was built and operated by a Yankee—Mr. Ralph Smith of the Northeast, who lived and died in Alexandria and whose descendants are still living there and in the parish. The stage was running all through my childhood and youth, and the war probably ended its day. [Boyd interview. A transcript of the interview is available in the Jesse Wright Collection, LSU Archives. Esther Wright Boyd was the wife of LSU president David French Boyd.]

  73. “The Texas Road” actually referred to a number of trails beat out across the forests leading to and from Texas, both coming through Louisiana, one in the south and another in the northern part of the state. There were added trails alongside each of them, probably cut in the wilderness when heavy rains or obstacles in the trail caused travelers to go around the beaten path. These trails at some points were called the El Camino Real. Trails running from the little inland port of Washington to the Sabine River also were called the Texas Roa
d, chiefly referring to a ridge of slightly higher ground than the surrounding woodlands, reaching through virgin pines to the Sabine River separating Louisiana and Texas. These trails were followed by Texas cowboys driving herds of cattle to the inland port of Washington for shipment by steamboat to the New Orleans market. Blacksmith shops available for shoeing horses and boarding places grew up along the Texas Road [See Eakin, Washington, Louisiana, 6-22; Eakin, Rapides Parish . . .,19-20; and Eakin, Centennial Album . . .,149].

  74. Reuben Carnal and Timothy Flint owned plantations which Ford and his slaves walked across after leaving the Red River Railroad car. The turning rows through the Carnal and Flint plantations led to the Boeuf where a crude bridge was crossed to get into the Great Pine Woods.

  Reuben Carnal in 1819 migrated from Martin County, North Carolina, to the Bayou Boeuf area and became one of the first planters in his section of the bayou. His home was in the pine woods, as were several planter homes, and he was buried there. He developed two large plantations—Quantico and Sugar Bend. One of his plantations became the settlement which developed into Lecompte. A native of Massachusetts, Timothy Flint was born in 1770 and studied for the ministry; he was ordained after graduating from Harvard College. He became pastor of a church in Massachusetts at Lunenburg, a name he bestowed on a Bayou Boeuf plantation given to his son. He became a Presbyterian missionary, traveling with his family through New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and Illinois. He moved to Missouri, remained there briefly, and left for Arkansas before taking a church in New Orleans. A committee from Rapides Parish searching for a headmaster of a proposed new school to be founded contacted Reverend Flint, who with his wife and five children moved to Alexandria in 1823. The Rapides Academy opened that same year, with Reverend Flint and William Gunning in charge. The minister left the Academy in 1826 and moved to Cincinnati, where he opened a book business. He returned to his birthplace in Salem, Massachussetts, where he died in 1840. All of his children are buried in Alexandria [See Whittington, 92-95; and Gaeinne].

  75. Concerning the characteristics of the land around Red River:

  Red River runs through the [Rapides] Parish, from the northwest to the southwest corner . . . Although I [Lockett] have classed it [Rapides Parish] among the Pine Hill parishes because the larger part of its surface is covered with the longleaf pine, it has a great deal of fertile land within its borders and is a wealthy, populous parish . . . On the northern side the base of the hills is not very far from the river. At Pineville, opposite Alexandria, the hills strike the river bank. From this point northward they bear off from the river . . . South of Pineville the hills are never more than a mile from the river’s banks and form bluffs at numerous points down to Grimes’ Bluff in Avoyelles just beyond the limits of Rapides. On the south side of Red River, there is a bluff just south of Colfax, called DeRoches’ Bluff, then another above the mouth of Bayou Jean de Jean, and from this point, the base of the hills follows the course of Bayou Rapides and Bayou Boeuf to Cocodrie Lake . . . The space included between the lines thus traced is all Alluvial Land. It is between ten and fifteen miles wide and nearly forty miles long. The banks of Red River are generally arable land, settled and under cultivation . . . [See Lockett, 77-78]

  76. Wild cattle, small, dark animals thought to be of Spanish origin, roamed the woods. They were of no use for milk or meat, but first settlers killed and skinned them for their hides, which they sold, and their horns, which sold on the New Orleans market for manufacturers of buttons. Tallow made from the hides was also a valuable commodity for the first settlers to market. Under the topic, “Wild Stock in the Woods,” Lewis Cecil Gray writes, “There were numerous wild cattle, horses, and swine in Florida, and during the early years of British occupation hunting wild stock was an important source of food” [See Gray, 139]. The wild cattle mentioned as roaming Louisiana woods during the early colonial period, usually attributed to Spanish herds, were more like those Gray notes existed in Maryland in 1661: “. . . the governor was authorized to appoint a number of persons in each precinct to hunt wild cattle, allowing two shares to the chief hunter, and one share to each of the others, but reserving the tallow and hides to the Lord Proprietor” [See Gray, 139]. Perry G. Jordan focused on cattle in Texas, but the same situation with wild cattle existed in Louisiana. Jordan notes that “wild cattle . . . sought refuge” and that “sale impregnations appear in most part of the country, and are of benefit to the large herds of wild and tame cattle which roam over the immense prairies and woods” [See Jordan, 86].

  77. William “3 C’s” Martin was named for William Charles Cole Claiborne, the governor of the Mississippi Territory, where Martin was born in 1802. By 1850 he owned 25,000 acres of land and eighty-two slaves, making him one of the largest slaveholders in the state; also, he was a member of the Rapides Parish Police Jury. Like other planters, he maintained a home in the pine woods, where he lived much of the year while operating his plantations in the lowlands. The site of the Martin home where Reverend Ford and the three slaves stopped is still marked by a country road titled “Martin Springs Road.” Martin Springs still gushes ice cold water that pours into the crystal clear creek that flowed at the rear of the Martin home. The Martins’ private cemetery contains the graves of William C.C.C. Martin and members of his family. His wife was the former Sophia LaMothe, daughter of Polycarpe LaMothe, one of the early settlers of the area. LaMothe was married to Editha Wells, sister of Samuel Levi Wells, the surveyor who owned thousands of acres along Bayou Boeuf [See Pernaud; Stafford, 194; and U.S. Census, 1850].

  78. During these years Ford was not wealthy. The lumber mill on forty acres of land in the pine woods was the smallest of lumber mills—called a “grasshopper mill” because of its small size and the fact that it was so light it could be moved. The mill was jointly owned with William Ramsay. With the creeks running through the Great Pine Woods no more than five or six feet deep, there was no way to generate power for any but the small mills such as Ford’s, along with grist, syrup, and sugar mills, as well as small cotton gins. A cypress log preserved in Indian Creek for over a century was a part of Ford’s sawmill and is now displayed at the library of Louisiana State University at Alexandria. It contains the imprint and incision of the water wheel. The 200-acre plantation on Bayou Boeuf was inherited by his wife. Ford owned eighteen slaves, according to the U.S. Slave Census, 1850. This number of slaves included men, women, and children. The hill farm he patented was not valuable at that time.

  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].