Scanning through some digital newspaper databases, I came across the following curious story, originally printed in the Buffalo Courier Express of March 24, 1857.  I could not access that newspaper, but other newspapers copied and re-printed the story, in part or in full. The title was typically “A MOHAWK DUTCHMAN IN SLAVERY,” but sometimes it was “A White Man Sold into Slavery.” In full, it read:

In December last a company of strolling players visited Linden, Cattaraugus County, N.Y. where resides a family named Barnhart, who were among the early settlers, and are Mohawk Dutch. The family has a son who was not celebrated for the delicate whiteness of his complexion, but who was a splendid violinist. Young Barnhart went to the show, and took with him his violin to show what he could do in the way of music. He played, was admired by the actors, and after some negotiation, was hired to travel with the company and grace their orchestra. They went into Pennsylvania, then into Maryland, and so on into Virginia. Since then, until some three weeks since, nothing has been heard of the young and inexperienced fiddler. The first intelligence was , that the play-actors when they go into the interior of Virginia, sold him into slavery, where he is now held. When our informant left Linden, the father of young Barnhart was about to start to Virginia to reclaim his son from slavery.¹

Another version of the story was almost the same:

The Buffalo Express learns that a young man named Barnhart the son of early emigrants to Linden, Cattaraugus county, from the Mohawk Dutch settlements, has been sold as a slave by a company of strolling play-actors, with whom he engaged to travel in December last. Young Barnhart is an excellent player on the violin, and accompanied the actors into Maryland and Virginia in the capacity of a musician. He was of rather dark complexion, and his companions, representing him to be a negro, sold him to some Virginia slave trade. The evidence of this was doubted at first, but is now believed to be true, and Barnhart’s father was making preparations to seek for and rescue his enslaved son.

The editor who printed this second version added: “Northern men with ‘brunette’ complections [sic] will have to keep a sharp lookout hereafter, or they may wake up some fine morning and find themselves grubbing cotton the plantation of some Virginia F.F.V.”² The Tiffin Tribune (Ohio) printed the story as well, and commented sarcastically: “We have just heard of a circumstance which portrays the beauty of Slavery and affords a caution to all Northern people to beware how they enter a Slave State.”

            In the few weeks after the article was originally printed it Buffalo, it was reprinted in newspapers across the country. There was no Associated Press or Reuters’ news service in those days, but newspaper editors often subscribed to other newspapers, or traded copies in kind, so that they could read the news from elsewhere and select stories to re-print, if they found something relevant for their local readers or just needed to fill some space on the page.

            It is perhaps not surprising that most of the newspapers that reprinted the story were based in the North, since in 1857, North-South tensions over the politics of slavery were high, and Northern newspaper editors from Vermont to California were happy to feed an audience hungry for stories about Southern perfidy.

I have found the article reprinted in at least 25 Northern newspapers, including the following:

Monongahela Valley Republican, 9 April 1857

Belmont Chronicle (Saint Clairsville, Ohio) , 9 April 1857

The Niles Republican (Michigan), 2 April 1857.

Western Reserve Chronicle, 15 April 1857

Worcester Daily Spy (Massachusetts), 18 May 1857

Meig’s County Telegraph (Ohio), 14 April 1857

Pomeroy Weekly Telegraph, (Ohio) 14 April 1857

Seymour Times (Indiana), 10 April 1857

Sunbury Gazette (Pennsylvania), 11 April 1857

The Indiana Progress, 21 April 1857.

Vermont Phoenix, 4 April 1857

The Liberator, 17 April 1857 (Boston, MA)

The Daily Gate City, 17 April 1857  (Keokuk, Iowa)

The Fremont Weekly Journal, 3 April 1857  (Fremont, Ohio)

The Enterprise and Vermonter, 3 April 1857  (Vergennes, Vermont)

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 1 April 1857

Christian Repository, 2 April 1857.  (Montpelier, Vermont)

The Indiana Progress, 21 April 1857   (Indiana, PA)  

Evening Bulletin, 29 March 1857, (Louisville, KY)

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 1 April 1857

Bucyrus Journal (Ohio), 4 April 1857

The Sacramento Bee, 30 April 1857)

True American (Steubenville, Ohio), 8 April 1857

Tiffin Tribune, 10 April 1857.

            It was also published in Canada:

The Kingston Daily News, 1 April 1857  (Kingston, Ontario)

            Then, a few weeks later, when the American newspapers made it across the Atlantic, the article appeared again in English newspapers, including the following:

Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 10 May 1857 (London, England)

The Ipswich Journal, 25 April 1857

The Wells Journal, 9 May 1857 (Somerset, England)

The Leicestershire Mercury and General Advertiser for the Midland Counties, 9 May 1857

The Morning Chronicle, 23 April, 1857  (London, England)

The East Kent Gazette, 9 May 1857

            The steamships took at bit longer to reach Australia, but when the American newspapers reached Sydney in July, the article was again re-printed at least three more times, in:

Southern Morning Herald, 18 July 1857.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 July 1857.

The Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal, 5 August 1857.

            Eager to find more, I looked deeper into the story. Did this really happen, and why hadn’t I heard about it before? Why isn’t this better known among historians?

            My conclusion is that the story was likely fabricated. The only newspaper in a slave state where I found the story reprinted was skeptical.  The editor of the Spirit of Jefferson (Charles Town, Virginia), opined: “We think the following statement from the Buffalo Express, of the 24^th inst., is of very doubtful authenticity.”³

            What elements of the story made that editor then, and make me now question the legitimacy of the story. First, the story sounds a bit too much perhaps like the famous Solomon Northrup (author of Twelve Years a Slave) case. Northrup, you might remember, was also a fiddler and was also tricked into joining a band of traveling entertainers, who then kidnapped him and sold him South. Northrup’s autobiography had been published only four years before, in 1853, so the author of this article could very well have been influenced by having read Northrup’s book. Now, it is possible that bands of musicians were still kidnapping Northern blacks after 1853, but by then, Northerners were well-aware of this possible kidnapping strategy.

            The second element of dubious legitimacy is the name of the kidnapped man in the story. Only the last name “Barnhart” is given. Why would the author not give the full name, or the name of the man’s father or family?  I searched the 1850 and 1860 census for the Barnhart of the story. The article says that Barnhart was living in Lydon, Cattaraugus County, New York.  Now, while there is no Lyndon in Cattaraugus County, there is a Linden, which also indicates the original author’s unfamiliarity with, or invention of, the story. I discovered a Barnhart or two in adjacent counties, but none in Cattaraugus and naturally none in Linden.  I contacted the county historian of Cattaraugus County to look further into this, but they found no Barnhart either.

Historian Richard Bell, with his book, Stolen, established himself as a leading scholar of the antebellum kidnapping of African Americans in the North. In a 2022 article in the Journal of American History, Bell explains that “kidnappers rarely approached highly literate, middle-aged adults. They preferred instead to lure away poorly educated boys and girls with ruses that could swiftly separate them from their families.”⁴ Bell relates further that while Northern white children were sometimes the victims of such kidnappings, anti-slavery advocates often played on American fears of white enslavement to support their own cause of defeating the enslavement of blacks.

Curiously, a German newspaper in Allentown, PA, printed the story in translation, but called Barnhart “Der Sohn einer Deutschen”  (The son of a German) and changed his name to “Bernhardt” for effect.⁵  This reflected part of the confusion at the time between Dutch, Low Dutch, High Dutch, Pennsylvania Dutch, etc. In fact, a Mohawk Dutchman, I have discovered, could either be a Hollander or a German by ancestry.

            Finally, what makes me suspicious about this story is that there was never a follow-up. I have been unable to find any information to confirm the story took place, and given the nature of the topic, one would think audiences would have been eager to know the result. Did Barnhart exist?  Was he kidnapped and sold South?  Did he have a father who went looking for him? I don’t know, but I’m suspicious.

1. The Daily Orleanian, 9 April 1857. ↩︎
2. The Mansfield Herald, 22 April 1857. ↩︎
3. Spirit of Jefferson (Charles Town, Virginia).  7 April 1857. ↩︎
4. (Richard Bell, “‘Principally Children’: Kidnapping, Child Trafficking, and the Mission of Early National Antislavery Activism” Journal of American History (June 2022), 50.) ↩︎
5. Der lecha patriot (Allenton, PA), 15 April 1857. ↩︎