Cornwall’s connection to ‘12 Years a Slave’

Ryan Bachman uncovered a connection between “12 Years a Slave” and the town of Cornwall. Kathryn Boughton — County Times

CORNWALL >> An internship designed to help the Cornwall Historical Society determine how many enslaved people were kept in that town has revealed a tantalizing connection between the town and the Oscar-nominated movie, “Twelve Years a Slave.”

While doing his research, Ryan Bachman of Norfolk, an anthropology major who is now applying to graduate schools, came across a reference to Victory Birdseye and his role in drafting the legislation that eventually helped free Solomon Northrup, an educated free black man who had been kidnapped into slavery.

In 1853 Northrup wrote his memoir, “Twelve Years a Slave,” which has been now transformed into a much-acclaimed movie by director Steve McQueen.

Victory Birdseye, the architect of the legislation, was from a Cornwall, Conn., slaveholding family. He and his father’s slave, Obed, grew up together. Obed was eventually freed, married, bought land and was a successful laborer in Cornwall. Bachman notes that when freed Obed symbolically changed his name from Obed, Hebrew for “slave,” to Obadiah, the Hebrew word for “Slave of God.”

Bachman concludes that it is likely that the presence of an enslaved child in his boyhood home influenced the anti-slavery beliefs that later led Victory Birdseye to author the bill that helped free Solomon Northrup.

Bachman admitted that the connection he chanced upon between Birdseye and Northrup is “very obscure,” and said he found the first scure,” and said he found the first reference to it in a British newspaper. “Then I started looking through books to find out more,” he said. “That Victory Birdseye was from a slave-owning family was shocking.”

Slavery in the North was a different institution than it was in the South, but Bachman said the underlying injustice was always there. Slave and master might labor in the fields together, the slave might eat at the farm table with the family, but he still did not have freedom.

In the Birdseye family, though, one might infer a level of discomfort with owning another human being. Bachman noted that Victory Birdseye’s father, Ebenezer, freed his young slave even though he could legally have held him in bondage. “By law, slaves born after 1784 were to be freed when they were 25,” Bachman explained. “Obed was born before that, so Ebenezer Birdseye did not have to set him free. But he did.”

Bachman’s research in Cornwall has progressively focused on the story of Obed—who took the name of Obadiah after his manumission—and Naomi Freeman. Naomi was born free in Vermont in 1794 and was adopted by the Sedgwick family of Cornwall as a toddler. Bachman said that John Sedgwick’s wife brought the black toddler home with her after a visit to her brother and sister-in-law in Vermont.

The Sedgwick family was influential in the overthrow of slavery in Massachusetts after Theodore Sedgwick took on the case of the famous Mumbet, who fled her Sheffield, Mass., master’s home, and pled for his assistance in securing her freedom.

John Sedgwick later legally adopted the little girl Naomi, endowing her with all the legal rights his own grown children enjoyed.

Obadiah, on the other hand, was born into slavery in Connecticut in 1778 and was owned by the Birdseye family for a number of years. Victory and Obed were about the same age, and grew up on the family farm in East Cornwall.

In 1794 Victory left Cornwall for schooling in New York, and then Williams College, and never came back. While he was at school preparing for college, Obed was being rented out to neighboring farms and working in the fields of the vast Birdseye estate.

In 1805, Obed was freed by Ebenezer, took the name Freeman, and signed up for a one-year contract to work for wages on the Birdseye farm. Afterwards, Ebenezer paid for half of a $3.50 stagecoach ticket and Obed disappeared from the records for another 11 years. In 1818, Obadiah reappeared in Ebenezer’s account book and delivered a load of goods to Victory up in Pompey, N.Y.

Bachman said there is no record that the Victory and Obed ever met again after the trip to Pompey. Obadiah went on to marry Naomi in 1826. Naomi, who was literate where her husband was not, bought a house in 1828, and they had a daughter, Sarah, in 1830.

Victory Birdseye meanwhile served in various government positions and as an attorney, and in 1840 introduced the law that authorized the governor to send agents into the South to find kidnapped African Americans from New York.

Under this act, the lawyer Henry B. Northrup, a member of the family that had formerly owned Solomon’s father, traveled to Louisiana and brought Solomon back to his family.

Bachman said he is interested in knowing what affect Birdseye’s early contact with slavery in his own family had on his later views. “Victory’s younger step-brother, Ezekiel, shared his anti-slavery views and became a pretty radical abolitionist,” he noted.

In September 1853, the same year Solomon Northrup wrote his memoir, Victory Birdseye passed away at his home in Pompey at age 70. Obadiah Freeman had died in Cornwall the same week that Solomon Northrup had returned to his family in New York.

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