Shortly upon his return to New York, Northup was motivated to write his story due to the widespread belief, even in the North, that slavery really wasn’t so wicked, that maybe it was “good for the Negro” to have such a rigorously structured system for their “employment”. As the title alludes, a fortuitous combination of events leads to his freedom in 1853 and reunification with his family. While witness to some of the most cruel and vile acts imaginable, he somehow manages to hold onto his humanity. Despite his violent hatred of the institution of slavery, the regular beatings he receives and his daily yearning for an opportunity to escape, he never hesitates to point out the frequent acts of kindness that he encounters during his time as a slave. Uprooted from anything he had ever known, Northup tells his story with an astonishing balance of sorrow and objectivity. Beaten into submission and shipped onward by sea, he was eventually sold to a plantation owner in the bayou country of northern Louisiana where he would spend the next twelve years in the darkest servitude.

In chains and stripped of any identifying documents he was transported south to Virginia where his protestations of freedom were met with violent whippings. However, his unremarkable life was changed forever in 1841 when he was drugged and kidnapped from his hometown by two visiting businessmen. He tells it himself in Twelve Years a Slave.īorn in 1808 to a free black father in Minerva, New York, Solomon received a solid education, learned to play the violin, married, raised three children and worked various jobs in rural New York, establishing himself as a citizen of honorable stature. While his routes to slavery and subsequent freedom were markedly different, his life story is equally compelling and heroic. Great American heroes like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass are known to anyone who was paying attention in American history class, but until recently I’d never heard of Solomon Northup, another former slave who was one of their contemporaries.

Twelve years a slave solomon northup