John Tibeats (who was likely named John Tibaut) was an especially cruel man. However, Northup was only enslaved by Ford for about a year. Northup was describing an institution in which not every enslaver was irrevocably evil: "It is not the fault of the slaveholder that he is cruel, so much as it is the fault of the system under which he lives," Northup maintained. It is this particularly generous characterization of Ford that was striking to readers of Northup's memoir. Northup described the intensely Christian Willam Ford as a "model master" - one who avoided unwarranted beatings, who read scripture to those he enslaved each Sunday, and offered praise for his carpentry. Northup was then purchased by a man named William Ford and taken to the Red River region of Louisiana. "Never have I seen such an exhibition of intense, unmeasured, and unbounded grief," Solomon Northup recounted in his book. When the enslaved men and women were cured of their near-fatal illness, Northup witnessed the horrific separation of Eliza and her two children, who had been sold to different enslavers. Before the auction, Northup and many aboard the ship contracted smallpox and were hospitalized, as records confirm.
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