

What historians don't know about the author of "12 Years A Slave" is when and how he died and where he is buried. It's a lingering mystery in the final chapter of the life of the 19th century free-born African American whose compelling account of enforced slavery in pre-Civil War Louisiana was made into the Oscar-winning film of the same title.


Northup was born July 10, 1807, in what is now the town of Minerva, in the Adirondack Mountains. His father, a former slave, moved the family, eventually settling in the village of Fort Edward, on the Hudson River 40 miles north of Albany. Northup married Anne Hampton in the late 1820s, and the couple lived in an 18th-century house in Fort Edward that is now a museum.


Northup endured the next 12 years enslaved on a Louisiana cotton plantation before friends in Saratoga finally won his freedom. In 1853, he published a memoir of his ordeal that led to a speaking tour supported by abolitionists. But around 1863, the height of the Civil War, he dropped out of sight and was never heard from again.

"He may have just wandered around from place to place and died somewhere nobody knew who he was, and he was buried in a potter's field," said David Fiske, co-author of the 2013 Northup book along with Union College professor Clifford Brown.