M. Marvin, a part-owner of the hotel. He played his violin at several well-known hotels in Saratoga Springs. He also worked on the construction of the Troy and Saratoga Railroad. He had become a regular customer and friend of William Perry and Cephus Parker, who owned several shops in town. Over the seven years that the Northups lived in Saratoga Springs, they had been able to make ends meet and dress their children in fine clothes, but they had been unable to prosper as hoped. In March 1841, Anne went 20 miles to Sandy Hill where she ran the kitchen at Sherrill's Coffee House during the session of the court. She may have taken their oldest daughter Elizabeth with her. Their two youngest children went to stay with their aunt. Northup stayed in Saratoga Springs to look for employment until the tourist season. Kidnapped and sold into slavery In 1841, at age 32, Northup met two men, who introduced themselves as Merrill Brown and Abram Hamilton. Saying they were entertainers, members of a circus company, they offered him a job as a fiddler for several performances in New York City. Expecting the trip to be brief, Northup did not notify Anne, who was working in Sandy Hill. When they reached New York City, the men persuaded Northup to continue with them for a gig with their circus in Washington, D.C., offering him a generous wage and the cost of his return trip home. They stopped so that he could get a copy of his "free papers", which documented his status as a free man. The city had one of the nation's largest slave markets, and slave catchers were not above kidnapping free black people. At this time, 20 years before the Civil War, the expansion of cotton cultivation in the Deep South had led to a continuing high demand for healthy slaves. Kidnappers used a variety of means, from forced abduction to deceit, and frequently abducted children, who were easier to control. It is possible that "Brown" and "Hamilton" incapacitated Northuphis symptoms suggest that he was drugged with belladonna or laudanum, or with a mixture of bothand sold him to Washington slave trader James H. Birch for $650, claiming that he was a fugitive slave. However, Northup stated in his account of the ordeal in Twelve Years a Slave in Chapter II, "[w]hether they were accessory to my misfortunes –