The problem which he then faced of liberating his wife and three children was taken off his hands for a time by Seth Concklin, a freelance white abolitionist who volunteered to abduct them.  This daring emancipator duly went to Alabama in 1851, embarked the four negroes on a skiff and carried them down the Tennessee and up the Ohio and the Wabash until weariness at the oars drove the company to take the road for further travel.  They were now captured and the slaves were escorted by their master back to the plantation; but Concklin dropped off the steamboat by night only to be drowned in the Ohio by the weight of his fetters.  Adopting a safer plan, Peter now procured endorsements from leading abolitionists and made a soliciting tour of New York and New England 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.]